Andrew Roberts » Family Diary

Trees and snow at dawn

AndrewRoberts — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 16:04:54 +0000

By getting up on the hill by sunrise, Lisa and I mananged to get 120 trees planted before we decided to retreat from the snow and get home while we could! That’s 2720 so far, 3280 to go.

Willow fish, hearts, tunnels and domes!

AndrewRoberts — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:21:28 +0000

After the very unfriendly willow planting weather that has compressed the entire planting season into four very busy weeks, we’re finally away. We’ve just finished our largest structure to date, a 400 square foot willow maze of tunnels in the shape of a giant fish or sea serpent. We’ve also completed a large dome at Ysgol Mydroilyn and a smaller dome with tunnels at Ysgol Mynach. More images can be found here.

I’ve also been working on some dried willow sculptures – this willow heart is made from “brown” Flander’s Red willow rods.

There is more information at the Living Willow Wales website.

The Matrix rocks!

AndrewRoberts — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:15:50 +0000

I’ve just finished watching the last of the Matrix trilogy that I’ve been working my way through over the last week. Wow. I’ve watched them all a few times in the past, but I’d forgotten – well the sensation had waned – what a monumental achievement this series of movies was, is. The rush just sitting here as the credits roll and the music subsides. I just wanted to capture it and my feelings at this moment. Should I be working on something like this? Should I be working at the bleeding edge of special effects and story telling? Nah, that’s not my strength. I don’t want to be spending hours poring over a hot special effects workstation or dreaming up some amazing tale or writing inspirational music. My strengths are learning and applying stuff, taking information and making judgements and sticking at that learning and decision making process. But most importantly I want variety and freedom to explore new things and then tell people – who might be interested about those things.

But, man, great movies!

Girls, Girls, Girls

AndrewRoberts — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:11:53 +0000

Rose and I have come to spend a few days at my parents house, and my mum and sister Ceri have got their hands on Rose: tiara, pink track-suit, excessive jewellery and high heel shoes - and get this – combed hair. Bit of a contrast to our usual little ragamuffin!

Allotments, Pirates and Britney

AndrewRoberts — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 09:18:19 +0000

Lisa is really getting stuck into the allotment and sorting out some permanent paths for the place. We have now have about six tonnes of wood chip 200 yards away from allotment – hands off you fellow allotment owners! If anyone has a wheel barrow be warned, there may well be a wood chip moving party in the offing.

We all got dressed up as pirates today – as you do. Lisa, Rose and I went to a friend’s birthday party with a desert island theme and Lisa wouldn’t let me go as a hoola girl. I once went to a party as Britney Spears and as she thought I was enjoying the role way too much she wouldn’t talk to me all evening. It’s a shame I’ve got the coconuts ready and everything. On the fancy dress theme Icouldn’t resist throwing in a picture of Rose all dressed up and ready for skateboarding. It was a fantastic party, Kat’s food was amazing a usual.

We all love maps

AndrewRoberts — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:31:52 +0000

I’m a great lover of maps. I can spend many a happy hour poring over maps, especially local maps, looking for a new, undiscovered corner to discover. So you can imagine my delight when Rose drew her first map (that I’m aware of anyway). It had some islands on it that we lived on and some houses, and lots of sea. She’ll be appreciating the tilt feature in Google Earth and flying around the landscape in no time. She also is coming on with her letters, is starting to recognise some more and starting to draw shapes resembling letters, so not long to go there.

After all this acedemic study it was time to let off steam, so Lisa, Jake, Rose and M, who’s staying with us at the moment, went down to Cai Bach beach to have a romp around – I stayed at home and went up to the round house.

Letter from Ffarmers

AndrewRoberts — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 20:24:00 +0000

After the usual frantic start to the day trying to get everyone and everything together, Rose and I headed up to the cottage to do a change-over. The plan was to get there by 10:30 to leave us a bit of time to hang out (I wonder if she is going to learn to hate these mythical people – the customers. “Don’t touch that Rose it’s all tidy for the customers”). We finally arrived about 12, with just enough time to clean. No enjoying the place today. In fact the customers turned up about an hour early and had to be sent off into the hills again.

Rose managed a good bit of self-learning whilst we were up there though: someone had left Scrabble so she spent half an hour making unfeasibly long words and recognised a few letters.

Lisa made the most of being free of Rose and spent the day working herself into the ground in the allotment. When I got home I made a few small steps closer to getting this blog into it’s final state.

Rosie’s Day: Baking, Hugging and Swimming

AndrewRoberts — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:34:00 +0000

Well I think Rose has had the busiest and most news worthy day of us all, so I’ll dedicate today’s post to her. She started it off doing a bit of baking with Mum. Rose had bought a fairy cake making kit yesterday when she was down the shops with Lisa and spent the morning making some very tasting cakes (which I greatly enjoyed with a nice cup of tea!) Lisa and Rose then went off to visit Lisa’s knitting buddy who has a four year old little boy called Thomas. They spent the afternoon playing: Thomas likes too show off his strength and carry Rose around in a loving embrace; he read to her for a bit and they spent a while off in pre-schooler make believe land.

When she got back I took her swimming. After an initial burst of piscine enthusiasm (?) when she was a few months old, we’ve recently started a regular jaunt to the swimming pool. There has been lots of kiddy stuff going on down there during the summer, which is fun but the pool gets a bit manic, especially as Rose doesn’t really like getting her face splashed. So the contrast today, now that the kids have back to school was amazing. For a while we had the whole pool to ourselves. The sun was streaming through the windows casting an impressive sun glint on the walls, and making for an almost tropical experience under the water. Rose really loves swimming now and it can be a bit of a challenge trying to get her to leave the pool after the hour is up. She happily swims around the pool with her arm-bands on, which allows me to get a bit more exercise in swimming around, and around and underneath her. We took her bike down but she was a little tired on the way home so I got to carry her bike all the way up the hill. And I think her enthusiam for cycling that day had a been a little tempered by the fall she had trying to negotiate a shallow ditch.

We rounded the day off with a bit of TV, computing (I let her drive while we ordered a new swimming costume off the Internet for Lisa – we could have her in the pool with us soon) and then to bed in her tent

A quick aside as the post has a kiddie theme: I persuaded Jake to come out mountain boarding with me today. Now that the grass is getting a bit flatter the main run is getting faster. We tried a new slope in the next field, which although steeper is a lot more rutted and harder to carve a turn on.

Guilt free Idleness

AndrewRoberts — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:16:00 +0000

I’ve been making a big effort to try and reduce the amount of time I spend working, and increase the amount of time I spend idling – ”Don’t do anything that isn’t play”! I’ve been doggedly studying the works of Tom Hodgkinson (How to be Idle, The Idler and How to be Free) and working on my ability to just hang out at home and not feel guilty about it. Today has been the kind of day I’ve been working toward. I was up and out reasonably early to get the car to the garage, so this got me out of bed and out of that “I’m going to lie in bed all morning and enjoy it” state of mind I sometimes get into. I did have a little admin to catch up with in the morning which left me feeling I had achieved something with the day (still got a lingering work ethic) and then after lunch the day was my own. With the car in the garage leaving us Lampeter bound, I had suggested we all headed out for a walk. But the weather had other ideas and the rain didn’t stop lashing down all day so out with the board games. And it was great. I hung out with Rose some and we got into playing with the drums and the metronome; I watched a bit of telly and started to do some research on this pro-blogging business (I recently dug out a load of old diaries and it inspired to start doing something regular again, yes, potential capitalisation did occur to me!)

One scary fact I stumbled across – we’re thinking about home educating Rose – was that home education is illegal in Germany. This is a hang over from the Nazi era apparently when Hitler wanted control of all those young minds.

So all in all a good day down on the ranch.