16 May 2012: Amelia Kay

That's Amelia Kay, born at 12.03pm on 16 May 2012, 8lb 5oz and 20.25 inches long.

She came by c-section - we had been planning a 'VBAC' but the scar was sufficiently hurting during the final week that Gloria in the end just had to ask the doctor to get her out. So in we came to the hospital at the thoroughly civilised hour of 9.30am (far better than 2.30am after four hours of labour!), prepped and went into the operating room around 11.40 - and she was with us in time for lunch.

Everyone doing well, including Hannah, who came down to visit with Pop Pop yesterday afternoon, and was pleased to find that Baby Sister (who we now know is named Amelia) had brought a gift for her. Here's the vid (HD available for this version, unlike the one we put on Facebook!) of Hannah meeting Amelia for the first time:



So far the consensus is that Amelia looks remarkably like Hannah, including lots of hair and eye colour, but in personality she seems to be a little more of a cuddler and also has far more patience when it comes to nursing, which this time seems to be an actual possibility.

More photos as we get time to deal with it, no news yet on going home but given standards for c-sections I'd think we're looking at Saturday morning. After that it's time to pack up and move to Louisiana, but that's another story...

Update:
Some more photos from day one:

Quick photo with Hannah and one of Baby Sister's outfits before going to the hospital.

Birth weight in kilograms, equivalent to 8lb5oz.

Hannah sees Baby Sister Amelia for the first time.

When asked "would you like to hold her" she says very clearly "yes please" - you can see that moment on the video!

Baby sister brought Dora toys and stickers, a guaranteed winner with Hannah.

Later on, Hannah kept climbing on chairs to check on Amelia. Possibly to see if she had any more Dora merchandise for her.

Pop Pop (Gloria's dad) made a valiant attempt at getting both grand-daughters in one chair, but it never really worked out.

Duncan wore a Saints shirt for the occasion. Amelia, like Hannah, may turn out to be a Saints girl rather than an Argyle girl, but we'll see.

Ryan, Alyssa and ten-week-old Emery pay a visit and wonder how it is that Amelia already has much more hair than Emery.

14 May 2012: Nearly

Becky quite rightly asks why no comment on the football.

Answer: we're about to have another baby, currently at the point of counting contractions when they happen and looking for various other signs that things have actually started and we have to go to the hospital!

Also, Gloria's dad (known to Hannah as 'Pop Pop') is here and that's making Hannah very excited:


(That one's available in HD by the way, courtesy of our exciting Sony HDR-CX160 camera that is so small you'd think it's incapable of doing anything yet it records in 1080i/p and has 16GB internal memory as well as an SD card. But enough specificationing.)

The thing about Argyle staying up is that it seemed so amazingly unlikely back in September. There's an old saying in most sports that you can't win the title in the first month of the season, but you certainly can lose it. And back then, Argyle had the worst start just about any club has ever had - clicking this link will take you to a match report and league table from 17 September, nine games in to the season. Argyle had just lost again and had amassed (if that is the right word to use here) a mighty one point from those nine games, and that was due to a miraculous last-minute equaliser from soon-to-be-manager Carl Fletcher, one of the very few players who didn't leave. Argyle were regularly fielding teenagers to make up the squad and it looked bad.

In fact it reminded me of something Danny Baker once joked about regarding a league table once - Argyle would be the team this time who would not just finish bottom, but they would finish SUPER-bottom, so far adrift at the foot of the table that the Football League would have to send out search parties to try and find them.

But, James Brent came in, got a few players in, replaced Peter Reid (who frankly did his best) with Carl Fletcher, happily removed Peter Ridsdale (never trusted him) and the results slowly, slowly turned around such that the final 37 games of the season yielded 45 points, not wonderful but enough to keep Argyle up with a couple of weeks to spare.

Meantime Saints were at the opposite end of the Football League - in the top two of the Championship the entire season and despite a couple of wobbles, made it back to the Prem. Saw the final day 4-0 win over Coventry and very much enjoyed it. Curious thing is that the core of the team is the same one that struggled under Alan Pardew at the start of the League One season the previous year, Billy Sharp and Jack Cork (and possibly Steve De Ridder) being the only notable additions, with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain the notable absentee. So, a settled squad but one that did, for a while, struggle in League One. I dunno. They say Hooiveld and Fonte are a good central defensive partnership, but frankly Saints shipped a LOT of goals, especially in the second half of the season. Just as well West Ham forgot how to win games...

Anyway - so baby sister coming sometime soon and who knows what fun we can have with the HD camera after that!

15 March 2012: Quick

Got five minutes, so wanted to post a couple of things. First, this headline, taken straight from the BBC News website this afternoon:

"Legal challenges against the scrapping of a tax loophole that allowed the Channel Islands to sell low value goods VAT-free fail."

Now I don't mind that Jersey used to offer VAT-free goods, or that this was due to a legal loophole, or that said loophole was to be scrapped or that there was a legal challenge against said scrapping or indeed that said legal loophole had failed. What I objected to was that I had to not only read the sentence four times, but actually work it out piece by piece to figure out what it was saying and determine if it meant things would be cheaper or not. (Answer = "not cheaper").

And secondly, looks like the Save The Hobbit campaign, which got support from the likes of Stephen Fry and Ian McKellan (Gandalf himself, of course), has succeeded. Hurrah! Not that I get to go there much these days, but there's something reassuring about knowing that not all unique pubs go the way of the Old Black Cat.

Happy Thursday. Time for another meeting.

5 March 2012: Tumble

This one's been brewing for a while - since our visit to the UK in January, in fact - but my sis spotted a news article from the Guardian concerning the same subject and I knew it could wait no longer.

According to said article, there will soon be Mr Tumble - The Movie.

That statement will have a small minority of you cheering, and the rest (from both sides of the Atlantic) scratching your heads in puzzled bemusement. But I know what it's about, because during our visit to the UK, my mum (bless her) decided it would be good to put a cushion on the floor in front of the television, sit Hannah down on it, and switch on CBeebies - the BBC digital TV channel for the under 5s or so which just celebrated its tenth birthday.

Well, needless to say this went down well with Hannah. Back home we offer her occasional trips to Dora the Explorer and a little Bagpuss or In The Night Garden (thanks to birthday DVDs), but here was a constantly-on channel aimed right at her! Well, we thought, it's holiday time, she can watch a bit more TV than usual.

Of course, what also happened is that as well as Hannah watching it, we watched it too, and watched her watching it. And I began to see what has happened to BBC programming for pre-schoolers since those many years ago when I'd watch Brian Cant or Fred Harris trying to make Little Ted sit up straight on Playschool.

The first thing to say is this: it's a lot better than you'd think, and a lot better than pre-school equivalents over in the US. Partly because there's no adverts (no adverts to speak of on PBS Sprout either, to be fair) but the reason Hannah clicked with it was because it was, for the main part, actual real people (and usually adults) rather than animation. It surprised me that she preferred that, given the flexibility of animation, but there was no question that she really liked seeing even the continuity announcers being real grown-ups playing around with toys.

And then you get to the programmes themselves. 'In The Night Garden' was there, of course, just before bed time (although Hannah also got into the 'Goodnight Song', so we've had to YouTube that a few times for her since) - whenever the Night Garden characters appeared, there was a visible jump from her (not yet 18 months by this point, remember). But we also soon picked up which shows were her favourites and which ones she didn't care for.

And the winner, unquestionably, was a programme called "Show Me Show Me", which was roughly twenty-five minutes long and generally featured two adults playing with five toys, interspersed with occasional songs and video shorts. In other words, it's Playschool, innit?

The presenters, Chris Jarvis and Pui Fan Lee (the latter of whom I find slightly irritating for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, although I did read that she used to be a Teletubby so that might have something to do with it...) - anyway, apparently they used to be CBeebies continuity presenters who got a show of their own when their contracts were up. And it's really good. Just pacy enough to keep Hannah interested without being over the top, and sufficiently non-patronising that they can make in-jokes and only-parents-are-going-to-get-this references without ruining the show.

Other favourites included Mister Maker, an art/craft show fronted by the eponymous Mister Maker, who energetic performance makes him appear to have some kind of bi-polar thing where he is right at the top and about to plunge over the edge... then there's ZingZillas, a bunch of monkey-costume musicians whose ten-minute show is a nice length; some train animation thing called Chuggington that I don't particularly get but seems to have Playschool alumnus Floella Benjamin somewhere in the background; and Grandpa In My Pocket (aimed at much older children than Hannah I think, but she loves it), featuring James Bolam of all people - playing yet another version of James Bolam, of course, but that's always pretty good value.

And then there's Justin.

Ah, Justin. What can you say, other than he appears to be on just about every other show on the channel and everyone loves him. Justin Fletcher MBE, of course, given the award for services to children, television and communication, as I understand it. He was on something called Tikkabilla (another Playschool clone that my sis says I was lucky to miss), voiced several of the Tweenies (another show we avoided happily), and today still hosts a joke-related show named Gigglebiz and Hannah's other favourite: "Justin's House" (essentially a weekly pantomime with much audience participation). And of course, Mister Tumble.

The show is actually called 'Something Special' and is about to start filming its eighth season. Justin plays both himself - meeting special needs children and doing some activities with them - and said character Mister Tumble, a strange man dressed in spots and with a mild clown-like appearance, whose sections of the programme are shared by an unseen child (presumably representing the viewer) who talks and interacts with Mister Tumble and his unusual family (all also played by Justin). The Guardian article tells you more about the show, the sign language it uses and Fletcher's family (although it fails to mention that his cousin is Guy Fletcher from Dire Straits) but what surprised me was that for a slow-moving show aimed at special needs children aged 4 to 7, it GRABS Hannah's attention almost as much as Show Me Show Me. She interacts with the sign language to some extent and ALWAYS performs the magic to transport Mister Tumble's Spotty Bag to Justin ("touch your finger to your nose, blink three times and off it goes..."), usually ahead of cue.

The show is slow-moving and generally not all that interesting to me (contrasting with Show Me Show Me or Justin's House, which I'll happily watch all the way through) but it seems that it's not only Hannah that loves it - children of all ages and across the needs spectrum are huge fans of the show, so much so that (like In The Night Garden), the BBC dare not take it off the air even for one day. And I suppose that's why Justin has his MBE - he is such a good communicator and is able to teach children in the context of fun, as well as giving such great exposure to special needs children in such a positive way.

So enough gushing from me, the challenge now we're back in the US is to get Hannah back from being a telly junkie... especially as it's not long now until her little sister arrives...

9 February 2012: Corruption

Breaking out of semi-blog-retirement to comment on the Harry Redknapp thing and the England manager thing.

Not much to say, really, except that the whole thing stinks worse than a pig sty after curry night. Not content with the fact that everyone within the game (really, everyone) knows that Harry's been doing the bung thing for years (and not just bungs), the FA seem poised to sanction his behaviour by appointing him England manager.

The only light in this dark place appears to be that a little over fifteen years ago, Terry Venables was removed after two years as England manager essentially because of his somewhat shady dealings. The fear, however, would be that times have now changed and the FA aren't as concerned about corruption as they used to be. I mean, look at them parachuting David Lampitt into Portsmouth, an organisation that seemingly exists purely to allow Mr Chainrai's clients to "own" for a short period so they can do some laundry. (Really, buying David Norris using the savings of elderly Lithuanians and then declaring bancrupty? Mmm.)

The thing that really made me think, though, was the fact that earlier this week Alberto Condator was found guilty of drug cheating due to the world's tiniest measurable amount of Clenbuterol in his system, and banned for two years. Notwithstanding any appeals he may make, the facts are that he is now officially branded a cheat (although the amount in his system would have had zero effect on his body or performance) and has been stripped of the 2010 Tour De France title.

Now don't for a moment think I'm suddenly a Contador apologist. He's been involved in doping controversy - either at a team or an individual level - on at least two prior occasions AND there was evidence (due to the presence of a type of plastic in his samples) that he may also have been involved in blood doping (where they transfuse blood with more red blood cells into his body - hard to trace, fairly effective but also highly dangerous) during 2010. Totally unproven, but a slight whiff of 'something not right there' Add to that his 2011 performances, which were much more normal/human, which also fits with someone who used to use banned performance enhancers and now doesn't... all unproven conjecture but to me it just smells a little.

Contrast this with football's corruption, right up to the highest level, and the thing appears to be this: at least cycling, as a sport, is DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

Football just buries its head in the sand and watches the money roll in.

Makes me think, do I really want Saints to get promoted back to all that Premier League stuff?

30 December 2011: Spikier

So here are the results and indeed the spike this year proved spikier than the spike of last year, thus adding yet another spiky year to the upwardly spiky graph.

As we've yet to have New Year's Eve, the final mini-spike is yet to register, but the pattern of previous years has again proved repetitive: mini-spike in early December followed by steady growth before a huge leap leading to two days of almost-identical viewing figures on the 23rd and 24th, before dropping off somewhat on Christmas Day itself.

And the numbers? Compared with last years twin peak of 1476 and 1479 on the 23rd and 24th respective, this year gave us heights of 2056 and 2082 views on those same days this year, with Christmas Day (1221 views) actually slightly below that of 22nd December (1243 views). So with no intervention whatsoever from myself (except for my previous blog entry), the spiky spike rises to a new high, taking the video itself over fifty thousand lifetime views. Not crazy compared to some of those viral videos, but for a one-week-a-year hit, it's doing pretty well.

The other stats are much as expected - UK males aged 45-54 again dominated hugely. The only interesting one was the one I pointed out previously - viewing sources. There was a slight rise in Facebook percentage but the mysterious 'external' non-traceable source actually ended up accounting for 39.9% of this year's Bill Barclay traffic. YouTube searches came in second at 23.4% (I think that's something of a new phenomenon for that to be so high as well) with Facebook down in the teens and Google at only 8.1% of traffic sources, which is much much down on previous years.

So, Twitter does its job and proves to be the Facebook of 2011 as far as my video is concerned. In fact, if you do a few relevant twitter searches you'll see links to the video popping up at regular intervals and people extolling Bill's genius. Also weirdly this year someone made a negative-sounding comment on the YouTube page and it was sufficiently thumbs-down voted that it actually got auto-hidden. I had nothing to do with it and only saw it a couple of days ago!

Final thing: while Bill Barclay got 15206 views (so far) since the beginning of December, the 2009 Kokomo Christmas Lights video only garnered some 448 views during the same period. Goes to show that dinosaurs come and go, but Scottish comedy lasts forever.

Or something.

Happy New Year!

18 December 2011: Spikes

Here's an interesting picture. Is it a heartbeat chart from some medical facility?

No. It's a graph indicating the YouTube statistics of the Bill Barclay '12 Days Of Christmas' video from a few years ago. As you can see, nobody views it during most of the year - if you do a close-up of those sections there are normally one or two views per week. But then at Christmas it just takes off...

Interestingly there's always a little mini-spike right at the beginning of December. Not sure why that is, but maybe that's the unofficial 'start of Christmas' period when folks begin to search for Bill's classic song. Then it drops a little before remaining somewhat steady at a few hundred views per day, then...

December 23rd it just JUMPS - 1476 views last year. Then Christmas Eve comes along and it jumps further (although in 2010 it was almost identical to the day before, at 1479 views), and this is usually the peak. Christmas Day is also pretty big (1201 last year), but never quite as much as Christmas Eve. Then...that's it. There's a very minor spike on New Year's Eve, but essentially that's it for another year and the video slips back into its coma.

And the statistics aren't limited to how many views per day - YouTube also uses 'logged in users' to give me demographic info, and there are no surprises here: vast, vast majority of viewers are from the UK, Male, aged 45-54 - the people who would have remembered the song from the 1970s when they were young. Second most popular source of viewers is the USA, presumably curious Hoosiers interested in what other videos I have up aside from the 2009 Kokomo Christmas Lights (stats for that one, incidentally, are all Indiana, aged 25-34, equal male/female split, but that video only gets a thousand or so views per year now).

It also tells me the 'Traffic Source' for the hits - at least as best as it can. The Bill Barclay video has varied over the years, but Facebook embeds tend to come out on top, followed by YouTube searches (for "Bill Barclay" and "Wee Heavy and a Half Pint" etc), Google searches for the same and a few direct links from sites where people leave it as a message or a comment (2009 featured 528 views after someone left it as a comment on a story in the online edition of The Guardian, a major UK newspaper). This year it's changed slightly - 'Mobile Apps and Direct Traffic (unknown sources)' is suddenly at the top, carrying 42.1% of the traffic for Bill Barclay so far this spike, far ahead of YouTube searches... too early yet for the Facebook embedded links to really get going. This would appear to be largely Twitter-based direct links, which YouTube tends not to trace so well. So, I guess I have some link to Twitter after all, despite being continually bemused as to its popularity.

Anyway, all that is to say that Christmas must officially be here since the spike has begun. You'll notice from that initial graph that the peak each year is bigger - last year's total of over 4000 views in the three day period 23-25 December may be under threat... we'll have to see. I could of course try to fix it by publicising the video on various sites, but it's kind of more fun not to, and just see how people find it on their own.

As for making a Christmas video this year? Hm. We'll have to see... we're in Louisiana so maybe something Cajun featuring alligators or something....