Life of Wiley

Woo-hoo, got my new trumpet last night. It’s a Conn International with a rose brass leadpipe and yellow brass bell. Although it’s only a student model it comes with a first valve saddle and a third valve slide ring.

I collected it at a rehearsal of City Brass, a brass ensemble I play in, and the first thing I needed to do was oil the valves. I duly did this reinserted the valves and tried to play but couldn’t get any air through. It turns out that, unlike the cornet, the valve guides on a trumpet will fit in one of two ways (only one of which is correctly aligned) and of course I’d got all three wrong!

Just need to get a new mouthpiece to match my cornet mouthpiece ( a Bach 3B ) and we’re away.

is that, unlike boys, there’s no warning sign that a baby girl is going to wee over you whilst changing her nappy!

Tis the season for parents nationwide to buy sandals for their children, as evidenced by the lack of sandals in any of the shoe shops and departments of a suitable size for Euan. But therein lies the problem, what is a suitable size for Euan?

Going to the Clarks shop in Mothercare World in Watford and they measured Euan’s feet using some electronic thing at a child’s 10.5. John Lewis on the other hand measured his feet manually and came up with 9.5!

Louise took Euan back to Clarks in Mothercare World and got them to measure his feet manually at which point the sales assistant stated that he’d never used the manual measuring device before. Now this, in my opinion, is diabolical. With something is important is the growth of a child’s feet you would expect Clarks’/Mothercare’s staff to be trained to measure feet properly. Clearly the electronic device is measuring feet 1 or even 2 sizes too big, but even if it was accurate what would they do if it didn’t work? Measured manually the sales assistant measured his feet at 9.5 on one foot and 10 on the other!

Whatever the size though, you can’t get a decent pair of kids sandals in Watford for love nor money!

Louise and Eva came home on Thursday. I’d thought it was being a bit optimistic about coming home on Thursday but I guess the NHS are really short on bed spaces Actually Louise has really improved since Eva’s birth and has been much more mobile than I’d anticipated.

I’ve added some photos to the photogallery, these can be found here.

I’ll also need to update the site to include a photo of all four of us on the heading.

So far we’ve been very lucky with Eva; already she has got into a good feeding and sleeping pattern which means we’re having good nights and she’s easy to deal with during the day. Also, she’s spent more time sleeping in the moses basket than Euan ever did when he was a baby. Eva’s not slept in bed with us at all (yet!)

Big day today, Eva Mae was born at 9.15am weighing in at 3Kgs (6lbs 13oz in old money). Louise and Eva are both doing well with Eva just sleeping all morning. I expect Louise will feel the pain of that later tonight!

Our friend Simon told me on the phone that we now have a “gentleman’s family” having one of each, meaning that the Wiley name will be passed on with Euan and I’ll get to walk down the aisle with Eva. So already I’ve got a remortgaging experience to look forward to!

Hopefully we’ll have all the family at home on Friday.

So tomorrow is the big day and when asked whether Euan is excited or not he states quite matter of factly that yes he is because tomorrow is “Michaelangelo Day”! The background to this is that Euan is really into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and now has Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Casey Jones, but is missing Mikey. We’ve been saying that he can have a Michaelangelo but in fact he’s going to be getting one as a present from the new baby, so tomorrow will be “Michaelangelo Day” but not how Euan will expect it.

Today has been a bit surreal really as we’ve been going about town doing relatively ordinary things, I’ve had my new car stereo fitted, we’ve bought some new blinds and ordered a chest of drawers and Louise has been gardening; you wouldn’t think that tomorrow we’re going to be having our new baby!

dme bemoaned the lack of updates on here yesterday, but there has been a good reason. In amongst all this DIY telecoms I’ve been doing I’ve also been working hard rearranging furniture and junk to make room for our new baby.

However, there are a couple of things to mention. First off, last Friday I had a new hood fitted to my Escort. The job was done by Soft Tops based in Croydon. Sadly the weather let us down badly but the fitter was quite “happy” to do the job in the covered section of Asda‘s car park! And what an excellent job he’s done too, no leaks and it looks excellent.

On Sunday we all went to a couple of parties celebrating a friend’s 40th and then a wedding reception. The wedding reception was particularly interesting for me as the chap who got married, Jem Davis, is an ex-keyboard player of the group UFO and I know he knows the chaps from Iron Maiden of whom I’m a fan. Well to cut a long story short, Janick Gers of Iron Maiden was there! I’d have loved to have had a chat with him but a) I’m never sure when it comes to recognising “celebs”, and b) he’s just a regular guy, a dad in fact, just out with his family seeing friends, so why should I go and bother him?

On the Monday the band were supposed to be playing at Lemsford Fete but the fete was called off on police advice after torrential rain (the car park was in a field), but after speaking with the organisers we put on a free concert in the village church for an hour to the obvious delight of the villagers and organisers. So much so that they’ve booked us for next year! The concert went really well considering it was an improvised programme, all the soloists played really well and went down well and we nailed pieces that hadn’t had a massive amount of rehearsal, so all in all an excellent afternoon for the band.

Finally, some toys have started to arrive; namely, an Epson Stylus Photo R300 Inkjet Printer and an Alpine CDA-9812RR head-unit for the car. The printer is excellent, it came with some sample photograph paper so I printed out a photo from Euan’s birthday and left it out for Louise. When she saw it she thought it was a photo as you would get back from a lab. Not had chance to play with the Alpine yet as it needs to be installed and I’m not confident about doing it myself.

For the first time ever yesterday I was almost physically sick after reading a rather gruesome killing in Charlie Higson‘s book Full Whack. I was reading it on the tube and had to get off to recover!

In the same way as I can’t continue to watch Reservoir Dogs after the ear cutting scene I doubt I’m going to be able to finish Full Whack; which is a shame as until that point I was enjoying it. Ho hum. I doubt I’ll be reading anything else of Charlie’s as apparently they are all pretty gruesome.

Oh dear. Whilst we had a good rehearsal last night going through stuff for the first gig of this year’s banding “season” at the Lemsford Village Fete on Monday, I felt completely knackered at the end. I’m putting this down to a serious lack of home practise over the past 3-4 weeks as I’ve been very busy at work and at home. Now things have started to settle down abit, the decorator’s gone and the DSL is in place perhaps I’ll find some time for it again.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to Monday’s gig which will be at St. Johns School in Lemsford, Hertfordshire.

Way hey! After much aggravation I’ve managed to rewire my internal phone network at home to move the DSL downstairs since the spare bedroom is now being turned into a nursery. In the end it was very simple; isn’t it always? But the pain was in trying everything first before checking that an existing, BT installed cable actually worked! Anyway it all works now and it’s all nicely cabled up and pegged down so that’ll please Louise.

In doing the job I need to drill a hole through a double thickness cavity wall (it used to be an external wall) so I hired a SDS drill and very long drill bit to do the job. £700 worth of drill did the job in less than 2 minutes, though I still had to hire it for the whole day! Then the decorator comes in and says: “Oh, you could’ve borrowed mine”!

Just got to wait for the new desk now, should be here on Saturday, so more DIY fun to follow.