View from where we are

So last week Alberto Gonzales quit (read: was fired by the Pres). Following the utterly incompetent Donald Rumsfeld and the overly competent Karl Rove, one of the last of the toxic squares is gone only leaving Dick Cheney to fall on his sword. It won't happen, I know, but it would be so good for the political climate in the USA and make a statement that those with the "We had to destroy the village to save it" mentality are finished. And "toxic squares", you ask? Well there are four of them, they pretend to be uber-conservative, atavistically so in a social context. And they've done more than anyone but the Pres to simultaneously alienate useful, longtime friends abroad as well as conservative voters at home.

It seems when trouble comes it comes in spades. Some of my favorite service providers are having trouble all at once. Skype, which has worked flawlessly for 2 years (3?) has had problems seeing its own peer-to-peer (P2P) network today making logins interminable, and now Google, whose Gmail is one of the nicest free apps on the net, has fallen foul of its own spam filter!

Sometimes I think it must be nice to be French. Discounting all the rhetoric about "Freedom Fries" and "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" (from The Simpsons for those fundamentalist evangelicals who wondered. And it's a fabulous show in case there was any doubt), the French take most of August off, going to the beach, the mountains or just out of town to the country. Nice. Now, we're off to Somerset tomorrow, ourselves, but only for a short break. There are things to do when you're blessed with a protestant work ethic, and things have been being done as well.

The term military intelligence has long been considered an oxymoron (by everyone, excepting perhaps Tom Clancy and Dan Brown). Today's press report from Guantanamo Bay proves this (I know, another Guantanamo story, but bear with me...). The problem is the rot goes all the way to the top. It isn't rogue press officers or a "couple of bad apples" as a couple of idiots in the cabinet have said, it goes all the way up.

Just a few minutes ago the British Atorney-General gave a speech on human rights. Like his American counterpart, his job is to advise the British government on the legality of proposed legislation, or governmental actions (such as going to war) as relates to treaties, international commitments and legal requirements of things such as the European Convention on Human Rights of which Britain is a signatory.

Jacob's recently been being a toddler in the sense that he won't eat anything but his favourite cereal, Daddy's chocolate oatmeal or peanut butter and honey sandwiches. His parents, in spite of being assured "they all go through this" have been pulling their hair out trying strategy after strategy to counteract this.

Just a few minutes ago, though, he downed about half of Vikki's cup of Lee's special cafetiere coffee. This after eating a whole(!) Granny Smith apple!

www.alley.me.uk launched this morning (EST) officially as Lee's UK-centric website. It marks the diversion of the domain which has always been attached to this site as a unified Alley website.

It will also be a showcase of design nous starting with a barebones template and featuring a different design addition at least once per week. In practice Lee isn't that patient and will probably change or tweak something every day.

....I had last night at our friend's Steve and Laura's. Delicious!

Having endured so many bland dishes tasting of paste or some supermarket version of highly spiced mystery powder added to hamburger meat and taco shells, last night's meal was such a nice surprise! And to think we had invited ourselves over for a bit of kitchen design help, we did quite well.

Cheers folks! It was really superb and we'll be inviting you over for the first new-kitchen party, bubbly and all!

I was shocked a few days ago when a friend asked about some code I use to make the menu to the right work (Edit: in the former theme) in Internet Explorer. "Oh my!" I thought, "someone not related to me reads my site!" I set out then and there to start updating the site more often; weekly if possible.

Apologies to those who have read this before or who noticed the dates are all wrong...just retrieving the stories we lost before.

We had heard Jake count to 4 or 5 before and even as high as ten one night in the bath. Today, however, as we did our railway walk, Jake walked down the steps himself. That's unusual as, like Daddy, he likes walking up inclines but not down them. This time he walked down the steps but also counted them as he went. He got all the way to 11, needed help with 12 then counted to 19 then said 10 instead of 20!