Imagine

We've just been for a visit back to the north east (now we can be more specific than "Scotland"). In the main this was so I could help do tech stuff at Imagine - which we've blogged about before here and here. Jay took the chance to catch up with a lot of our friends who'd come to the event, and still managed to fit in both childcare and some volunteering with admin things herself.

We packed a lot in to the week and a half. We started with a visit to Granny and Grandad (Jay's parents), then headed out to the McCalls in Kintore, who very kindly put us up while Imagine was on, their house being only a few minutes' drive from the event. (John McCall was my PhD supervisor so you can guess that there was also a good chance to talk research for a little while too!) I briefly saw my old friend Tom in Old Deer, we dropped in to Oldmachar church for a Sunday service, and we saw our friends Anne and Dan Pearson at their new house. We stayed for a couple of days at my parents' house in New Deer - although they were on holiday in France so this was simply a place to stay while I returned borrowed kit to different churches, and it allowed a brief catch up with my sister Allison and her daughters, and my brother Ian and his wife Christine. Ian was also on my team at Imagine, but naturally we didn't have much time to ourselves there! Finally, one the way back south, I got a quick look around RGU's new building at Garthdee and we stopped off with Lizzie Bird.

On the way up we stopped at Peggy Scott's again for a nice cup of tea and some cake. Clearly this went down well:

While we were at Granny and Grandad's we nipped over to the park in Keig.

Those action shots above where quite hard to get, as we have very fast-moving children. My camera is full of pictures like this:

Jay also took the girls to the park in New Deer while I was out delivering kit...

The whole week of Imagine was a tiring exercise. I was working from about 8:30am through to midnight each day. The girls had a lot to do as well, so Naomi much appreciated the double bed at Grandma's house:

This provided somewhat more space than the former cot mattress we'd taken with us for other places. Apparently our luggage was more comfortable...

Of course Miriam was happy to just sleep anywhere.

Here is where I spent most of my week - the tech desk - complete with various gadgets and a hefty supply of Irn Bru.

Our job was making things appear on the screens, working the lights, and doing pretty much everything electrical in the smaller breakout venues.

The venue for Imagine is Thainstone Mart, usually used for selling cows etc. In fact, we had to clear out of this venue on a couple of days to make room for a sheep auction! Here's the room set up for the talent competition, which was excellent fun.

The week is also good for getting to play with lots of toys, like this neat little digital audio desk. It has colourful lights, what more could you want? (seriously, this is one of the best digital desks I've used, very logically set out and easy to pick up, and ideal for the small set up we had for the talent stuff - well done to Soundcraft for this one)

At the end of the week I delivered kit back to various places it was borrowed from. Some had come from NESYFC, which is about to move office from Crown Terrace Methodist Church to Deeside Christian Fellowship Church. NESYFC has been at CTM since 2000, almost the whole time I was volunteering with them, and it's a bit of an end of an era. This is the last time I'll see the office there - a little sad as there are a lot of memories there. Here it is, already in a bit of mid-move disarray...

Back to the children. You can guess that Naomi sees me sitting at a computer a fair bit. While at the McCall's house, she made herself a laptop with two coasters (one of which was a magic square so it looked like buttons). We thought this was just excellent...

She's also quite adept at the real thing. Here she is playing on Wii Fit at Anne and Dan's house (friends we visited just after Imagine)

Naomi's getting really good at drawing and painting, and really enjoyed the space made for such things at Imagine.

Jay asked Naomi if Jesus was giving her any pictures to draw, and Naomi was adamant that these two were such:

I was particularly pleased with how well the car was packed for the trip back to Stirling! I don't expect it will be this good next time.

Lastly, we thought that you might enjoy this picture of Miriam being thoughtful. We do :)

Misc

Sorry for the radio silence from me of late - things have been rather busy! Here's a selection of a few pictures which I've saved up over the past month...

I quite liked this shot of Naomi having a seat on one of her more cube-shaped toys, combined with having a bit of a dance with her dolly (who is still very well cared for)

I thought these two shots were classic "child eating" material. Just a suitable amount of food on her face - though really she's getting pretty good at eating now. She's getting the hang of a fork, although we quite often have dropped food being picked up with fingers and put back on the fork for consumption. Very cute.

Here's dolly being looked after, being changed into a plastic fridge magnet (I got this printed up as a YFC promo for our car at some point a few years ago). I'm sure it's quite comfortable. On a similar vein, Dolly received a dunk in the bath last night (complete with clothes - needless to say it caught me by surprise). I asked Naomi if she'd been needing a clean, to which I got a definite nod! Naomi then helped me dry Dolly in a towel.

 Ever the independent girl, Naomi can now climb unaided into her high chair and buggy. The operation looks quite precarious but she's quite good at it and sits down nicely once done, usually looking very pleased with herself. Apparently the act of climbing up/down is the best part; after meals she often wants down, only to climb back in again.

A little update on work. Loughborough University is the preparation camp for the UK and part of the Japanese Olympic teams. Consequently there's been a bit of a lock-down - with massive security barriers appearing all over the place - like this one, which blocks the road access next to my building:

(it's less impressive than it looks - mesh boxes filled with bags of soil - though elsewhere there's proper steel and concrete barriers in place - and they all do the job) I'm a little surprised I've not been searched yet! Perhaps "the look" I seem to have at airports doesn't carry over to my work day.

There's also a bit of a shuffle happening in my office. In contrast to my old department at RGU, there's a much larger research budget here, built up over several decades. There's something like 40 research staff - about 10 times as many! Though I see RGU's School of Computing is expanding research funding all the time, and well deserved that is too. Anyway, there has been a bit of an influx and we have some more people coming in here at LU, so on Tuesday I was told to work away from my desk while furniture was moved. I returned on Wednesday to find my desk hidden by a big pile of boxes!

Hopefully these will be gone soon - though I'm somewhat glad I'm out of the office for most of next month (holidays and a conference) - so there should be plenty of time for my "castle" to disappear again.

It's also been a bit wet here today - as it has been across more of the UK - and I can see some pretty impressive lightning from my office. Our department's lab building (home of a massive ram) is flooded. Of course, this is where all the computer servers and our experiment running machines are kept, and currently I can't access them over the network. Hopefully they're all okay! Today is an exciting day, as NESYFC is launching its cage project - this has been in the making since a year before we left Aberdeen and it's good to see it really happening - though I suspect it may be a bit wet for those who venture out to see it tonight. Still - long term I'm sure it'll be a great resource and more importantly, will open avenues for reaching out to many young people.

Finally a short clip of Naomi trying to whistle. She's gone off this again now, but a couple of weeks ago she noticed me doing it, and gave it a shot. She even managed to make a bit of a sound a few times, but unfortunately I didn't manage to capture that - so all you see is her giving it a quick go (silently) and me whistling out of shot (and tune).