Let’s start with a quote from Mrs A…

How much trouble can a dog that small be?

It was fifteen weeks ago that we picked our new pup Missie. At the time I promised lots more photos, but unless you’re one of my Facebook friends you’ll still be waiting. So here’s one (click on it to see the full picture) that comes from a set of photos taken during an unusually warm spell of April weather and is affectionately known as ‘the swamp creature’.

Missie has changed a lot since those early day – her fur is longer and has changed from all-black (apart from the white tuft on her chest) to mostly-black with hints of gold on her legs, ears and face. She now weighs a whopping 1.8 kilograms, which is amazing considering that she rarely finishes her daily food allowance. She now fits into the coat donated by Wally, another Yorkipoo, which is just as well as she’s grown out of her first ‘coat’ (a British Airways sock with two leg holes).

Toilet training has been the biggest challenge. You often find out things after you’ve made your purchase – apparently small dogs, Yorkshire Terriers in particular, are slower to pick it up. I blame the bad Winter weather to a certain extent, and the fact that until a couple of weeks ago we didn’t have a secure area to easily let her out without being on a lead. I erected a fence around the patio, and then had to further secure it with wire mesh after she discovered she could slip through the tiny gap. For a long time she wouldn’t do her business outside – we’d spend ages in the garden or on a long walk, but she’d hold it in until she got home to the newspaper. Not the idea. The toilet training is improving, but she still has to learn to ask to go out.

Last week saw the start of training classes – after the initial excitement overload of being in a room full of other dogs she got on very well and was the best in the class for fetch and recall. Walking to heel needs some work. This week I’ve been working with her on ‘sit’ – the only progress is that now she’s okay with me pressing her backside down on the floor, but she won’t sit to order.

On the whole she’s been a very good girl – there’s been no damage to the house (touch wood) apart from the odd wet patch. Occasionally a slipper or Croc goes missing, and the ends of some of my shoe-laces look like they’ve been chewed… both Mrs A and Lolli deny responsibility, so I have a feeling I know who the culprit is.

It was actually quite scary how quickly this happened – a few weeks ago Mrs A finally agreed with Lolli that we would get a new dog, but plan it to coincide with the start of school holidays. The pair of them then started looking at where they would get the right dog from… the ‘right dog’ being a Yorkipoo, a Yorkshire Terrier / Poodle cross. This cross-breed has the advantage of being hand-bag sized and not dropping hair. While I was at Lotusphere they located a litter with a female pup, and by the time I got home we’d made an appointment to collect it, subject to certain conditions (i.e. a healthy puppy, seeing the mother, etc). A small fortune had already been spent on doggy equipment.

Mrs A had some last minute wobbles as we drove to Essex, but the doubts melted away when she saw the tiny black fluffy bundle. ‘Missie’, as Lolli has named her, came from a litter of five. We saw the mother (a lovely tiny Yorkshire Terrier who wasn’t much bigger than her offspring), and observed that the family who owned both parents had given the puppies the best start in life – everything was in order, and it was a very good sign when the lady insisted that we rubbed antibacterial lotion on our hands before touching the pup. You hear so many bad stories about dog breeders and puppy farms, but there were no concerns here. The initial vaccinations had been done, the puppies were already ‘paper-trained’ and had a proper feeding regime.

Missie is now back at Adams Tower, and Lolli is on cloud nine. Mrs A said that she’ll be cooking sweet and sour chicken tonight, but I have a feeling it’ll be delayed.

Click on the photo to see a larger version, and I’m sure there’ll be more soon. Lots more.

Here at Adams Tower we love Christmas, and every year I have to persuade Mrs A to hold back on playing the Christmas music until a reasonable date. 1st November is too early, even though the Harrods Christmas department opens in August. As we get to late November, and the sound of Bing Crosby’s crooning and whistling wafts out from the iPod speakers, I consider how ridiculous the lyrics of White Christmas are… for traditionally Christmas in the South East of England is a rather grey affair. Tree tops seldom glisten, and the only sound children listen for is their parents telling them it’s stopped raining so they can go outside on their new bikes.

What a shame, I’ve always thought, that Christmas doesn’t live up to that romantic image conjured up by the songs of Bing, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Perry Como and, of course, Shakin’ Stevens… until now.

According to the Met Office…

…the definition of an official white Christmas used most widely, notably by those placing and taking bets, is for a single snow flake (perhaps amongst a shower of rain and snow mixed) to be observed falling in the 24 hours of 25 December.

That’s a bit of a swizz really, because a single snow flake (or even a few) isn’t going to make the tree tops glisten or children listen to… okay, you get the point. We did get a fair amount of snow on 17th December, so much in fact that I didn’t drive my car again until Christmas Day itself when there was still an extensive covering around Adams Towers, making the landscape rather white. But I don’t think any snow fell on that day… so officially it wasn’t a white Christmas. And that’s a bit daft.

So, do I want a white Christmas for 2010? Right now I’d have to say “not really”. As you’re probably aware, Britain is in the grip of the coldest Winter for many years. It may be my fault actually, because while in Finland a couple of months ago I remember saying to someone “we rarely get snow”. Irony, we are told, is a fickle mistress. The “cold snap” has dominated the news and caused chaos for millions, thus leading to the perennial debate about Britain being generally crap as a nation in dealing with the white stuff. While some people are wondering what the fuss is about, spare a thought for us.

Two days after the main fall of snow we’re still stranded up here in the heights of Camberley. To get to Adams Towers we go up our avenue (and I do mean ‘up’ because it slopes upwards), and then up a narrow lane (again, up) and then our drive slopes down. So typically I have to reverse up the drive to get out – and because of my BMW being rear-wheel drive (I think) that doesn’t work very well in snow. The narrow lane, because of the lack of traffic, tends to stay snowy for a long time – and that makes it very difficult to get back up.

Mrs A’s Mini is far better at dealing with these conditions, but even this brave little vehicle has it’s limits. The snow on our drive was (is, still) eleven inches deep. Okay, I know we can clear that in a few hours and throw down some grit from the dwindling supply. Mrs A’s idea was to clear two tracks (one for each path of the wheels) to get up and down the lane. However, the snow was so deep that it would have piled up as the car pushed it… so she spent around five hours clearing the entire lane (using hitherto unknown muscles and crippling herself in the process). However, the avenue is covered with six inches of snow which has been compacted by numerous vehicles. That in itself is very difficult to negotiate.

So how can we get better with tackling the snow-related problems. I know some things now… don’t step on the snow you intend to clear, stay off it so that it doesn’t get compacted. Buy yourself a big shovel and have your own personal supply of salty grit (don’t rely on the grit bunkers in the avenue, it’s all gone). What else could I do? Buy one of those much-maligned four-wheel drive juggernauts? Oh yes, the owners of those gas-guzzlers are looking a bit smug right now.

Bing, me old mate… White Christmas… nice idea and provides some good photo opportunities but, to be honest, it’s a pain in the backside. I think I’d rather stick with the grey ones, just like I’ve always known.

A couple things to add to this ongoing saga. Clearly we’re on the threshold of an apocalypse, because the supermarket (name withheld for legal reasons) in Camberley town centre had run out of milk. Later in the day, as if to illustrate the British approach to managing life in the snow, a removal van attempted to get up around the bend on the avenue and failed miserably. It reversed and tried again. And then again. The smell of it’s burning clutch permeated my nostrils, despite having just got over a life-threatening cold. An hour later, it was joined by another removal van… 18:15 in the evening, and the new residents were still waiting for their furniture. I don’t know the final outcome, but it wasn’t looking promising.

Then Mrs A asked why, if global warming is taking hold, are we having such a cold Winter. I explained… as the polar ice caps melt they dump lots of fresh water into the Atlantic. This has an effect on the cycle of salt water which brings warmth from the South West regions of the ocean, thus causing temperatures to drop in our neck of the woods. And then I realised that was the basis of the plot for ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ and therefore may not be totally true (even if it does sound feasible).

Don’t worry, this won’t take long. I’ve seen a lot of links for ’10 things’ today, either for the year or the decade, and I really can’t be bothered to do my own. Anyway, most people will be out boozing tonight and nursing a hangover tomorrow, so there’s no point, no-one will be reading this.

I started the decade (i.e. January 2000) in my first management role, heading up a team within the larger Lotus Technical Sales team… the Technology Advocates were specialists (experts you could say). What a line-up… Rob ‘Choddo’ Hayden, Tony ‘Woody’ Cocks, Andrew ‘Thommo’ Thomas, Ed ‘Tedwardo’ Hollands and Mike (he didn’t have a nickname) Hayward. My c.v. says I had a team of eight, so if anyone could remind me of who the other three were I’d be grateful. I think the overall structure of Technical Sales was quite fluid in those days. Three of that original team eventually went to Microsoft, although only one remains there.

Sixteen months later, after watching my manager deal with the biggest pile of expenses I’d ever seen and then promptly leave (for Microsoft), I took over as Lotus Technical Sales Manager for North Region – which consisted of the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and, of course, South Africa. Don’t even try to understand it. I got the news of my promotion while I was in Prague for Choddo’s stag weekend. Blah blah blah, a couple of other things, current role.

dadams.co.uk started in 1999 so it was around for the whole of the decade, albeit not in it’s current form running on WordPress. There was a time when it boasted a synopsis of all South Park episodes from the first three seasons – I remain a huge fan and was glad that it got back on track following poor 4th and 5th seasons. My first post of the decade on dadams.co.uk discussed ‘The Millennium Bug’. Since then, the web site has undergone a series of face-lifts and a major upheaval in April 2007 when it was moved to WordPress rather than hand-written HTML using Dreamweaver.

On the personal side… the saddest event of the decade was the death of my dad (September 2006), and never being one to do things by halves he died less than a week before we moved house. I flew out to Florida on a Monday morning, attended his funeral the next day, arrived back home on Wednesday morning and we moved on the Thursday. Three years later I’ve painted every square inch of wall and ceiling (not including the bathrooms) and lived through a major kitchen re-fit.

Travel-wise, we made two trips to New York (we had to cancel the first one planned – September 2001), we went to Chicago for the first time ever, and I made four trips to Orlando for Lotusphere. The Adams clan went to Menorca every year of the decade, I went to South Africa a few times, and made debut trips to Denmark and Norway.

So that’s about it. Achievements? I’ve managed to keep us solvent despite Mrs A’s best attempt to spend every penny I’ve earned (only joking dearest… put that rolling pin down). And I’ve watched my lovely daughter Lauren (a.k.a. Lolli) grow from a cute toddler to a wonderful beautiful (not to mention clever and humorous) girl who plays the flute, has a huge array of gymnastic medals and an eye for fashion (that’ll cost me too), and regularly baffles her mother with her grasp of technology.

And finally, a new year resolution? Yes… 1920 x 1200.

On Christmas Eve I announced via Twitter the sad passing of Mrs A’s laptop. I was on the phone and from behind me I could hear the unmistakable sound of a hard disk in the throes of death. By the time the conference call had finished, the Windows desktop had disappeared and had been replaced by a black screen with the words ‘disk error’ (or something to that effect). Attempts to bring the old beast back to life failed. And it was an old beast – a single core processor of dubious ability, half a gigabyte of RAM and a hard disk which constantly struggled for space. For the best part of a year I’d been telling Mrs A we should replace it, usually in response to a complaint about it’s speed or the fact that it would give up it’s wi-fi connection at regular intervals.

The hard disk failure has now forced the issue, even if it might be possible to retrieve some of the data (most importantly the contents of Mrs A’s Thunderbird e-mail account which apparently contains items of incredible importance). Thus I started to think about a suitable replacement. Mrs A’s computer usage doesn’t demand a high-spec laptop – it’s mainly e-mail and Internet shopping – so a Macbook would seem to be an expensive option. Something around the £350 mark, with a dual-core processor and 2 gb of RAM is more than enough. I’m not being a skin-flint, Mrs A will testify to my Christmas generosity, but the cheapest option is a netbook. Would it be too small though? Would the portability be a worthless factor given that it would rarely, if ever, leave the house? So here I am considering the technical and logistical issues of a laptop versus a netbook.

Mrs A’s response… “hey, I could buy a Juicy Couture bag for it to fit in”. I rest my case.

There’s good spam and there’s bad spam… bad spam offers me a dangerous array of dubious prescription drugs and the chance to receive money from some extremely generous Nigerian bankers. Good spam is harmless but unwanted… and sometimes it’s received because at some point in the past I purchased something or maybe even submitted my own e-mail address. I’m talking about the offer of an array of Christmas gifts from a company which offers acres of land situated on other places in the solar system, the chance to become a Scottish laird or lady, and even an opportunity to adopt a grape vine.

It probably won’t surprise you that I already own an acre of the Moon – it was a gift a few years ago. The package contains a certificate (the lunar deed) and a map of the Moon – X marking the spot of my acre, a nice plot North-East of the Oceanus Procellarum – both of which take pride of place on the wall of my home office. I do realise that I’ll probably never visit the plot in person, and will probably never get rich if NASA discover a rich vein of minerals running through it, but I do get the telescope out occasionally to make sure no-one is trespassing. I have briefly considered how much rights as a land-owner I would have should the Moon ever be colonised, but it’s filed under ‘unlikely’. Nevertheless, an acre on the Moon does constitute something tangible, and as for an acre of Mars… well, maybe one day mankind will step foot on the red planet. But an acre of Venus…?

This strikes me as a bum deal. Within seconds of setting foot on Venus you would resemble a hamburger. The atmospheric pressure, over 90 times that of Earth’s, would squash you flat. And then the 470 °C temperatures would have a cooking effect on your flesh and organs. The sulphuric acid rain would also add to the general unpleasantness of your visit. With 60% of sunlight bouncing back off Venus’ thick atmosphere, the view of the dried and crusty volcanic landscape will be terrible.

Venus is nearly the same size as Earth, so it’s much bigger than Mars or the Moon – and that means there’s more one-acre plots to sell. So bearing in mind there’s no shortage of Venusian land and it’s overall lack of attraction, why does the land there cost the same as Mars and the Moon? It’s a bit daft if you ask me.

Have you ever wondered about how much rain runs off your roof, into the gutter and down the pipe? Your answer is probably “no”. I don’t spend my days considering it either. But heavy downpours used to worry me – the guttering at the front of our house didn’t seem to be able to cope well with torrential rain and the result was that a small area near our front door used to fill up. The soil there is so clay-like that you could probably grab a bucket-full, put it straight on a potter’s wheel and knock up a vase. Even digging two big holes and filling them with gravel didn’t really help. On a couple of occasions I’ve worked for an hour scooping up water, fearful that the level could rise above the damp course (usually at night, in the rain). The solution was quite simple in the end – clear out the gutter, remove the clog of leaves and mud from the down-pipe and fix the leaking joint.

Regular dadams.co.uk readers will remember that last year we had our kitchen renovated. One of the major changes was to remove a window and install french doors, and as a result of this change Mrs A wanted the 50 gallon water butt re-positioned. So I emptied it, did some restructuring of the down pipes, and placed the water butt at the other end of the garden. However, after a wet Summer, followed by a wet Autumn, a wet mild Winter, a quite pleasant Spring and another wet Summer, it became apparent that the water butt wasn’t actually collecting any water. My father-in-law concluded that the gutter was sloping slightly so that water was draining to where the water butt used to be.

Now add in to the story three new fir trees which Mrs A wanted in order to add some privacy to the garden. Our neighbour’s gardener got them at trade price and myself and my friend Derek spent a day planting them (and yes, it rained all day). The gardener advised a lot of watering, every day, even if it rains. It was at this point that Mrs A decided that the water butt would be useful in it’s original position, so once again I restructured the down pipes and moved the water butt.

So here’s the question again… how much rain runs off your roof, into the gutter and down the pipe in a day? When attaching the overflow into the drain I said something to the effect of “it doesn’t matter, it won’t get that full”. It did… less than a day later, after some steady but not catastrophic rain, the 50 gallon container was full and the surplus was draining out. Thinking of the price of water, I rigged up a hose attachment, opened the tap and let the trees have the full 50 gallons (which took over an hour).

Finally, you’ve probably seen the news coverage of the effects of the rain on the unfortunate inhabitants of Cockermouth in Cumbria. Living half-way up a hill I hope that the worst we’ll ever get is a flooded flowerbed. But it’s a sobering thought that this type of flooding can happen close to home, as these pictures of Lotus Park, Staines (2003) on the old dadams.co.uk site demonstrate.

I don’t want to turn this into the fox blog, but I wanted to share this with you. I think it’s wonderful to see foxes in the garden, and it’s even better to see three youngsters as I did this morning. I’m sure they’re siblings from the same litter, and no doubt one of them was the solo visitor who appeared a couple of days ago (probably scouting for a good place to have a snooze).

One of the nippers came up onto the main patio, right near to where I was standing in the dining room, but didn’t oblige by facing the camera.

Click on the small photos for a larger view (and thanks to some jolly clever technology you can then move backwards and forwards like a slide-show).

Since we moved to Adams Tower here in the wilds of Camberley three years ago, foxes have been a familiar sight (especially since our dear old spaniel Molly passed away). This year I’ve seen a pair together only once, but have seen more individual visitors at the front of the house… which isn’t surprising since that’s where I sometimes leave food out for them. I’ve twice seen a badger although they scuttle away very quickly as soon as the security light comes on. Foxes however are more bold, and we sometimes spend a few moments looking at each other before they grab the food and move to a safe distance.

A few weeks ago a mother walked across the raised flower bed outside our lounge, followed by a young one… not exactly a cub but probably not a year old. I’m fairly sure it’s the same one who came into the back garden today and grabbed a quick snooze during a five minute break in the rain.

Young foxy grabbed forty winks while I grabbed my new camera (Panasonic TZ65), he (or she) yawned, decided against a drink from the birdbath (it hadn’t had fresh water for a couple of weeks) and casually walked away. Half an hour later the youngster reappeared and sat for five minutes on the veranda of Lauren’s summer house, and then disappeared again.

Click on the picture for a bigger snapshot, and I may post a couple of photos of young ginger on the Wallpaper page.

My daughter Lauren (Lolli as she is known to her friends and on Twitter) is a girl of many talents – she gets amazing school reports, she plays the flute better than anyone should be able to after just 10 months, and no-one is better at driving the wrong way round a Project Gotham Racing 4 circuit to smash head-first into the other drivers. But her real passion is gymnastics.

She came to the sport fairly late and joined a gymnastics club with the aim of getting into the school team – this was quite a challenge as the Marist Preparatory School has a long tradition of doing very well in the national championships. But I’m very proud of my girl because she stuck to it and eventually was accepted into the school team for the final junior year. The team did very well and took bronze in the Southern finals (and two weeks later they pushed the silver medal team into third place and took silver themselves at another competition).

Since then Lolli has been attending a better gymnastics club than the first two she joined, and today was their own club competition. There were three disciplines – floor, vault and trampette – and a record number of children taking part (I think they said two hundred). Lolli was in a group of girls aged 10 on 1st January 2009 – she did a faultless floor routine, a great vault (always her weakest discipline) and an amazing pike somersault off the trampette. The competition was stiff, I noticed a number of other girls of very good ability, but when the award ceremony took place there was a clear winner in her age group. Lolli took the gold for the floor routine. No sooner had she sat down she was called up again to accept the bronze medal for the vault. And then she was back on the #1 podium again for the trampette. After two golds and a bronze there was only going to be one overall winner, and thus she got a third gold and a trophy.

Well done kid, I’m proud of you. All those medals around your neck and you didn’t even walk with a stoop. Thank you to the current Mrs Adams for proof-reading this entry.