Painting her bedroom
May 26th, 2010 by rbanks
Thought this was cute. The roller on the right is hers.
Painting her bedroom by rbanks.
Archive for the 'Home' Category
Maddie learns to ride
May 1st, 2010 by rbanks
Maddie took off on her bicycle this week. She used a balance bike for quite a few months, to the point where she could coast along on it for a long way with her feet off the ground. Then two goes on her new bike, without stabilizers, and she told me to “let go” and off she went.
Limbo snowman
February 7th, 2009 by rbanks
The result of a little melting. A carrot pointed skywards.
The Greenbelt
April 24th, 2008 by rbanks
Many cities in the UK are surrounded by acres of protected land that form Greenbelts. They are what makes my house feel almost like it’s in the countryside, although it’s actually only 15 miles as the crow flies from the bustle of Trafalgar Square.
Greenbelts are the result of policies created in the 1930s to help combat urban sprawl. I believe in them strongly. They make rural experiences so much more accessible to urban dwellers. They help protect countryside that might otherwise go under tarmac, and that in a lot of ways is quintessentially English.
This is the first map I’ve seen that shows how green and belt-like the Greenbelts are.
LONDON /moleskinecity.com » The End of the Green Belt?
Airliner crash lands at Heathrow
January 17th, 2008 by rbanks
Bit unnerving to find this in amongst my RSS feeds. Here’s a map of where the incident happened. I’ve circled in red where my Dad used to work, and where we’d park our car before heading into London at the weekends. This is still not far from where we live. Planes taking off from Heathrow go over our house every day.
Amazing that there were no fatalities. Sounds like they basically lost power and the pilot had to glide the plane in. It may have been safer that he touched down on grass, since there were less sparks than there would have been on the runway.
Cats need to navigate an obstacle to remember it
September 5th, 2007 by rbanks
Cool! A little home experimentation with our cat, Sidney, seems in order…
” In their experiment — pictured below — they had a cat step halfway over a small barrier, at which point they distracted it with food. They lowered the barrier while it was eating, but when the cat moved on, it still raised its hind legs, believing the barrier to still be there. This is the sort of behavior you’d expect, of course.
But then they repeated the experiment with a twist. This time, the cat was stopped at the point when it had seen the barrier — but before it had stepped its front paws over it. Again, they lowered the barrier while the cat ate the food. But when the cat moved onwards, it didn’t raise its hind legs high enough the clear the now-removed barrier.”
Cats need to navigate an obstacle to remember it
Rain watcher
July 26th, 2007 by rbanks
Strangely enough, I’ve been spending a lot of time on this page over the last few days.
A break in the weather
July 24th, 2007 by rbanks
You may have heard in the news that we’re suffering from some bad weather and flooding here in the UK. Pretty much the worst on record. Much of England has been hit, but we’ve been really fortunate that, although we live within spitting distance of the Thames, it still hasn’t broken the banks where we are.
We are on a high state of alert, though, and we’ve taken the precautions that make sense. We’ve moved a lot of things upstairs, wrapped the leg of the piano in plastic, sent the cat to visit “grandma”.
Naturally we’ve been following the weather closely. It’s really highlighted how little this is a science. Here, for example is what the 5 day forecast for London on the BBC looked like yesterday afternoon:
And what it looked like this morning:
It changes hourly, basically. When I looked at it last night the sudden change in forecast was actually far more dramatic. The image above was almost entirely little pictures of the sun for the rest of the week (we have sunshine right now in the UK). Then a few hours later, the cloud was back with that one drop of rain on Thursday.
Anyway, you can’t trust the forecast. But that doesn’t stop it from making you feel better.
London Bikeathon 2007
July 3rd, 2007 by rbanks
We’ve signed up for the London Bikeathon on the 15th of July. This is a fun jaunt through the City of London, starting out in Chelsea. Maddie’s been great on the various rides we’ve taken along the towpath so we think she’ll enjoy it, and we have the flexibility of picking the 13 or 26 mile route on the day, which is great.
If you’re interested in sponsoring us, then feel free. No pressure, though. We’re mostly doing it for the fun.
Blue Tit at home
May 15th, 2007 by rbanks
After a good degree of jelousy over Shannon’s cousin Andrea’s nesting (American) robins I’m pleased to say that we have some ‘pet birds’ of our own.
We’ve seen a grey shape flitting in and out of the sparrow box that I set up in the porch for a number of weeks. We can see this box really clearly through our kitchen window. The birds finally slowed down enough to tell that they are Blue Tits. Tiny little birds. Why Blue Tits would move into a sparrow condominium block I don’t know. Possibly the sparrows don’t like the location, but the Blue Tits are happy with how close they now are to our hanging feeders. Who knows what goes on in the minds of birds?
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