Trying out the new camera phone

This new phone is easy to use in some ways, and in others it'll take me ages to work things out. Lara was able to take a good photo of Olga last night, and then she posed for a nice one for me:

Olga's One Day To Go

Tomorrow is Olga's last day with Geotrace after more than 6 years. Hopefully there'll be no emergencies in the morning, her handover seems to have gone quite smoothly, and there should be a couple of shandies in the pub at lunchtime. She'll be having two weeks off before starting with Flare on the 24th January.
I've got a few more weeks to do, but hopefully I'll be at home on gardening leave from late January for a couple of weeks. Our toys have arrived already, nice big Dell laptops and HTC Desire phones, so we'll be customising them for the next few evenings. We're used to laptops, but the phones (I've got the HD, Olga's got the Z) are a great novelty, so I expect to be posting up to Facebook with annoying frequency over the next few days.

Boys update

The boys seem to be OK after their operations. It's been 2 weeks and we've only just decided to relieve them of their buster collars. Those collars might not have survived much longer anyway, I was repairing them on a daily basis with gaffa tape.  We're still waiting to see a big improvement in their behaviour around other dogs, but we have to remember that this wasn't going to be a miracle cure. It'll definitely be easier on the boys when we're working from home so they can interact with us more.
Here are a couple of pics from earlier this week:

Christmas in Radcliffe, back to work then New Year at home

As you can imagine, things have been rather hectic these past few weeks.

We drove up to Radcliffe on Christmas morning (2 hours 40 mins - this will be relevent later), and had a lovely, traditional Christmas Day - a great turkey dinner, time to open presents before watching the Queen, then entertaining Lara. I even managed to get through the day without a nap, not bad since we'd got up at 6.30. We had to wake Lara up, and when we asked her if we should go and see if Santa had been, the reply was something like "Not yet, I want to stay in bed"!!

Lara took to her roller skates with great aplomb, only falling over a couple of times, and even then she managed to fall gracefully. Her balance is good, and when we took her out with the boys for a walk, she was much better at staying on the sledge whilst Mishka pulled her along at a sprint, managing a personal best of about 80 metres in one ride.

On Boxing Day we took Lara to the East Lancashire Railway for a trip on a steam train. Depending on which side of the train you are sitting, the scenery was either dramatic snow-covered countryside or industrial sprawl, but Lara loved the steam engine, and the driver gave an extra long toot on the horn whilst we watched it pulling away after we got off, which delighted Lara.

The journey home on the Monday took rather longer, more like 5 hours, which scuppered our ideas of starting the job of turning our bedroom into our new home office. On the Tuesday we drove into the Cotswolds to meet up with Catherine, Nick, Elizabeth and William for a lovely pub lunch and to swap some more presents.
Olga and I were back at work from the Wednesday to Friday, and Lara came with us. It would have been nice to have had a quiet couple of days there, but we were both pretty busy with trying to clear our "to do" lists before we leave.

On New Years Eve we did our usual thing, we got a load of food and drink in and had a little house party, just the five of us. Lara went to bed just before 10pm, but Olga and I saw it through until nearly 4am. It was Olga's turn to get up with Lara, and whilst she's a very good sleeper, Olga was expecting to be getting up around 7.30. It was a lovely surprise that the monitor stayed quiet until 10.15am! Lara really is a teenager trapped in a 3 year old's body when it comes to sleeping. Either that or Mothercare don't get enough praise for their cotbed and mattress, it must be very comfy.  We only recently took the sides off her cot, just after we got home from the Lake District, and we were worried about her sleeping less, and wanting to get up and wander about, but if anything she is actually sleeping more since she had a "proper" bed. She hasn't once got up and left her room, which is good. She does wake up and help herself to a drink of water from her bedside table, which cuts down on the visits Olga and I had to make to see her in the evenings.
The next night was even better - we put her to bed early by her standards, around 6.30, and I was expecting to be up at 7.30 as usual, but as it was I had to go in and wake her up at 10.20! That's just crazy. But we're not complaining!