Happy New Year

HAPPY NEW YEAR to all.

Usual apologies about not doing the blog for such a long time, no excuses.
I even managed to completely forget to talk about our trip to China in August. I guess I should put something retrospective in on that very strange visit (not so much a holiday as an educational revelation).

So what else has been going on.

Leon
Leading up to Christmas my eldest grandson, Leon, has been sick with some digestive system problems, even spending some days in hospital a couple of weeks before christmas. He has been getting nausea and stomach aches and losing weight (mainly because he does not want to eat). After any number of tests, the doctors are none the wiser than they were at the beginning. This reminds me so much of the the "Crohn's" saga with Amber back in 1997/8. We are hoping the result will not be the same. At least he was back with us over Christmas, poor little fella.

Christmas with the Gardiner-Smith's
As usual we had the typical Anglo-Swiss holiday season which allows us to start eating on the 6th of December (Niklaustag / St. Nicolas) and to start dieting on 6th January (Dreikönigstag/12th Night). And just to make sure there is no letting up on the gluttony we stick in a baking day (2nd Sunday in December) and a 2nd festive birthday for our lady Kayleigh of the prolific procreation (15th December).

Do you think the people that decided that 12th night was on 6th January could count?

With 10 at the Christmas table there was little time to get bored, no time to play with the new toys (except for the kids of all ages, yes you know who you are) and absolutely no traditional style TV blobbing that is so popular in the UK.

Pads
The favourite presents this year were Pads, or tablets, or slates (depending on whether or not you want to admit that Apple defined the market or not). My vote is with pad, Joss is a tablet guy, I reckon tablets are what you need when you are sick and slates, who would call a piece of hi-tech a "fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock." But a pad, that is what you come home to, that comfortable place where you feel totally at home.....man.

I still have my vintage i-pad (and still happy with it, thank you very much), but we seem to have a new proliferation of i-pads around the house at any given time. And there is the one Sony Tablet "an Android tablet like no other", because it's like a pad maybe?

Thanks for the Presents
Thanks to everybody for this years presents - The soft face, the Port I cannot drink until the puzzle has been solved, the well charged mouse, the prospect of floating above the earth without an engine (but with a parachute) and the the upgrade to being a complete  Apple convert. Finally the Windows Notebook can be replaced by my a brand spanking new Air). Apologies to anybody I missed out.

Carol the Artist
Over the past year Carol has added painting to her hobbies. She sneaks off to our bedroom as early as she can to can to dabble the night away in the company of her watercolours and acrylics. I am one of the few, if not the only, person to have seen the results of this enterprise.  Give here another year and we'll be looking for exhibition halls.


The 9 to 5
On the work side there have been a lot of changes recently that were out of my control, including the redefinition of my role in the department I work in. I have not been very happy with the changes and have therefore been looking for something more appropriate to my skills (and with the potential for a bit more fun). It looks as though I have found something with my current employer so I will not need to go through the non trivial hassle of changing employers. (Imagine, looking for somebody who would be be prepared to hire me at 30% and handle all of the "organisational" hassle of hiring an invalid). So next year I will be probably doing a lot less trips to Paris but a few more further afield. I will miss my Parisian friends and will need to find some excuses to make the odd visit now and then. More on the new job when things are more or less settled.

Epilogue
I am sure I have missed out on a ton of things that we have been up to in the last 3 months but at the moment in my current drugged up state ( I have a cold) I cannot think of what.

I have already started working on my best of 2011 music list and hope to get this posted before the end of this week, and if I get the chance I might even look at moving the blog later in the week, because if I don't do it this week I think it may be a while.

gardiner-smith.com, new home

The gardiner-smith.com domain  and hosting (mostly used for the our mail addresses) have been hosted by the same service for over 10 years and the services have not change one iota in that time and I was still paying the same price.

Nowadays, e-mail messages are much larger and I had been having quota problems so I decided that I would look if I could get a better deal. I first tried my existing mail/web host service (flump.net) and discovered that they were still talking about the same packages as I got 6 years ago with spaces measured in MB still!! What is more they have not updated their site in 4 years, I think maybe they have lost interest.

After a quick look around it looked like hostpapa had one of the best deals with pretty much unlimited space/bandwidth and a great set of services for €2.95/month. Compared to my 250MB limit for about twice that. They also offered a free domain for life (as long as you stay with them I guess) so I was able to transfer gardiner-smith.com from from register.com to tucows (host papa's registry) at no cost. Their pre-sales on-line support was excellent and instructions for set was clear

Planning the move was quite nerve wracking making sure that the break in service was as short as possible but I need not of worried. I was given an ip address at host papa which allowed me to set up mail accounts and stuff, then once the auth code had been requested &  received from the old registry (requiring a phone call and them pleading with me to stay for 10 minutes)  and passed on to the new registry all I had to do was wait. I backed up the old mailboxes and up a redirect on my old mailbox so I knew when that stopped redirecting the new domain address had been propagated. It all took 4 days from signing up to being transferred (with no loss as far as I know). Most of that time was just waiting for the internet to propagate my new address through the global DNS. Now a lll I need to do is shut down the old service.

Upshot is I am now running gardiner-smith with hostpapa. No homepage yet, but you can look at some photos of my new grandson and our China holiday at http://gardiner-smith.com/pictures/.

If all goes well over the next few weeks I might go back to hosting my own blog rather than using bloodspot. Mainly depends on how difficult the migration is.

p.s. The more observant may have noticed a few posts from my old 2002/2003 architecture blog just for nostalgia's sake.

Your Good Healtth

Or mine actually.

Given the origins of this blog I thought I should mention the current state of my health four years on from that fateful day 1n 1997.

1. I am still alive: This in itself is more than I could have hoped for and I seem to well into the long tail of the morbidity statistics for my condition. Sometimes it is hard to imagine that I am terminally ill.
2. Side Effects from my condition or treatments: It is difficult for me to tell which is which, and the doctors can't tell either.
   - My Brain-Speech connection still has problems and I lose words and forget names more than is normal (or was normal for me). It may be getting worse, but it is definitely a slow progression ifit is. It is the only thing that still scares me, the idea that I might at some time lose my ability to communicate.
   - I still have some insensitivity on my right side but either it has got better or I have gotten used to it, I think this was a by-product of my biopsy, but as I said nobody can prove it one way or another.
   - I still get headaches on the left side of my head in the mornings, on waking, several times a week, but they are not severe and they usually go away within 30 minutes.
3. Drugs: I only take Timonil (Carbamazepine) 300 twice a day as a precautionary measure against seizures. This to make sure that my regular EEG doesn't show too much craziness in the damage areas (see plot below) because if it did  I would be banned from driving. (Given the drugs I am more likely to get banned for other reasons, but more of that in another post perhaps).
4. Monitoring: I am now down to 2 check ups a year which comes down to alternate EEG / MRI appointments. Sometimes I feel embarassed taking up the time of the guys and gals at the hospital just so that Professor Neuro can say "No Change"

Just in case anybody is interested here is my latest EEG from yesterday:

Interesting bit is around 3:47 where the sensors (FP1-F7, F7-T3, T3-T5, T5-O1) around my damage get a little crazy,
but not crazy enough to worry Prof. Neuro thank goodness

 P.S. I have added a tag Health so you can track just the health stuff

More Ooh & Aah pictures from Jayden

Just Me

Me Again

Just me and Mum

with Mum and siblings

with Nanny (& u. Joss)

Nanny Again

With Aunty Amber

Extending th Moser arm - Jayden Tyler

Just a quick blog to announce:

Jayden Tyler Moser

Arrived at 12.02am in Baden Weighing in at 3.3kg (7lb 4oz for the imperalists), 49cm long, quick birth mother (Kayleigh) and baby are fine.

This extends the Moser arm of the Gardiner-Smith's to 3.

My Dad

I just noticed I did not publish my dad's Eulogy from back in April. Pretty embarrassed actually.
Sorry Dad.

Goodbye Amy

Shocked by the news of Amy Winehouse's death, even if it was somehow inevitable that she should die young. Such a wonderful songwriter and an incredible singer. I am almost ashamed that on the day after such atrocities in Norway that it was this news that brought me to tears.

I have not felt quiet this way since John Lennon died and I was so much less of a jaded character in those days.

You will be sorely missed Amy, by this fan and millions of others. Rest in peace my lovely.