More teeth?

Rebecca woke up at 4.30 then cried back to sleep then again at 6.30 and finally after she went to sleep on me I hauled myself out of bed at 8.30 - and watched a bit of Lions rugby! We are also suffering from the throat and cold Rebecca has in abundance. Howeover, she is also not eating today which is a sure sign another tooth is on the way. Amazing how it disrupts them so much. Feeling jaded myself already and its only mid afternoon on a saturday. No idea how sarah is getting up early most of the week! When she goes back to work in a couple of weeks we'll have to get up at 7am every day.

Waited for Jonathan Ross last night - and Billy Idol - but he wasn't on it - not sure why - obviously didn't get in to the country in time.

The County Collection - Designer Nursery Interiors

Finally finished the redesign of the County Collection web site. Primarily hoping to generate more orders.

Another 5.30am start

Rebecca has a cold again and decided she needed to get on with things at 5.30 for the second morning running. Feeling a bit tired at the moment - sarah let me go back to bed for an extra hour so she is feeling even more wiped out.

The greenhouse is now a little fuller with plants - hope I can catch the middle of the summer for some produce.

The 2/3rd xi hockey game for next tues evening was almost in doubt, Gary at Aylesbury had it down for Monday evening - good job Drew emailed me about something completely different.

Met up with Liam at lunchtime to discuss the Youth Club and various other things - also gave him a lap top that is going to be used for the database at the club. When we first got involved, there was only about 8 kids twice weekly. The place has now been completely refitted and there is 50 kids twice a week - and growing all the time. Now need to consolidate and then have more volunteers to help open more evenings of the week. All fantastic news though - not bad progress in one year - and two years since we started the youth action group as part of the village appraisal.

BBC NEWS | England | London | Plan for massive Thames wind farm

BBC NEWS | England | London | Plan for massive Thames wind farm

This looks like a great idea. I was reading yesterday how the destruction of amazon rain forests was at an all time high to enable soya bean production for China. So this has cheared me up a bit on the environment front. The NSE didn't help either!!

SENSE / Parish Council Meeting

I've posted this on the CSP forum I guess I should have posted it on here. Better facts are probably available from the C-Sense web site.

It was a very interesting meeting and the clarity of the presentation of facts rather than assumptions was particularly impressive. The SENSE people really have put a lot of time and effort in on behalf of the whole of the village - and indeed surrounding villages (when they discover the A413 grinds to a halt for example). I think it was Glynn who was particularly impressive in his speaking and knowledge.

Two main areas arose in my brain from last night -

1. The need to actually raise money to bring the buildings up to national care standards
- a few of the buildings are quite obviously not up to scratch and need to be demolished however, they are proposing way and beyond this
- they made great play of the deadline of 2007 to implement these changes - they have 'buried' in their planning documents that they will keep coming back to planning if they fail - therefore clearly missing the deadline and it has been indicated that they wouldn't be closed down if they weren't on track
- there is no reason why they couldn't make some of the changes to meet the care standard act and then maybe over the next 10 years develop the facilities further to get to where they wish to get to in one year - they seem to have developed revenue to put in the plans - a figure of £0.5m was mooted - but I suspect that was conjecture rather than fact - however if this is correct and they were able to raise £0.5 each year they could go someway to meeting the upgrades
- the rest of the revenue could come from selling existing property which is on the periphery of the site - quite simple to sell some of the existing houses which would raise substantial money and not therefore need to build on green belt and the substantial amount of houses needed to fund the infrastructure upgrades which wouldn't therefore be required

2. The actual plans -
- they are in green belt and point 1. proves that it is not an exceptional circumstance as they could fund the meeting of the care standards act
- the infrastructure cannot take it - interesting to hear the education part - sounded like Bucks CC was keen to take the money but then would be completely unable to take the money and actually build any more capacity at Robertswood as that is on green belt! Doctors I wasn't so convinced about - I'd have thought fairly easy to add additional Doctor capacity - a great place to work I'd have thought and recruit. Sewers are the most obvious - but again Thames Valley may just turn round and say more money for no work and sod the consequences.

However, need to go along to the public appeal meeting, register, maybe speak (speak to SENSE) and fingers crossed when it lands on Prescott's desk!!

Then went to the Waggon bumped in to someone and got chatting and it wasn't the quick pint i'd envisaged!

The Greenhouse is operational!!

The greenhouse is now built except for a few minor parts and has a cucumber plant in it already - which was just about hanging on for life on the kitchen window sill. A few more tomato plants and cucumbers are ready to go in - but had better do some fee paying work.

Off to the NSE meeting this evening - was also supposed to be at the village appraisal but cannot be in both places at once!

My hoped for Google revival on a couple of my brand new sites seems to be short lived. Unless it is doing what it used to do ie straight in then a week later out then six weeks later on the bigger update back in again - but I don't think so - think it is doing the straight in - uh oh - new site - best remove it for at least a year. Very dificult being a web designer telling new clients that their site is not going to get listed in Google for at least a year.

New Greenhouse

Spent the entire weekend building a greenhouse in the corner of the garden - its plastic so that if rebecca runs / falls in to it nothing will hurt or break! Not quite finished but my back is aching, hands are hurting (these are keyboard hands not manual!). Have lots of plants all ready to go in so need to finish the last few bits of quickly. Have a sports club meeting tonight i think and a NSE meeting tomorrow night (and a village appraisal - the NSE one takes precendence - the new plans are appalling).

Not particularly constructive week last week - spent most of it trying to get the CSE Distributors ecommerce site back up and running after Fasthosts had a hard disk failure on the SSL server - or so they say - something a bit odd as they said they couldn't recover the data - but some of it was there - and they didn't send an email to those affected so you had to find out for yourself. There was also a settings problem which they refused to acknowledge until yesterday so spent wed / thurs / fri and sat trying to upload and get it to work with various new settings (Which they'd also changed without saying) until yesterday they finally emailed to say they'd reset it with the correct settings. Fasthosts to be fair have been very reliable the last year or so. So anyway, plenty of work to be getting on with this week as I didn't get as much done as i'd hoped last week...