How to go off floor adventure triking. Lesson 1 – First, get trike off floor onto sofa like so:

Lesson 2 – Join trike on sofa:

Lesson 3 – Board trike, taking care to keep wheels perching precariously over the edge of the sofa:

Lesson 4 – Once on board, look behind before reversing. Spot potential hazzard and stop just in time:

Lesson 5 – Decide reverse isn’t all its cracked up to be. Go full speed ahead along the sofa instead:

I miss my little man. Follow him on twitter here.

It’s now just over 18 months since Galen popped into the world.

Among other things, he loves watching videos of tractors on YouTube.

That’s my boy.

After being over here for nearly a year, I exchanged my driving licence for a UK one.

Amazingly, I’m allowed to drive the following types of vehicle:

• Car
• Car with trailer
• Up to 7.5T Box Lorry (!!!)

So for the move we rented a 7.5T Mercedes Atego 816 for a day. We picked it up from Bridgwater and I then drove it home, loaded it up, drove it to Nailsea, unloaded it, and then drove it back to Bridgwater.

This isn’t it, but this is basically what I drove:

Driving to our cottage from Bridgwater, I couldn’t believe I was allowed to drive such a massive machine without any kind of lesson or training. Except for a slight scratch of the indicator against a wall while I was reversing away from the cottage, it all went well. I’m not in any hurry to drive one again though.

Last weekend, Galen, Sherry and I moved house.

We loved our cottage, but I was struggling with the commute to Bristol 4 times per week.

Sherry found a lovely 4 bedroom semi-detached house in Nailsea (20 minutes drive from Bristol), and five weeks after suggesting that we should consider moving, we’d found the house, signed the contract, picked up the keys and moved all our possessions.

The new place is great. It has plenty of extra space, a garden that Galen can more easily play in, and I save 4 hours every day commuting to and from work.

We’re moving house soon. Last week, Sherry called BT to get the phone line sorted at our new place. Everything was arranged, we had an order, a phone number, but they’d given us a stupid connection date.

For some reason, they were unable to connect the new line at the date we wanted (any day around the time we were actually moving). They were also going to disconnect our current line on the same date. The only time they could apparently do this was 13 days before we moved.

13 days here without a phone line, leading up to a big house move, wasn’t something we could live with, so we cancelled the order and today I went to place a new one under my name.

But in the last week, it looks like BT have disconnected the phone line to our new house. When I called BT this morning there was apparently no connection, which means an engineer has to go to the exchange to connect us.

They want to charge us £122.50 to reconnect a line they disconnected in the last 5 days.

Thanks a lot BT.