www.danlawrence.co.uk

I am going back to work tonight after having 5 weeks off. It’s gonna be tough!

I had a rota’d week off before Amelia was born, she then arrived early the following week (the day I was due to go back to work funnily enough!) and I haven’t been back since (bar a 6 hour stint of overtime as they needed some urgent cover). I had 1 weeks paternity leave, 2 weeks holiday and another rota’d week off. All adds up to 5 glorious week spent with my gorgeous baby girl and equally gorgeous wife!

The fact I work nights is going to throw a complete unknown into the works. I am going to need to get 5-6 hours kip in the day after working. Will definately be interesting to see how that pans out. Also, Lucy will have her hands full with sole responsibility for little Amelia.

Time will tell how it goes I suppose!

Just had lunch in the garden. Upon deciding to come back indoors, Lucy suggested that as Amelia was asleep that we leave her in the pram just outside our French Doors. My first instinct was absolute horror, I then reeled off a list of things that could happen that she thought were hilarious, so thought I would share them.

• An eagle may swoop and steal her
• A seagull may peck her
• A cat may scratch her eyes out
• A cat may take a shit on her

I was deadly serious when saying all of those things though! Apart from the eagle, we have had cats and seagulls in our garden. I am also fighting a losing battle with one cat who likes to shit on our flowerbeds … so my theories are not really that far fetched.

However, we are taking the risk of leaving her there and it’ll be all Lucys fault if any of the above happen! She’s been warned!

I was pleased to discover an F1 app for the iPhone the other day .. infact, I got so excited I got the camcorder out and did a brief video for youtube!

Great little app, only £4.99 too. It wasn’t until yesterday I actually found out that there is a charge to use it for every race! Only £2.99, but it’s not the point! It’s downright greedy and not really following the precedent of other iPhone apps where you make a one time payment and get upgrades etc free. You can buy a season pass for £15, which works out cheaper again, but it still takes the absolute piss! I won’t be paying anymore.

Still, great little application!

Bit of a late update! But on 02/06/2009 @ 19:42 our baby girl entered the world. We have named her Amelia Bethany Lawrence. She was 7lb 6oz and is absolutely gorgeous!

Both myself and Lucy are over the moon! She is just 1 week and 3 days old at the moment. We are just about getting into a  routine now, but as anyone who has ever had a baby can probably appreciate, her needs change all of the time! It’s a great challenge and we are loving every moment, even the nappy changing!

Have been playing a bit of rFactor lately. It’s a racing sim game that has been developed purely to be customized and there is a huge community behind it, churning out modifications to improve the gameplay and add to the game.

I used to be majorly into sim racing, running a very successful sim racing league between 2000 & 2003, but have dropped off the radar in the last few years. The most I have played is the relatively old ‘TOCA Race Driver 3′, and even that is rare these days… perhaps once a month.

It might have been the start of the new F1 season, but something stirred inside of me recently and I felt the need to do some proper racing again. Installed my old favourite, GP4, but times really have moved on since 2001 and whilst it’s still a great game, it’s aged massively and there is not much of a community behind it anymore. I wanted to race 2009 spec F1 cars, but couldn’t find much on the net.

I then decided to reinstall rFactor, a game I bought a couple of years ago and have barely touched as I hated it. Once installed I sourced a 2009 mod for it and set about trying it out … and WOW, it was brilliant!!! I started patching it with allsorts of other stuff and am now totally hooked! Great game!

Was driving into Lucys parents driveway on Thursday and somehow managed to clip their gatepost with my rear wheel. I don’t know how it happened because I am a brilliant driver

I wasn’t overly concerned at first as it didn’t sound anything more than a passing scrape, but when I got out of the car I was greeted with the sound of air escaping the rear tyre. Upon inspection I found that I had torn a hole in it’s sidewall!!! Doh!!

The problems did not stop there however! On a peugeot 306 (or most french cars of that era) the spare wheel is held in a cage underneath the car, the the cage is fastened shut with a very large bolt and nut. Unfortunately, in my case the bolt had rusted solid and I couldn’t get the spare wheel out!!

I know I must be getting old as I then didn’t spend the next 4 hours trying to do the impossible (sort it myself) and just called the RAC. Might as well get some moneys worth out of our membership afterall. Thankfully they turned up pretty quickly and removed the spare with brute force (aided by a trolley jack).

Unfortunately the spare is not the same size as the other wheels on the car, so I need to get it replaced asap.

Bit of an expensive driving error!

Wrote this whole blog entry on my iPhone, so easy! I can type almost as fast as I would on a standard keyboard! Is ideal!

Has been a while since I blogged about my enthralling little life, so here are a few things that have happened:

• Went to see the band ‘The Pineapple Thief’ in Bristol
• Dropped my HD camcorder down the toilet on a train when hammered
• Bought a new, better, HD camcorder to replace the one above
• Attended 3x Antenatel/Parenting classes .. 2 of which were useful, one of which was not!
• Visited and subsequently chose the hospital where my kid is gonna be delivered
• Quit drinking till the baby is born, incase I need to drive at short notice!
• Decorated and furnished the babys nursery
• Made my noisy Media Center silent once again …altho the noise has since returned!
• Got an iPhone
• Sold a Marillion CD on ebay for £85 !
• Started re-watching LOST from series 1 in High Definition!
• Booked gig tickets and accomodation in Leamington Spa for December ..meeting my Marillion Weekend room buddies for a rather large drinking session!

Plus more mundane shit I can’t be arsed to post.

I’ll be blogging more about the antenatel classes at some point …I need to rant.