Stu ‘n’ Sonias Weblog

Last Saturday we went back to Hillhouse Wood in West Bergholt for a walk and to take some photos. If you’re in the area between April and May it’s well worth a visit as there are miles of paths carpeted with Bluebells.

Link to Google maps

Loads more pics of Abbey and Sonia in our gallery here

Long story short: we had our old Ford Focus stolen back in March and it was written off after recovery

We had wanted to look for a new car in September so this was an inconvenience but not the end of the world! We tried loads of different cars from big to small and manual and automatics but we finally settled on a 3 series BMW. I was very tempted to spend a year in a Porsche 911 but eventually decided that it was too expensive and too much of a compromise even though we could have fit Abbey in the back… I guess my dream car will have to wait until retirement!

For now this is my new baby

More pics HERE and more to come once I give it a good clean and have some time to take it out with the camera

Time is ticking along, only 6 full months until the Loch Ness marathon and I’ve not exactly been following what you would call a rigorous training regime. The running I have done has been a bit short and sporadic, although I do feel much fitter now, I still take steps backwards if I don’t run for a couple of weeks.

Last night I ran the longest distance I have done so far 6.1 miles (just short of 10k) in 55 minutes which works out to around 9 minute miles….. It was unplanned and stupidly with a bag full of stuff on my back, not exactly marathon pace but still not too bad.

Next step is to repeat the 6 miles and to build in at least 3 runs each week rather than the odd one here and there, from there I’d like to have run a half marathon by June.

If anyone else is running or planning on running any distance in the future I’d recommend a look at www.mapmyrun.com Its a great site where you not only map out where you want to run or where you did run on a map to see the distances involved, but you can also log your training sessions on a calendar and the site works out all the nerdy statistics like calories burned and how fast you were running.

Watch this space for more updates….

Abbey turned 2 last month….. time flies! Thanks for all the cards and presents if we didn’t already thank you. Abbey is still singing happy birthday to herself almost a month later

By the end of her long birthday weekend (Friday-Monday) Abbey was exhausted. We took her to see Old McDonalds Farm with Sonia’s mum which was OK but not something to rush back to, we went to Aldborough with my parents, had a double party on the Sunday with all the NCT kids and then back at ours for cake, then on Monday we went to feed the ducks at High Woods.

Lots of pictures online here from Abbeys birthday weekend and plenty more to come once I have time to sift through them all – Abeys 2nd birthday photos

It looks like spring is finally here in the UK and the gardens are beginning to come alive again. We had a nice walk through Castle Park in Colchester today and I took my camera along to snap some daffodils which all seem to have come out at the same time for a change. T-shirt weather is almost here; far nicer than the snow I found myself out in last week in Slovakia without a coat!

Happy Spring

In an attempt to get fit, and as a reminder to my body that I am 28 not 58, I am now officially entered in the Loch Ness marathon on October 4th. Follow the link to see their website Baxters Loch Ness Marathon 2009

I will no doubt regret doing this at some point between now and October, not least pickup time at 7am on D-Day! I have decided not to be forced from the outset into raising large amounts of money for charity but nearer the time I might nominate a charity for sponsorship without all the pressure of targets.

Updates on training progress and target time as I reach my milestones at 4, 12 and 20 miles

Anyone stupid enough to want to brave the Scottish October weather is welcome to join me

Picasa is a great, free piece of software for photo management on your PC. It’s very easy to pickup for anyone with basic PC skills and it covers all the common things you want to do with your photo’s once you transfer them to your PC.

Having recently forced myself to use Picasa I have become something of a convert so I thought I would share a few thoughts on how it can be used.

Download Picasa from here ~10MB

Installation: dead easy… simply follow all the default options (next, next, next)

Getting Started: the first time you run Picasa you will notice it starts scanning your PC for common places where you keep your photo’s, for example it will look in “My Pictures”. This is great for a start but you will want to put a little more thought into configuring Picasa to keep an eye on the folders you want it to look at. One of the cool things about Picasa is that is constantly checks for new pictures in the folders you choose (selecting these is covered next) so you don’t have to keep re-configuring, think of Picasa as a central place to look at all your pictures from across all of your PC and external drives.

Configuration: you will want to select specific folders on your PC and external drives for Picasa to monitor, to do this click on the File menu and choose “Add folder to Picasa”. The dialog now lets you browse through folders and drives on your PC to choose which ones should be used. Pick all the locations you keep your pictures (and where you upload your new ones from cameras) and select “Scan Always”. Picasa now updates itself whenever you add new pictures to the folders you selected. Once you change the configuration and hit OK you will see Picasa re-scanning to pickup the new photo’s in the new locations.

Browsing photo’s: now that you have all your photo’s visible in one place you can start to use Picasa to look at them. Your photo’s are arranged in time order with the newest ones at the top, you might need to set the time of your camera’s for this feature to work properly! Scrolling your mouse wheel or using the slider on the right hand side will take you back through all your photo’s and on the left hand side of the screen you can see all the folder labels where each of the pictures actually resides on your PC. In the bottom right hand corner of the screen you will see another small horizontal slider, this makes the picture thumbnails bigger or smaller so you can see more or less pictures at any one time.

Opening photo’s: to look at a photo full screen all you need to do is double click it and you will automatically open the picture in a basic editing tool. There are arrows at the top of the screen to scroll through more pictures or you can use your scroll wheel to browse full screen.

Editing: I don’t generally use Picasa for photo editing because it’s very basic, but for simple tasks like cropping, getting rid of red eye and for automatically correcting colour it is very handy. On the left hand side of the editing window you can find the different options for edits and effects.
One thing I was not able to find was a re-size option, this would be handy for reducing image size before uploading to the web but it’s not entirely necessary.

Creating Albums: back in the main “Photo Library” screen of Picasa you will notice in the left hand side you have Albums and Folders. Folders are the names of the folders on your PC where the photo’s are stored and Albums are a neat way to group together sets of photo’s so that you can show them in a slideshow or upload them to the web.
For example, you come home from a holiday with 300 pictures on a memory card, you’ve put all the pictures onto your PC (maybe you might use Picasa’s Import facility to do this next time) and you’re looking through them one by one. You might want to pull out a handful of good photo’s from each folder to show to your family and friends without having to bore them with all the dodgy photos of blurry sunsets and stray hotel cats. Picasa lets you add selected pictures to an album by right clicking on a picture (or multiple) and choosing “Add to album”. Now when you show off your holiday snaps you need only show the good ones by displaying the Album instead of all the photo’s from the camera.

Showing off your photo’s: so now you have your Albums arranged with all your holiday snaps and you want to show them off. You have lots of choices at this point (double click or right click on the album in the top left of your screen for some of them) I will list a few of them and leave you to explore the rest.

I am fairly new to Picasa so feel free to comment if you found something I missed. It’s quite likely i will post about Picasa again in the future when I get to grips with all it has to offer.

The camera points at you, you look at the camera and smile…… Grrrr

At least Santa knows the score.

It’s been ages since we added anything here; mainly because nothing much has happened! Abbey is in full toddler mode now walking talking and chatting back with the best of them, Sonia is still in employment (at least for the time being) and I’m still at Green Hat.

We have uploaded a bunch of photo’s over the past few months http://www.discostu.co.uk/stuff/main.php but it will have to be a new years resolution to post more on here!

We took this photo back in October but never got around to posting it. Happy belated haloween!!!