Christmas Day Visitor – 25th December 2009

A surprise visitor to our garden in the form of a green woodpecker. I’ve heard woodpeckers before but had not caught sight of one so it was a nice surprise to see one in the back garden.

Family Christmas Lunch – 20th December 2009

As is now the tradition we all meet up for a Christmas lunch sometime just before Christmas.

Snowing Again – 18th December 2009

We’d had a few flurries of snow a couple of days earlier but when we woke up Friday morning everywhere was white. Thomas got an unexpected day off as his school closed for the day but Matthew’s school was still open.

With little evidence of any gritting of the roads I decided not to risk driving and so, instead, walked Matthew to school.

Views from our drive: 

Walking to school with Matthew:

Matthew in his school playground:

A few more pictures from the walk home:

Degree Congregation – University of Birmingham – 9th December 2009

I passed my BA Honours in War Studies during the summer and on December 9th we went up to the University for the degree congregation ceremony. It was a fitting way to end the six years of study.

First some pictures from around the main campus:

  

First I went to get my gown fitted. The official photographs were also taken at the same time but I won’t get them for some time yet – I’ll post them to the blog when they do arrive.

 

After a quick lunch we made our way over to the Great Hall for the ceremony:

 

Inside the Great Hall before the ceremony started (and photography was no longer allowed):

   

 
Ceremony over, here’s four of the five of us who completed and passed the War Studies degree course:

Finally a few more pictures taken towards the end of the day.

  

Go Ape – Bedgebury – 27th September 2009

To celebrate Sam’s birthday we went to Go Ape at Bedgebury Pinetum in Kent. We had excellent weather and it was great fun (if a little scary at times – at least for the adults!).

They were very hot on safety so first we had instructions to read plus a safety briefing and help getting into our harnesses.

Most of the following photos were taken from the ground by HunYieng.

As she was using a long telephoto lens it can be difficult to gauge how high up we actually were. The next two photos were taken by me (Mike) from one of the walkways and, hopefully, they give a reasonable impression of the actual height we were above ground.

There were lots of different bridges and swings between the tree posts and each section ended with a descent back down to the ground on a zip wire – the best bit if you ask me!
The highest point for a zip wire was 13 m, which can be seen in the picture above (the platform above Thomas and Matthew) and the longest was 146 m.
Here’s a selection of pictures showing what we got up to, ending with some of us on the zip wire.