Planet Shengsters

Just seen the title track of the new Primal Scream album on The Culture Show.  Spent the first half wondering why I thought I’d heard it before and the second half marveling that the Quark, Strangeness and Charm-era Hawkwind sound is getting another outing.

Seriously, get yourself a listen to QS&C and you’ll see what I mean. Bobby Gillespie even manages to get that weird Dave Brock falsetto down pat.  Very odd indeed.

A couple of bits of pleasing progress with Channel4.com this week.

First is the refocusing of FourDocs to become, in essence, a blog rather than a complicated (and expensive to update) upload tool and video site. We don't need to create our own tools and try to persuade people to come and use them when people are happily uploading documentary content to other platforms that we can discover and engage with. These words - from the FourDocs site - "We're no longer asking you to upload films to the FourDocs site" is music to my ears. Well done Hilary and team. Good example of realising that not everything we do needs to be a "product" or a "site". It can just be something we do using the Internet.

Second bit of excitement is the refurbishment of 4Homes . It's been a slog to get here but the team worked extraordinarily hard and deserve great credit for the end result. Its sister site, 4Food has seen outstanding progress since launching at the end of last year on the same platform so I have high hopes that 4Homes can now start to compete properly in its sector.

We are going through a period of changes to the products with a renewed focus on doing sensible things in areas where we can be truly competitive, rather than just participating wherever there's a game on. It's very pleasing to see this momentum.

Jaw droppingly, er, jaw dropping:


I really did like the comment from the Jewish Network though:

"You would hope people would have more sense than to take a cuddly Hitler into work."

Er, yes. Yes, you probably would. Wouldn't you? Yes.

(thanks, Urban Woo)

Check out Freyja's smooth moves:

No, not Chorley FM but 96.2 The Revolution, the line-up of which looks like a Who's Who of Madchester let loose on the airwaves. Coherence apparently optional :)

Listen live now >>> 96.2 The Rev Live

Coo, it's been a while; I don't have an excuse (my ears have been at the dry cleaners?)

"...so they need to go up to the Fifth Floor for a scope around."
"Scope around?"
"Scope around!"
"Scope up, scope up and get down..."

You had to be there. No, you really did.

Every morning, even though my husband has to leave the house at a ridiculous hour, he brings me a cup of tea in bed before he leaves. As I am still feeding Theo in the night I appreciate this more than I can say. It makes hauling myself out of bed each day that little bit easier.

I've not had such a great week this week. I've been back and forth to the hospital with Theo, as he's had to have his cannula refitted a few times, and I can tell you it is not such a pleasant experience watching a load of doctors trying to squeeze a plastic tube into your baby's veins. Oh no. And I'm taking Freyja to have her MMR* this morning - why make life easy?

Today when I came downstairs there was a Hotel Chocolat bag waiting for me:


Yum. Choccies for breakfast!

* Update: The MMR was not bad at all. The nurse who did it was so great that she'd finished before either Freyja or I really knew what was going on. Yes, she did cry but she recovered very quickly and spent some time afterwards congratulating herself on being such a brave girl.

We have a family party planned on Sunday.  We’ve been watching the weather with some trepidation.  Today we discovered that it’s so bad, they aren’t even going to tell us about it. (I assume they’ll fix it soon, but here’s the link anyway)

Feist’s 1-2-3-4 gets a tremendous amount of play in our office - not the original (used in the iPod ad), but the rather ludicrous Van She Tech Remix featured on the Kitsune Boombox compilation. This version’s the best yet though

I catch a plane tomorrow. I've been packed since yesterday. Everything's done, laundered, folded, sorted. I amaze myself. Still, I had a last afternoon in town today while Nick looked after Esme, just because I felt there must be things I ought to buy. There weren't. I got a woolly wrap for when it gets chilly. Then I wandered the West End while a zillion fucktards got in my way and walked too

After offmessage posted about the brilliant Girl Talk mashup album, 'Feed The Animals' (well worth checking out if you can still find it) there are now video versions of a couple of sections of it which have popped up on YouTube:


Very nicely done, sir.

Tom, over at theOTHERblog, makes some interesting points about what is and what isn’t mis-selling.  While I have little sympathy for mactards in general (it is, after all, just another shiny cog in the “Apple are the new Fox” machine, people) even those poor souls shouldn’t suffer the Carphone Warehouse Scam.

This made me chuckle; perhaps I have found my superhero character of the future?


Click to enlarge
More of the same at the rut.

All your nice comments on the last post made me cry. I was thinking about you all when I was in town today, and I think I'm very lucky to have you as readers. I mean that absolutely. Every time I publish a post, my forehead creases with worry as I imagine a generic Whoopee reader sitting at a monitor, reading it, then sighing with disappointment at my immaturity and the number of times I say

Just before Fathers day I found the perfect present, thanks to Mini-et-moi, a book called 'My Dad is Brilliant':


Unfortunately I'd left it too late to order one in time but I bought one anyway and it finally arrived yesterday. A very belated fathers day present for Adrian. Tonight I showed it to Freyja:

Me: 'This book is called My Dad is Brilliant. Is your dad brilliant?'

Freyja:'Um....no. Not really.'

Luckily we established that she didn't actually understand the word. I told her it meant great, wonderful or amazing. And then she agreed - her dad is brilliant.

…that’s the queen.

Hello! I'm back! It's all been rather eventful but instead of going into too much boring detail, I'll just summarise:

1. We've had lots of visitors - my parents, my brother and sister-in-law, my nephews and my parents-in-law. Freyja has had a whale of a time.

Connect Four at the Honor Oak Pub:


Vauxhall City Farm with Grandpa:



2. Freyja is out of nappies during the day - including her nap - and has been now for a while. I'm incredibly proud of her for picking it up so quickly. She's doing really well with it.

3. I got ill at the beginning of last week. I had what felt like flu - shivery, high temperature, aching everywhere, bad headache. Then I noticed a red patch on my breast and started to wonder if it was actually mastitis, particularly as Theo had hardly fed all day. I went to the doctor on the Tuesday and he confirmed he thought it probably was mastitis, gave me some antibiotics but said to hold on taking them as it tended to clear up itself. So I spent a horrible day in bed burning up, but sure enough by the next morning my fever had gone. I spent another day in bed, aching all over, with a throbbing head and generally feeling horrible. However, in light of what happened next, I'm wondering if it really was mastitis...

4. Theo got ill. He spent Friday being very sleepy and by that evening I was having trouble feeding him and couldn't get him to wake up properly. I put him to bed, thinking he was just tired, but he didn't really settle. We then had a terrible night where he cried and seemed very distressed for most of the night - very unlike him. By 4am he had a temperature so we gave him some Calpol and then he slept for a few hours. The next day he still wasn't right and he seemed listless, pale, irritable and just not himself at all. We gave him more Calpol, but by the late afternoon he had a temperature again - 38.3 degrees (38.6 by the time we got to hospital) - and we decided, with it being the weekend and not possible to go to the clinic, that we'd take him to hospital. I was quite worried about him but I honestly thought we'd get there and be sent home, told to give him some Calpol and stop over-reacting. Well, I finally got home from hospital Monday evening. From the minute we walked into A&E it felt like being on a roller-coaster ride that I couldn't get off. I cannot fault the staff at Lewisham hospital for taking it seriously and providing a huge amount of care for him. To cut a long story short, he is completely fine but the results of one of the tests suggest he had a very early infection and so he is now on antibiotics as a precaution, which are given intravenously through his hand, and needs to stay on them for 14 days. I hated seeing him in hospital and hated him being subjected to all the tests, especially when at the back of my mind I wondered how necessary it all was. I still don't really know if I made the right decision - maybe it has all been for nothing and he would have recovered by himself. Or maybe taking him in was the best decision we ever made - who knows? I guess it is better to be safe than sorry with one so small.


5. Theo slept through! Just before he got ill he did 2 nights from around 10pm to 4am and then even in hospital he was sleeping until around 3am. The night we got back home, I fed him at 9pm and the next thing I knew I was waking up at 5.30am, with leaky boobs about to explode. I admit I flew into his room to make sure he was okay. It hasn't lasted though and I now rather suspect it may have had something to do with him getting ill...

1. I am going 2. I am reading in Mrs Kennedy's Friday-night keynote 3. I get to meet an awful lot of fucking amazing people 4. I'm going to California, where I've wanted to go for 20 years 5. none of the above has sunk in. It's in a week! And I haven't written anything about it because it's shaping up to be one of the best weekends of my life so far, and I can't believe it's really going to

Although I have to admit it’s the only one of the shortlist that I’ve actually read.  But it is one of my favourite books:

Midnight’s Children wins the Best of the Booker

I’m surprised only 8,000 people voted.  I’d imagined a heated debate taking place across the nation. I think that says more about me than it should.  Heigh ho.

…that this link will make little sense to the vast majority of people.  Still.  You should read it anyway.

Features of various file systems

For bug tracking and source control?  For us it’s Subversion and Trac, but that’s primarily because of the quality of Trac; I doubt we’d be so wedded to Subversion if there was equally good integration with other source control systems.

The news is coming out about a tie up between Getty and Flickr.  Three and a half years ago Monoman suggested this might happen.  What took ‘em so long?

Esme made us go out today. "Shoes? Stairs? Keys?" "It's pissing with rain." "Keys? Keys?" "Seriously, look. It's throwing it down. It's really horrible even for here." "Keys? Keys? Keys?" SIGH. "Okay." I couldn't find her walking-reins, and I hate using a pushchair in central London, especially in the rain, so I just let her walk beside me on foot. And it was okay! There was a moment at

Bracewell is returning to Glos. This (to a Gloucestershire supporter) is awesome news.

I just bought Esme new shoes from an online children's shoe shop. All they sell is children's shoes. In fact, they're called Shoes 4 Children. Part of the checkout process was the question, "What was your reason for buying?" How many reasons can there be? Somewhere, a child needs shoes. You sell children's shoes. You don't sell anything else. Shoes have only one purpose. I wrote I am hungry.

Does anyone know what this is? I found it in the murky waters of Esme's folded-up paddling pool. It is 1cm long and has a 2cm whiplike tail. It has many relatives, all of whom live in our garden. Will they grow up to be cute and furry, or will they try to burrow into our heads? Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

So! One day I bring you hundred-year-old porn, then a picture of what turns out to be a rat-tailed maggot. That couldn't sound much worse, could it? What shall we call this creature? A rrrrrat-tailed maggot. Yum yum yum. It sounds like an expletive. I may start using it as one. The paddling-pool has been scrubbed and the beasts evicted. I'm going to think of something nice to write about and in

When we used to live in Hong Kong, I distinctly remember my father bringing home some cassettes of Jean Michel Jarre (I initially thought it was The Concerts In China but that wasn't until 1981 so it must have been something else - Equinoxe?). Whatever you think of his concerts (and looking back with the jaundiced eye of a some-time electronic artist, they were perhaps rather pompous) with his banks of massive synths and radical laser shows, it fair blew the mind of this 8-year old boy and I was definitely hooked on all forms of electronica from then on.

Anyway, thirty-odd years later, recently perusing one of the many (27 and counting) MP3 blogs in my RSS reader, I came across a remix of a Sebastian Tellier* track (the ridiculously titled 'Sexual Sportswear') which took me right back to those early days of JMJ discovery:









What do you reckon, Dad, have things come full circle?

* Yes, the very chap that represented France in the Eurovision Song Contest this year. He came 18th; the UK came joint last with Germany and Poland. No, my pleasure...

Britain’s top spy is seriously ill.  No foul play, so little news really, except for the gem at the end…

“[he] is known for running a website for fans of the band The Grateful Dead”

Pardon?  I’m sure there are rules about mixing LSD and the Official Secrets Act.  Aren’t there?  Surely?

Probably, to be fair, because I hadn’t needed to.  Yet again the Internet takes all forms of obsession to beyond their logical conclusion.  Herewith an extremely detailed guide to collecting and managing your promotional coupons.

There’s actually quite a few of these in our cupboards. Which is nice.

01:00 this morning. It is a hot night, the hottest so far this year. I take off all my clothes and lie on the bed, claustrophobically close to Ian, my head propped on one hand. "Hi," I say, with a toothpaste-advert smile. "I'm a naked lady." Ian shoots me a sideways, worried look. "You might remember me from such films as Naked Lady III: Past Bedtime." "We must start going to bed earlier,"

Interesting, if ultimately rather depressingly obvious, analysis of the effects of marijuana cultivation in California. Fascinating that it’s the state’s largest crop.

Oooh, this is just the greatesty thing:


With 'minifigs'...


* and hope they don't have blasters...

Bloody hell, what were they bowling at him, meat pies?

Awesome Napier shatters records

"Graham Napier rewrote the record books by hitting the most sixes in a Twenty20 innings on his way to the highest individual score in the Twenty20 Cup. The Essex batsman hit 16 sixes as he blazed his way to an astonishing 152 not out off just 58 deliveries."

GRACC members take note for our Inaugural International Twenty20 Challenge on Saturday...

Nice take on the MPAA et al and their pursuit of alleged copyright infringers:

Cory Doctorow: Getting tough on copyright enforcers

Please dear lord no.  Much as I am a fan of Twitter, please don’t suggest that it would make a suitable payment mechanism.  At least not until I’ve been a whole month without seeing the fail whale.

Oh how the mighty have fallen.  Not long ago the unstoppable force in limited overs cricket, now the whipping boy in near every form of the game. Despite the appalling summer last year they managed to turn a profit, yet this year they’re without a coach and with an ailing side. The latest move to refuse to pay agents’ fees smacks of desperation.

Here’s hoping Bracewell returns to Bristol and brings some much needed form with him.

So upgrading to Firefox 3, then. Very nice, lots of spiffy features, faster page load times, better rendering, etc. The world and his wife have blogged about it, no need to say any more here - but wait!

Something is not quite right. Why does the...when I...what the? Could they possibly have reversed the directions of the handy Ctrl+ScrollWheel zoom in/out feature?

Yes.

And that does not bode well for the muscle memory of long-term users of the aforementioned feature like what I am. Still, about:config to the rescue; make the following change (default value is 1):
More riveting debate on this issue here: Mozilla Bug #141476

I am in total agreement with the last commenter:
Er, yes. Carry on :)

We went to Tottenham Court Road today. It is where you go to buy electronic equipment or chic shit for your house: I wanted earphones, and a masochistic look around Heal's and Habitat at sofas I can't afford. Esme got bored, so we turned her loose in Habitat's toy section. Habitat's toy section had a bus. A wooden bus. Bright red; pleasing; chunky. Now my mind is wandering to people or things I

Turns out our fertiliser may be contaminated with a very dangerous herbicide.

I’m glad to say that this won’t affect my garden this year, but given that part of my desire to get into growing my own was to avoid such food scares (as well as show the kids where food actually came from and give myself something to do that didn’t involve a computer) this feels pretty serious.

Yet another indication that we simply can’t avoid the industrial entering our lives even on the most micro of levels.

"I wish you were my mum." (Nick B, who was 13 when he started coming to parties at our house, and who lived on our sofa for many of his teenage years) "You've got fucking amazing legs." (Rob H, at university, the first person ever to think I had nice legs and who almost made me cry by saying so, because I thought girls should have slim, skinny legs and had just spent 20 years hating and hiding

Top quality snarking.

I really love the BBC iPlayer; knocks Channel 4's feeble IE6+7 only(!) VOD thing into a cocked hat - and so it should: licence fee money, public responsibility, blah blah blah. However, I see they are about to launch an updated version with combined TV/Radio, easier to navigate user console, ability to resume playback later, a series link style function on your personalised homepage, RSS feeds allowing for mashup potential (yeah!) and a 25% bigger screen. More details:

BBC Internet Blog: iPlayer 2.0
Anyone want to buy a telly? :)

Here are some notes from a speech I gave yesterday at the UK arm of Microsoft Online Service Group’s* end of year conference. I worked there for 5 years before joining Channel 4 so I decided to speak about things I had changed my views on since leaving.

* (MSN, Windows Live, Microsoft Advertising)

1) Content

a. MSN is better at content than it thinks it is. It has a self confidence problem. It's not a problem Bebo seems to have and yet Bebo has no more right to be a "media company" than MSN does.

b. But content without Talent is karaoke. Jamie, Gordon, Davina, Jon, Krishnan, Kevin etc makes a big difference.

c. Might developer Talent; that’s to say developers as creators of new forms of content, be the untapped source of a new wave of creativity that Microsoft itself could mine?

2) Distribution

a. I’ve written about this before.

b. Not many people agree with me but I’m not so sure Distribution is the silver bullet for broadcasters seeking online reach. Our content is still only a decision away from everywhere else. What broadcasters need to do is to “leverage” their dwindling media foothold in a ruthlessly focused way. [note: the Hulu experience, thanks Louise, might force me to re-evaluate apropos long-form content].

c. But, since we are distributing Clips to everyone, it’s notable that MSN is doing a great job of being a good partner. The value probably lies in the tone of the partnership, rather than the deal itself.

3) What’s Microsoft OSG’s greatest strength?

a. I would have said the installed based in Hotmail and IM when I worked there

b. I avoided saying “the people”. Just.

c. It's Microsoft Advertising. I think what they already have is practically irreplicable. They’ve been doing online display sales really quite well for many years now. It seems to me only a matter of time (perhaps quite a long time) before big, scary, almost unthinkable conversations happen between old media and Microsoft about how best to monetise their digital audiences.

I was asked some good questions:

1) Am I worried about iPlayer eating the UK’s bandwidth? Answer: yes. This is going to be like the 10p tax rate: It’s come up. We've forgotten about it. But it'll come back and bite us in the future.

2) Am I the answer to C4’s funding gap? Answer: absolutely not, though I hope to contribute my bit. [Insert wry observation that the license-fee is the answer to questions 1 and 2]

3) Who’s going to sell the common-areas of Kangaroo? Answer: “Dunno. Are you pitching?” Answer: “Yes”. See 3 c) above.

Very good to be invited back.

…and this is sure one of them:

Judith Chalmers never wore knickers on Wish You Were Here

To quote Frasier… Pardon me while I go poke out my mind’s eye

I have had a longer post about twitter brewing for a while now… Sadly, like all my other longer posts, two things get in the way of it actually making it onto the page; an anally retentive inability to be my own editor and the lack of time to write them, even if I didn’t demand so many edits and rewrites of myself.

So, to break the back of this one, let’s just chuck some points down:

Twitter is a despite, not a because application. By this I mean that I love it despite its implementation, not because of it.

This is an anomaly on today’s web. Most applications we love (and talk about) are simple, elegant, easy to use, fill a real need. To find an application that I find utterly compelling (and stick with) despite my huge frustrations is a real eye opener. That said, both SMS and email were nigh on unusable when I first started using them. Which leaves me on to my second point…

Twitter is not a microblogging platform (made all the more obvious by the fact that Twitter themselves use Tumblr for their status blog). Twitter, to me anyway, is like one huge global IRC channel - but with the added ability to tune in and out of people or topics at will.

Those who’ve got used to signing in to tens of channels using screen will know what I mean. Twitter is a handier version of this, with multiple entry points and a better way of searching the logs. A while back Jemima Kiss tweeted (what else) that her IM usage had completely dropped off since she started using Twitter; she’s not alone.

At work where I’m plugged into the Internet firehose in so many ways already Twitter isn’t as important, but it’s certainly the first one I choose to connect at the weekend. So, like SMS and email, the combination of immediacy, ignorability and permanency makes for an extremely compelling communication medium.

What that IM/email/SMS like nature brings is a sense of the private, even though it’s actually very very public indeed. This blurring of the public and private can be dangerous. Someone I follow recently twittered from a meeting: “being asked by xxx at xxx how to evolve a horizonal xxx site to cover the vertical niches they’re losing customers to…”. He’s followed by 350 people, all of whom are in the same industry. 5 minutes later he tweets “i regretted that twitter as soon as i hit enter…”. No shit. This isn’t a private IRC channel or IM conversation. Even I have followers I don’t know (Hi, by the way, aren’t I fascinating?)

The loose coupling between social groups that tempts you into forgetting about the public and private allows for some beautiful serendipity. The use of the @username syntax means that I get to see who my friends are having conversations with, and in turn possibly find interesting people. Generally I don’t start following them on Twitter, but more often than not their blog will end up in my RSS reader.

But, this loose coupling and rapid spread of information has its down sides too. There’s is no such thing as provenance on Twitter. Lots of us got duped by the fake Richard Dawkins. Luckily it didn’t do any real harm; he was good enough to get us following him but then couldn’t really do anything with it. Someone more subtle could be a lot more dangerous. It only took 4 days from me first following the fake Richard Dawkins account (when it had less than 100 followers) to it becoming apparent it was fake, by which time it had 1,700 followers. The desire (even need) to pass on information as quickly as possible will no doubt cause some problems. I’m not sure this is fixable. I’m not even sure it’s desirable to fix it. We just need to be careful out there.

That said, sometimes a fake account would be better than the real thing. My first rule of Twitter was formulated only a few days in… “Just because you’re popular doesn’t make you interesting.” There’s no shame in unfollowing someone. Particularly if they’re dull as ditchwater. Which leads me back to my second point above. If it’s a microblogging platform why are some of the best bloggers in the world the biggest dullards on Twitter? Because they’re talking to their friends. Because they haven’t spent the last two hours crafting those 140 characters into their public persona. And that’s OK. In fact, I think it’s really good.

Some links:

• Mashable on Twitter’s use of Tumblr
  
• Tim Bray on the “how on earth do they make money” question
• Scoble on why it’s ok to listen
• Steve Bowbrick on the topic of despite vs. because

Telly being hogged by kids addicted to Boogie Beebies and 64 Zoo Lane? No bother, just install Zattoo and enjoy live streaming terrestrial channels on your PC. Apparently, due a copyright loophole, this is a legal P2P service (albeit in a grey area to do with the uninterrupted re-transmission of 'public service' broadcasting) and it works incredibly well:


Bring on the French Grand Prix at lunchtime (I'll be in the garden...)

UPDATE: screenshot from Ubuntu about 5 mins ago with Zattoo in action alongside Firefox and IRC (yes, I got madwifi for Atheros working eventually):

Mashable does some more crude maths on the music industry’s whining and comes to a similar conclusion to me…

The industry is doing fine; they’re whining because they’re greedy

Joe Cocker, at Woodstock, closed captioned for the clear-headed.

This is Freyja dancing to Rhinestone Cowboy:


I think she's almost ready to join us on a girls weekend away...

I have started about 3 separate posts now on how I have finally got round to potty training Freyja, but I'm not getting very far with them - in fact, in the time it's taken me to half write 3 posts, Freyja is practically out of nappies.*

We started about a month ago, it's gone much, much better than I expected - not difficult, given that I was convinced my daughter couldn't even tell when she was weeing and would never be toilet trained. Turns out she just hadn't felt the need to share it with me.

Anyway, she's pretty much dry at home. But at home I often leave her either with nothing on - in which case she goes to the potty herself - or with just knickers on and keep reminding her that she might need the toilet. I hadn't yet braved fully dressed and out of easy reach of a loo.

So yesterday we had the first trip out. I chose to go to the toddler group at the Ackroyd community centre, armed with 3 spare pairs of trousers, because it's very child friendly and has little child-size toilets. We left at 9.30am, got home at 11.45am, with Freyja still wearing the same pair of trousers she went out in - hurrah! And today we went to the park and she managed to stay dry again. I do have to keep asking her and reminding her that she doesn't have a nappy on but she is slowly starting to tell me when she needs to go too.

Unfortunately this morning she did wee on the sofa. Not the new sofa though (relax, Adrian!)

* not at night or for naps - we're a long, long way off from even trying that!

Girl Talk’s latest album Feed The Animals is awesome.  It’s also made up entirely of samples (list of some of which can be found at wikipedia). It’s not going to be available for long is my bet, so download it while you can.

It’s on a “pay as much as you want” basis, but $5 gets you FLACs.

As a piece of music it’s fantastic; as an exercise in sampling it’s technically faultless; and it’s a trainspotter’s paradise. Get it while you can.

Clive is ill. She is an old, doddery cat. She keeps throwing up. It may be a change in diet, because the vet ran out of her usual grub and I had to buy another brand to tide the cats over for a few days. I'm hoping it's just that. There have been four episodes of cat puke in as many days: 1. Flokati rug, in the front room A flokati rug is a shaggy woollen thing, one of the least practical

We did indeed have a terrible night.

I fed Theo at 10pm (he woke for it) and he then woke again at 1am but only settled for half an hour so I fed him again. And that was it, really. The longest stretch of sleep he lasted for was around 20 minutes so I was in and out all night. I fed him again at around 4.30am and he still didn't settle. Adrian then brought him into the bed with me and moved to the back room, as it was nearly time for him to get up anyway (he practically has to get up in the middle of the night to get to work on time).

Freyja did give me until almost 7am though, bless her. She's now eating dry Cheerios in front of the Very Hungry Caterpillar (DVD, not book, I'm afraid), Theo is on his first nap of the day, and I'm drinking tea and contemplating the day ahead...a trip out this morning then hopefully all three of us down for a nap after lunch, I think (hope).