Category: Uncategorized

Big boy has all England’s 2006 World Cup games saved on the DVR and he watched them regularly. So regularly in fact, that he knows the precise minute Wayne Rooney comes on for the first time as a substitute – 58th minute in the second game, against Trinidad & Tobago, of course! – he must have watched that game 20 times since it happened in June.

Anyway, each game is preceded by the two team’s national anthems and he as memorized the tunes of all of England’s opponents (he was humming what he assured me was the Portugese national anthem in a cab the other day, and who am I to argue?) and has figured out quite a few of the word’s of the English dirge/ditty.

So this morning he says to me, “Dad, why is the English national anthem all about the Queen?” And before I could mumble something about a monarchy being an anachronism in a representative democracy, he piped up, “I know, I’ll look on the Queen’s website to see what it says.”

And thus, being Web-savvy before you’re five, having an obession with football, together with an acute awareness of his dual nationality – he regularly says things in two accents – converged in one little boy’s innocent but curious inquiry.

Well, from here anywhere, a picture taken by a fellow Fulham fan of the Johnny Haynes stand at Craven Cottage today, where we were beaten by the best – most expensive – team in European football. One penalty, one legit goal.

A bit different to last season’s home encounter.

Still at least the weather was nice.

Mum’s at top right, in a bright pink top and Dad’s on her right.

Like many other lads, he’ll be very happy to hear the news tonight.
Those pictures were from his first ever Mets game, Tusday July 4, 2006, against Pittsburgh Pirates.

We left after 7 innnings, when they were losing 6-4 but thankfully the Mets came back to win 7-6.

On to the playoffs…..

I’ll be trawling back through our lives over the last few months over the next few days, updating pictures that I should have done, well a few months ago. So here’s a load from May from London (including his first football match at Fulham), Paris & Boston. It was a busy month.

And below is a couple of my favorites of his first attempts at cricket in the back garden in London. An ‘A’ for enthusiasm is warranted, I think. Usual username/pwd combo required.

This astromical dispute about Pluto is coming at an awkward time for us. The lad has just got interested in space but isn’t old enough to start sniggering at Uranus, though I’m sure that will come soon enough.

We bought a mobile of the planets a couple of months ago, though with our usual procrastination, we are yet to hang it. But I looked and we’ve lost one – I think it’s Pluto, so that’s a relief.

If you lend a boy a camera, what will he do? Well, this boy will take a picture of his players all in a line.

Should I read something into the fact that the English player has no ball? Oh well, at least the floor looks reasonably clean for once.

So I got a bit of help upgrading the software and now the pictures are back at patience.org. Links to the albums are here and on the right.

I will update the albums in the next few days, but by way of a taster, here’s a couple from yesterday at Chelsea Piers, where each Saturday he plays football and she does gymnastics. He’s improving each week and he always scores, usually about half the team’s goals. Yesteday in a short game he got a couple and here’s the celebration after one of them.

Meanwhile, with her gym finishing half an hour before football does, she comes to cheer him on. In a lull in proceedings yesterday, she invited herself to a game of catch with two older boys, as she is wont to do. This is her asking for the ball. Any comments regarding her hair-do should be directed towards her mother.

This was in a local playground, resting between practising her pitching. Her action isn’t quite as good as her brothers’, it has to be said.

But then she hasn’t spent as much time as he has studying the technique of Pedro and the other Mets.

Update: I should probably add that this was taken on my phone, hence the ‘quality’.

Blimey hold the middle page! Street fairs, that concentration of deep fried food, mix tapes and poor quality underwear that clog up New York’s streets every summer are apparently not the rich cultural institution the name may conjur up in people’s minds.

I could have told you that without commissioning a report just by looking out the window!  I like this comment on the Gothamist story:

“Hey, if it weren’t for street fairs, I would never have gotten to try things like deep-fried Oreos, which I had only read about in articles about how Middle America is getting fat.”

So you may or may not noticed two things about patience.org recently :

1. I like fiddling with things related to this site.
2. I am not very good at/don’t have time to – complete these fiddlings to a satisfactory level.

So I am currently waiting for community help in upgrading the Gallery photo management software that handles al the photo albums we have here. I have still not been able to complete the upgrade to the next verson of Gallery and until I am able to do so, the albums linked to on the right, will not work. Sorry.

But apropos number 1 – I have chanegd the theme of the site to this one, which I think is a little simpler and more elegant.

Back to fiddling….