just to let you know

quick update

Right, while I am waiting for Adam Curry's latest podcast to finish downloading, just a quick village fete summary.

It was a wonderful and very "villagy" sort of thing with a tombola, prize draw, slide and games for kids, tea, coffee and cake - you get the idea. Sal at one point said that village fetes must have always been like that for hundrets of years and I think she is right. It was such a small and nice little festival - another good reason to live out here in the countryside, we thought.

On a different note, we enlarged our range of garden equippment and are now the proud owners of another fisherman's chair and (finally) a parasol. Hooray!

More importantly, I have decided to pick up my "Beginning Java" book again (I purchased it back on Nov last year!) and what can I say: "This time it's for real!". No seriously, this time I really want to go for it and blow away those ABAP cobwebs :-) I am using Ivor Horton's book and so far (chapter 5 out of 22) get on pretty fine - I like his style and tone. More on my Java adventures soon.

welcome to Country Life

Tomorrow at 14:00 hrs the local village fete is going to take place right in front of our door and I must say I am getting pretty excited. I've never experienced anything like this - literally the whole village plus other visitors are going to go past our house - a little lodge belonging to a larger estate.

I will aim to take some pictures of the afternoon event - surely we will meet lots of villagers. Some of them came already round to our door to say Hi or hand in leaflets over the past few months. Sal and I are both so happy with this more intimate and closer knit community feeling. In comparison, Edinburgh was more anonymous - despite almost half a million people living in the place.

So, well, I shall keep you all posted about tomorrow's events and might post the odd picture - be warned !

Rain !

Finally, after days of blistering sunshine, the heavens opened this morning and gave the english Midlands the required cooling.

Hey, I am not complaining.

I'm back !

"What happened?", some may ask now. Why no posts?

Well I guess another typical "blogging gap" happened to me, lots of work, playing with Milly and enjoying this wonderful spell of british sunshine.

Speaking of which. It's been absolutely wonderful these past few days. It's just brilliant to spend so much time in the garden and to live outside for a change.

Another thing I've realised here "darn sarf" - as they say - is that no one complains about the heat in the same way as they do in Scotland, where temperatures rarely exceed 25 degrees.

Oh, and another thing happened: I got into Podcasting. No no, don't worry, my friends - Michael is not planning on doing a podcast himself - that would be pushing it a bit too much. And besides, I don't think my voice is sexy enough. But I've found a few good Podcasts out there - german and english. I particularly like Annik's "Schlaflos in München", Adam Curry and the offerings of the BBC so far. All very different, all achieving different things and all beautiful in their own way. And most importantly: they shorten my daily commute to work.