I’ve been marvelling at myself recently, marvelling at the skills I have now that I simply didn’t have four or five years ago. Last night, for example, I sliced up some home-smoked salmon with which to make some smoked salmon, dill-cream lasagnes (long story about how I got to the point of making salmon lasagne in the evening to follow one day) and was amazed to see how thinly I can now slice a filet of smoked salmon.
Ditto slicing up juliennes of red pepper to decorate a salad, or a brunoise of lemon peel. So actually I suppose it’s my knife skills that are impressing me most right now, even though I have always been easily impressed.
Where did these skills come from? The past four and a bit years of working in professional kitchens, obviously, earning my living doing what I like doing.
Five years ago if I didn’t buy smoked salmon ready-sliced it was going to be served in chunks, and the nearest thing I’d heard of to julienne of red peppers was probably Julian Clary. Now I can do both myself, and make a cracking beurre blanc, cook your steak bleu, à point or, if you insist, bien cuit and serve 55 people their starters inside an hour. Blimey.
But I still love writing, which is why I’m here at 7 in the morning trying to crank out some book chapters. Or rather, here avoiding cranking out some book chapters by pretending that this diary is a way to earn money when it really isn’t.
Ciao.

Kids. Leave them alone for five minutes with your computer and this is what they do to it…

I was actually swapping in a new HD for my Macbook Pro, a 320 GB monster to replace the titchy 200 GB  item with which it was supplied. I did this by buying a Western Digital external USB HD (that’s its red enclosure in the background), putting its HD into the Macbook Pro and then the Macbook Pro disc into the WD enclosure to use as a backup. After a frightening moment when the MBP wouldn’t boot (hadn’t pushed the RAM sticks all the way back in – rookie mistake, RAM always needs a heftier push than you think it needs or dare to give it) all is well. I used CarbonCopyCloner to copy the old internal disc over to the new external one before doing the swap and voilà, instant new HD.

The MBP has actually been poorly this week for the first time in its life (14 months old and counting now). Luckily I bought the extended AppleCare warranty to extend the regular 12 month warranty to three years, and it’s paid off; the left fan failed, unremarked by me, and subsequently the left I/O board overheated and failed, taking out the left two USB slots, the sound and the Airport WiFi card.s A quick search on the Apple website (the MBP still worked and connected to the internet via wired Ethernet) and I found my local Apple approved repair shop. Dropped it in Monday evening, collected it repaired Wednesday afternoon, no charge for a repair which would otherwise have cost me about €150 in parts and double that in repair person’s billable hours, i.e. more than the €367 I paid for the warranty last year. Bargain. And it’s a worldwide warranty too – break down anywhere, get it repaired for free in the local Apple repair shop, no charge.

So yes, Apples do break down. But as I’ve said many times in the past, you judge a company by how they put things right when they go wrong and in this case the service was exemplary.

I’ve been following David Allison’s move to Macs with interest, having done the same myself over a year ago. His latest post neatly sums up my thoughts. In fact while my MBP was away in the clinic I used my old Windows XP machine – another decision I made a very long time ago was to keep as much of my work online as possible so my computing life continued almost seamlessly – and found that I didn’t hate it. It worked fine. But now that the MBP is back, well, it’s turned off again.

Those who’ve been around here since the start will remember Anne Weale. She first contacted me when Dr Keyboard launched in The Times and was one of the very first testers of this site back in 1996. I’ve just learned that she passed away last October – I was looking up her e-mail address to write to her and found her website was gone. I’m sure we’ll all miss her very much.
http://bookwormonthenet.blogspot.com/ for her blog
http://www.romancewiki.com/Anne_Weale for the Wiki about her life.
My condolences to her family.

OK, this is a large-ish film, over 20MB; one for the grand-parents only, perhaps.

Scarlett screams at bathtime

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmostxlnt.co.uk%2Fdiary%2F&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=en&tl=fr

Attention: par machine, donc pas trop fiable… mais quand meme.

fashion-scarlett

We’ve been home for 10 days now and are gradually settling into life as a ménage à trois.

Scarlett slept through the first few nights, a solid 10 hours and we were happily congratulating ourselves on our excellent parenting whilst joking that things couldn’t go on much longer this way. The chuckling experienced parents in our entourage all said it wouldn’t last. And it didn’t, Scarlett started demanding twice-nightly feeds and long periods of wakefulness after the honeymoon period ended.

Now, though, she’s down to a feed at about 0530, sleeping from around midnight to 0900. Delphine has also started expressing milk, so I can do those middle-of-the-night feeds to give her a break. Otherwise during the day she had feeds about every three hours, six or seven a day in all.

My parents came to stay over last weekend and it was a joy to see them with the grand-daughter I’ve owed them for so long (my mother’s words – well, almost). We invited Delphine’s parents, brother, aunts and uncles over on Sunday for a long lunch and to give everyone a chance to meet up before the wedding in August.

Everyone, of course, was delighted to see and meet Scarlett; and, as we’ve been warned, many had opinions to offer, advice to give and admonisments to dish out about how well/badly we’re caring for her. She is, it turns out, about to die either of starvation or cold – it’s a bit of a toss-up which will get her first. Even though the daytime temperatures haven’t fallen below about 23 degrees since she was born and she eats seven times a day (at the all-you-can-eat mother’s milk bar), we are aware that we’ll be brought up on child endangerment charges any day now.

Well, opinions are like you know what; everyone has one and they’re full of…well again, you know what. “Yes, yes, thankyou, valued and valuable advice…” has become a pretty standard response. Thanks to Nick for offering that advice. And one years and years ago about nappy sacks – a genius bit of technology without which we couldn’t live.

I cooked for the families, of course, albeit nothing too exciting apart from a decent (even if I say so myself) terrine de foie gras à l’Armagnac et figues sèches. I only made it the day before so I didn’t have time to tasser, weight it down and compress it as you should so we ended up serving it with a spoon, but it still tasted good. Well, they managed to eat 1.5 kilos of the stuff anyway so I imagine they liked it. Served with Franck’s dried apricot chutney, so delicious all round. Roasted a couple of chickens and some rare beef (‘Raw beef’ as my father put it), did a couple of salads (tomato and basil, rice and sun-dried tomato with a few figs, mâche, that sort of thing). Fresh fruit salad with an orange pekoe tea syrup and everyone’s happy.

Coming home with Scarlett wasn’t really as traumatic as I’d expected – it’s quite cool having her around and she hasn’t cramped our style much at all, although I do have a sudden hankering to go out to the cinema more than before. Soon our French Government-sponsored babysitting service will kick in so we may take advantage of that.

Although before then I’ll almost certainly be back off to Ireland anyway – some time around the end of this month, probably, depending on when my boss comes home.

Even nappy changing doesn’t freak me out as much as I’d feared; again, as everyone said non-bleeding-stop, it’s different when it’s your own children. I have managed to avoid deluging everyone with e-mailed Proud Father pictures though (I’m talking to you, David, and you, Simon). I used to reply with pictures of Daisy back in the old days, which confused and even annoyed some people. Sure I’m proud of and pleased with my baby daughter, but that’s no excuse to spam your inbox.

m/f

Lots of people have asked me this; this article repeats what I’ve said to them in the past.

Baby Scarlett Roseline Eliane Rousée Ward, born at 1400 on May 1 2008 in the Urbain V clinic in Avignon, France. 3.370 kilos, 51 cms. Mother and daughter are both very well and dad is completely knackered. Blimey, I called myself ‘Dad’. Merde.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/13498074@N03
Delphine and Scarlett are in the clinic until Monday/Tuesday next week. I managed to get back from Ireland (pix of my house there on that same page) – Delphine called on Tuesday afternoon after seeing the gynecologist and said she was already two cms dilated; I spoke with my lovely employer (who offered to personally drive me to the airport!) who insisted I leave immediately or sooner to get back before the birth. I got a plane at 0700 on Wednesday morning, arriving home about 1530. We went out for dinner (nice and spicy tapas) and Delphine started having contractions at 2300 that evening. By 0330 they were coming every five minutes so we drove over to the clinic. And baby Scarlett was born at exactly 1400 today.
Delphine was up, dressed and walking around looking for dinner (what can I say, she’s French) by 1800, Scarlett had one feed from mum and spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping.
Voilà. Sarcastic comments, jokes and congratulations to the usual address.