Home alone and raining

So we made a nutella bread star

kneading the bread

 Miriam helps too

Cutting circles of dough

spreading nutella

 cut it fancy

The finished article!

Misc.

A few pictures covering the past couple of weeks...

Time for a delicious meal cooking by our girls

Apparently imaginary portions are large enough to require shovelling.

Yes more Stirling prettiness. Now With Frost.

No comment :)

Well, that's where socks go, isn't it?

Lydia had an injection last week, and both her sisters were witnesses. Now there is a lot of "doctor" play as well as "mummy and baby" - here's me getting some much needed meds.

Some advanced play from Miriam - taking Naomi's order for breakfast.

Sheffield

The past couple of days I was off to Sheffield (not for the first time). We are trying to get some funding to do more airport related research, and this is in partnership with the universities of Lincoln and Sheffield. It was a fairly productive but very long day yesterday, and we have lots more work to do getting the grant proposal in shape. It's pretty hard to get academic funding (something like 1 in 10 proposals get funded, and you're usually up against exceptional people from Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College etc) This is fair enough as it'll be a lot of money - three full time staff for a couple of years each plus various overheads and support costs. From my point of view it will be helpful to get it, as it would mean getting to carry on doing more interesting work, and would certainly help for applying for permanent academic jobs (universities like people who can bring in money - who'd have guessed?)

If you're staying in Sheffield, you might like to try the La Gondola restaurant - it was jolly nice!

This trip was done slightly more on the cheap than often, so my hotel room was rather reminiscent of staying in halls again. Did the job though.

The really fun part was right at the end of the day. The people at Sheffield U have a full blown flight simulator which we might use for this project. Here's a virtual landing at Hong Kong airport.

Beyond cool.

Pancakes

As you can see here, last July, Sandy travelled to Vancouver and brought back with him a jug of maple syrup the size of his head!

This was to enable us to continue with the wonderful family tradition of making pancakes most Saturdays.

Here is Miriam helping make them today...

Naomi made a monster's face out of today's offering

However, seven months on we are sad to report the maple syrup has run out :-( Sandy will investigate more work in Canada to stock up our supply

Why my toddler is crying

she is hungry and she wants a snack

Antics

Okay, so work-specific humour is rarely actually funny... anyway, you might recall that I appreciated some civil-engineer comedy back in Loughborough. Well, now I'm in a computing department and can appreciate that sort of thing on a whole new level.

Currently the stairwell near my office is having some repairs. There was a hole in the plaster and it got patched up. Of course, it's taking a little while to be painted, so our CS buddies have had a bit of fun...

Tee hee!

As a consequence of recent work, three coathooks and a screw have been sitting on the window sill of our common room for the past few weeks. Several people have anonymously been rearranging them into various sculptures, some of which have been most impressive...

I like the similarity with the Wallace Monument of this one!

Well, the "p" in phd could easily be for procrastination after all :)

Finally, once again I had a beautiful view cycling back tonight. For some reason the sunsets in Stirling are particularly stunning. The camera phone doesn't really do it justice, but here's the view just outside the university car park...

Jokes

Naomi is learning about jokes. This is a true conversation from last night's dinner time. I'm particularly satisfied that it appears immediately after my post on the COW.

Naomi: "Why did the cow cross the road?"

Mummy: "I don't know"

Naomi: "To go to the shops to buy milk."

Daddy: "You know, even funnier would be to say that 'she was moooving house'"

Naomi looks a little puzzled and then laughs appropriately.

Mummy: "You see, that's funny because cows go moo"

Naomi: "Why did the pig cross the road?"

Mummy: "Why?"

Naomi: "She was moooving house'!"

Mummy and Daddy: hysterics.