| Dinner with Liz & Paul Gyurgyak
in Barnstaple. |
| On the 4th February,
while we were on our visit to Devon, Liz & Paul kindly invited
us for dinner to catch up - as we hadn't seen them since our
wedding in July 2000. |
|
Pip, Liz and Vanessa after a few glasses of bubbly. |
| We were joined by Rob & Pip Malek (congratulations
are in order as Pip is expecting her second child) and Liz did
us proud with an excellent chinese that had been nowhere near
the local takeaway. A jolly good evening was had by all, and
the girls got to compare bumps! |
| Dave's Large Bendy Sausages... |
| On Saturday 11th February we got together
with Dave, Zanna, Camilla and Craig for a boozy night in Sutton.
Old Davy boy did amazing things with large Cumberland sausages
and mash, and many beers were consumed. |
|
The three girls: Vanessa, Zanna Clarke and Camilla Anderson. |
| Events of the evening included Dave's impromptu
Stone Roses concert, Dan's drunken attempts to DJ and annoy
the neighbours, and the amusing (if unsuccessful) hunt for Craig's
contact lens. We're planning to do it all again in Brighton
in the summer, after the wee sprog is born. |
| Baby Update... |
| Vanessa is still doing well in her pregnancy,
and the bump is beginning to grow rapidly now with each week
bringing the need for new clothes! This weekend involved raiding
M&S for stretchy trousers, and the discovery that all 'maternity'
clothes are far to big for Vanessa and look rather like sacks!
We have also bought ourselves a pushchair from Mothercare
in anticipation, which is a rather cool off-road three wheeled
contraption that will be great fun to take on long walks in
the country... |
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Dinner with the Gyurgyaks... Pip Malek, Liz Gyurgyak and Vanessa
at the back, with Rob Malek and Paul Gyurgyak to the front
of the picture. |
| West Tytherley Gentlemens' Club AGM |
| We have set a date for the first AGM of
the West Tytherley Gentlemens' Club: it will be on the weekend
of the 21st April 2001 - somewhat earlier than last year due
to the impending arrival of Dan's offspring (Vanessa might not
take to kindly to her husband disappearing for four days of
debauchery with the boys when she has just given birth). I will
contact all members individually and keep you posted as the
plans progress. There will be a WTGC website as soon as I get
round to sorting it out. |
 |
| If you want to come along, you will need
to have the Friday, Saturday and Sunday off work, and taking
the Monday to recover is highly recommended! The plan is to
once again rent a large cottage for the weekend, with Karting
arranged for the Friday afternoon (before we are too hungover)
and Paintballing on the Saturday morning. Sunday will be free
to relax, but if this AGM follows the pattern of the founding
event at Dan's Stag Weekend, this may turn out to be the wildest
night of the lot. All founding members are required to
attend, and there may be a number of candidate members for initiation
into the club - notably Mr C. Anderson, Mr M. Tomlinson and
Dr T. R. Hucker. I'll need to know numbers quite soon to book
the venue and events, and you will also be getting a call from
Dave ' The Machine' Butler to arrange donations for deposits. |
|
Things started to go horribly wrong - Craig & Camilla Anderson,
Vanessa, Dave Butler and Zanna Clarke. |
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| Dan's New PC from Evesham.com |
|
The Axis 1200DDR Ultra - a rather nice piece of kit! |
| I've finally taken delivery of my new computer
from Evesham.com
- there were some delays due to a shortage of motherboards in
their warehouse, but otherwise everything went smoothly. My
old Pentium 233, kindly donated by my sister Vickie, was finally
giving up under the strain of modern software so I decided to
invest in a reasonably futureproof system. For the geeks (like
me) I've listed the specs below: |
| Axis
1200DDR Ultra
1.2Ghz Athlon
256Mb DDR RAM
19" Mitsubishi monitor
GeForce2 64Mb Ultra
60Gb hard disk
16x DVD ROM
12x10x32 CD-Rewriter
SoundBlaster 5.1
Creative DTT speakers
MS Natural Keyboard
MS Intellimouse
Windows Me |
| I'm looking forward to playing around with
the more up-to-date features, especially using sound files on
this website. I recently picked up IBM's excellent ViaVoice
8.0 software so I will be learning to use speech recognition
to use the new system. |
| Award Received |
 |
| This website was awarded the Trellix Cafe
Site of the Week award for the week of 18th December 2000, and
also in the REFRESH newsletter of 4th January 2001. The award
had a dramatic effect on site traffic, with over 1500 hits in
the five days after the newsletter went out. My guestbook had
quite a few messages left on it as well, most of them very kind,
although there were one or two exceptions! |
| Beers in Brighton |
| Plans are afoot for the consumption of large
quantities of ale in Brighton on the 24th February. Mat Thomas,
Dan and hopefully Tim Hucker will be meeting for a night on
the town, and a chance to see Mat's new (well, we haven't seen
it yet) house. No doubt there will be a few amusing pictures
from the event which will find their way onto these pages! |
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