Lydia Drawing

Lydia has had a bit of a step-change in her drawing ability the past few weeks. Lots more detail!

This is some music. She's noticed that Naomi now has some sheet music to go with her cello.
We'll try to get a video of the song that accompanied this as it's very cute. Lots of stuff about God being good.

A wee bit more music and some pictures of her family and friends. See the eyelashes on the girls?

This is Lydia with her best friends Erin and Elise.

Stirling Castle

We've been in Stirling for nearly six years, and have finally made the long-awaited trip to Stirling Castle! This was largely possible thanks to Granny and Grandad's provision of Historic Scotland membership for us so we could all get in for free and have things like audio guides. Our friend Rick (Lydia's godfather) also gave Lydia some money for her birthday, and a wee bit left from that meant a trip to the castle cafe too.

Just after we got there a children's tour started, with a very energetic chap shouting BANG BANG whenever we were near any cannons (that's most of the time!). There was a room for dressing up in, and some impressive views of Stirling too. A great day out and seemingly well enjoyed by the girls...

February Holiday

A couple of snippets from our brief holiday in February...

Miriam was worried about being homesick, so I took some photos of her room before we left.
She didn't need them :)

Garden

Still feeling the benefits of having a garden that's properly ours, we filled it with bulbs in the Autumn. They are starting to appear (though getting quite a beating with the late snow...)

I've got some cuttings of my mum's cherry tree. Hopefully one of these will take (I've tried a few times before unsuccessfully)

Our broccoli from last year seems to have grown some extra heads too!

More travels

Not quite as exotic just now but work is still seeing me needing to travel quite a lot. All my girls are coping remarkably well with it but it does provide a bit of a strain. Most recently... another trip to London to talk about aircraft (very exciting, a real pilot has been put in a flight simulator to try following instructions generated by some of our software), and lots of travel around Scotland as I'm the academic chair of this year's SICSA PhD Conference. All good stuff - and plenty of time on trains! - but the tiredness imposed by all the travel means I'm moving ever closer to needing a hammock for my office...

On other work-related matters - any academics or other writers out there really need to look at ALCS -  I tentatively put a few of my papers and book chapters on there and just received a very healthy royalty payment. Definitely worth your while!

A far cry from some of my other travel pics...

A stunning view of a Dundee car park, from the University of Dundee.

From my hotel room window in London. This is very near King's Cross. In the distance upper right is the Digital Catapult centre, where I attended a Crucible event a couple of years ago. There also appears to be a UFO.

Same picture in the daytime. Best part: to the right, there are the towers of the Midland Grant Hotel (better known as the font of St Pancras station)

Rainbow!

Naomi got a "Rainbow Lab" kit at Christmas, which has a few experiments related to colour. There are a few crystals that soak up water and expand into a kind of jelly, then dry and shrink again. There are also some food colourings to try various combinations of mixes. She has had a lot of fun doing some basic science!

We got to do a proper design-of-experiments (Latin hypercube) to try mixing the colours in different combinations.

That promotion was easier than I expected!

The jelly version of the crystals

...and after they had dried out

This was showing how the colours ran into each other to make a rainbow effect