Retour de vacances

Comme je ne sais plus comment on fait pour charger une pellicule dans un appareil de photo manuel, je n'ai rien a vous montrer du bapteme de ce petit bout de chou:

On etaient 50 dans le jardin de ma maman. D'ailleur la voila qui souffle ses bougies:

On n'a pas arrete de manger des gateaux et des glaces. A part ca, j'ai fait de la planche a voile avec mon beau frere:

Je n'en avais pas fait depuis plus d'un an... Je suis aussi alle danser avec une amie que je n'avais pas vue pendant 5 ans - mon ex est jalouse. On est alle a une soiree rock. Moi qui n'avais pas danse le rock en 5 ans, j'etais agreablement surpris de ne pas avoir perdu le pas. Si vous voulez voir des photos de cette soiree cliquez ici

J'ai profite de la piscine de Marjolaine, et de la presence de Pierre et Sabine mais pas de photos malheureusement. On a aussi refait la terrasse de ma maman:

Grand merci a Fiore, Bernard, Bernard, Stanislao, Anna, Florence et Maman qui ont empeche le "diavoleto" que de pietiner la colle fraiche.

Et j'ai meme reussi a aller a la plage:

Vacances en famille et avec les amis. C'est la coupure dont j'avais besoin

Crate Challenge

In French this time

J'ai fait allusion dans la note precedente a mon job d'instructeur d'escalade. Les 3 dernieres semaines, j'ai travaille pour un centre a 10 minutes en velo de chez moi. J'ai surtout encadre l'activite high ropes, une structure permanente haute d'une bonne quinzaine de metre qui sert a installer un systeme de cordes et descendeurs pour assurer des activites en hauteur.

Une de ces activites consiste a construire une tour faite de caisse de bouteiles de lait. Bien sur, les ouviers/grimpeurs doivent construire cette tour tout en se tenant en equilibre dessus:

Pour que ca ne soit pas trop long, j'ai reduit le nombre de colones de caisses a trois, ca rend la tour beaucoup moins stable que la classique a quatre colones...

American kids are better !

I was talking to one of the counselor from the camp where i do climbing instructing. Kelly's from Australia, she doesn't like what passes as Summer here and she finds that the kids here are not as good as what she expected. Well, she's a fitness instructor the rest of the year so it's no surprise if she's disappointed by the lack of energy and motivation that English kids have these days. She said that next year, she'll go to the US because, in her words, "American kids are better". They choose to go to camp.

I managed to sneak a picture to show you what i do at the moment. I had to frame it so that we don't see children face/feature. The guys you can recognise on this are 2 counsellors, 23 years old Graham and 24(?) years old Noamh. Pronounce Nieve, it's proper Irish, the kind that would not bow to the Queen...

Counsellors also come from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, the Netherlands... Not many English, and if like Graham they want to work abroad, soon camp YHA will be able to teach kids foreign languages as well as other outdoor activities.

Now some more news to fill you in on the last couple of weeks. The mystery machine is still not running properly. I took it to the garage that converted it to LPG, it's one hour driving away but if they can't tune the engine then no-one can. Meanwhile, i've bought a 10 year old Skoda Felicia for a song. The challenge is to sell it when i get the Mystery Machine back without loosing any money. Now that i don't waste time sorting out the car, I have picked up the diy where i left it 6 weeks ago.

Meanwhile, my trusty mountain bike has learnt a trick or two from the car and started to rebel. I have changed the back wheel, the chain looks a bit tired and the fork must be replaced before the biking season starts. Because i bike when i cannot climb, that means the rainy season here.

I had to do a bit of work on the bike because colleagues from the sports shop had organised a ride from the store in Sheffield to the one in Stockport 10 days ago. Off course, things didn't quite go to plan as we were supposed to use the Mystery Machine to get there. As the previous garage was unable to tune it, we defaulted to a colleague's 205. Last minute panic to arrange a roof rack meant that we missed the start, here's a picture of us on an empty car park, 20 minutes too late.

And one from the ride:

To finish off with the stream of July Problems, the old computer that i planned to use to run a database for work couldn't be coerced out of hibernation. Perfect excuse to get a quieter, smaller, faster one from ebay. We're talking £100 for a P3 with 160Gb HD and 512Mb RAM. It's running on Ubuntu, with MySQL and other software from the Linux community. Yes, i can be a geek sometimes...

As you see, i didn't have much time these past few weeks. First thing to go, as usual, was sport. So when Mathieu from the ski mountaineering expedition 3 months ago pulled out from our project in the Swiss Alps in 2 weeks time, i wasn't too disapointed. No mountaineering then... Oh well I need a holiday!