Redecorating the lounge

Since we moved into Battersea back in Feb this year, we’ve been wanting to get the house redecorated and eradicate the Morocco tinges that the previous owners had installed. So out with the orange, dark blue and the horrid yellowy/brown sort of magnolia. We’ve had a bit of help putting up the wall paper from Kate’s parents, but the rest of the painting has been done by Kate and me. We now need to follow this up with some bits and pieces to make it really look like a home.

Big improvement? We think so!

We’ve also managed to rent my Docklands flat to Kate’s sister and her husband, so finally some cash coming in!

I’ve just been migrating this site and a few others across to a new server. I’m also retrieving content that I had left in draft, so some dates of posts might be slightly out of sync. I’ve also updated mine and Kate’s flickr sets as well.

I’m now using a virtual server hosted by One and One instead of their cheaper and less specified business solution. Not bad, though the Plesk interface is a bit naff.

On the 13th August, my brother and his wife had their first son. Welcome to the family firm young man…..

Well done guys!

Brother Nick with Eddie

Last month, I finally got the ICOMON website finished for my colleague Katie Eagleton in Coins and Medals at the British Museum. It has taken a while getting all their committee to agree to what they actually wanted. It’s now done and is a multi-lingual website (English, French, German and Spanish) that serves the money curators from International museums.

ICOMON Homepage

The design is pretty sparse and the colour scheme is simple as well. However, it is another website that I have constructed on the textpattern platform. However, I think that this might be the last time I use that as the basis of a website as it seems to be getting left behind a bit by the competition. Shame, as fundamentally it is rather good.

A head off Alexandria

Carolina and Adam

Kate and her fan

Last weekend, we went to Carolina Perez’s wedding to Adam Furgal. It was only the second time that Kate and I had been to Spain and we found Madrid to be far more enjoyable than Barcelona. Apart from the wedding, we also went to two fantastic exhibitions and a couple of art museums (not so great )We stayed in a modernist hotel called Room Mate Laura, which had carpet on the bedroom walls and large Post medieval images behind the bedsteads!

If you get the chance to go to Madrid, I really recommend going to the Submerged Treasures of Egypt exhibition at the Slaughter House (some amazing artefacts from Canopus, Alexandria and Heracleion) and also to the National Museum of Archaeiology ( a very simple, yet powerful display of Spanish and Central American archaeology.)

The Egyptian exhibition made really great use of technology to put the artefacts into context with both their past and their discovery context and also demonstrated how Maritime Archaeology works (I miss that part of my life!) The artefacts on display varied from Monumental architectural fragments, a couple of Sphinxes, lots of Pharonic statues down to everyday objects. I think that many national Museums could learn from their approach to displaying the story of the Delta cities through innovative labelling and ICT use. The venue that the exhibition is within is also quite interesting due to the graffiti on the walls and its immense size!

Pericles on his lounger

As Kate and I have now moved into a house in Battersea, she is now allowed a cat. It is something she has wanted since her last kitty Bertie died a few years ago. We went to Battersea Cats and Dogs home with James and chose a stray called Tommy Boy. He’s a short haired tabby cat, about two years old and he had to be renamed. Now, I wanted to call the cat either Bastard, Satan or just Cat; Kate was against this, so we used a classical name. We went through the Mythological characters and finally settled on the name Pericles, the great Athenian general and man behind the Parthenon.

He’s now settled in to the house, but has picked up a bit of a sniffle and is currently hiding under the dresser. Hopefully he’ll be out and about soon.