We went into Sheffield city centre last Saturday and on Sunday we went to the Peak District. I’ve put photos up.

Natalie and Stuart both started school yesterday and Kate started her job. All going well so far. We have also bought a car - a V reg Renault Scenic 1.6 Alize.

Owing to Pete’s continuing inability to obtain gainful employment, Kate has looked for, and quickly found a job in Rotherham. We are now in the process of moving to South Yorkshire and I will post some pictures soon. We lived in Rotherham for a short while in the summer of 2004 while Kate was doing locum work, all of us like the town and it will be good to go back. Pete is going to continue looking for jobs from there. The practice have graciously provided us with a three bedroom semi near the town centre. It is definitely the best house provided by work thus far, they even have an odd job man who is at this very moment painting it for us! Of course the first thing we needed to do was establish an internet connection; being in a metropolitan area we had a lot of choice. We settled on an 8Mbps ADSL connection from UKOnline and they’ve given us the option to upgrade to 22Mbps ADSL2+ when we get a new modem. Natalie is looking forward to going to her new school, Broom Valley Primary, which is just at the end of our street. Stuart may also have the opportunity to attend as they have a nursey attached.

Natalie’s school play went very well. The pictures are, as ever, in the gallery. We are now tracking Santa with Norad and Stuart is getting very excited.

Merry Christmas everybody!

I’ve not updated for a while as we’ve been travelling around the country to a number of job interviews. Unfortunately no luck as yet, but I am still waiting to hear from some.

Natalie is playing the female lead in “Hansel and Gretel” at school, I will post some photos after tomorrow’s performance.

Kate is doing a bit of locum work this week to keep us on the straight and narrow.

Stuart is slowly working himself into a frenzy about Christmas.

That’s all our news!

The interview in Winchester went well. I hope they ask me back for the second one. Here is a pic of Jon and Em who graciously put up with me and introduced me to the local scene / pubs.

Remember Jon, it’s King Alfred, NOT Arthur… we live in the Reality Based Community…

Needless to say there are more pics in the gallery.

The clocks went back last week and it’s getting dark at about 4.30 I’ve put some more photos in the gallery, the latest are of a trip to the National Railway Museum. Job news… I’ve got an interview at IBM software development next week, so fingers crossed

As Pete’s job hunt has so far been unsuccessful, we have enrolled Natalie at Hibaldstow Primary School in Year 5. She has made friends already and was grateful to leave “Mummy and Daddy school” as it was too much like hard work.

Speaking of jobs, Pete has posted his CV on the site (see sidebar). So if anyone wants to give him an interesting and extremely well-paid job, please look.

Neil commented, asking what this is. Conkers is a competitive, autumnal game. As always, Wikipedia can explain for the uninitiated much better than I, their article is here. When I was a child, the game was taken very seriously. A quick search on eBay confirms that this is still the case, look here. This guy however, may be sacrificing too much.
Here is a picture of Natalie practicing her technique.

I’ve made a few changed in the gallery, most notably i’ve hacked around with the php configuration files so that the slideshow function has more sensible defaults. I also took off the fullscreen option which used a java plugin, but only used the thumbnails for fullscreen!?
The slideshow function is at the bottom of each album page, should you wish to peruse.