Failure is the Key to Success

On Wednesday, I collected Farworld: Water Keep from the post office. This is the new book from J. Scott Savage that I posted about a couple of months ago. Water Keep is the first in a five book fantasy series called Farworld. J. Scott Savage has published several other books, but this is his first young adult book and first fantasy series.
Although it is aimed at young adults, I found myself enjoying it immensely. As with almost every other fantasy book, there will be elements that are similar to other writer’s fantasy worlds, but it didn’t read as a copy and stood well on its merits. Aspects of it reminded me of J.R.R Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s ‘DeathGate Cycle’. The characters, creatures and locations weren’t over detailed, but sufficiently enough to guide your imagination picturing the story as you went along.

Continue reading » Big thumbs up for Farworld: Water Keep

Tags:Farworld,J. Scott Savage,Water Keep

While we were on holiday at Center Parcs, we bought a bird feeder at the Nature Centre and then added a pole to put it on. They are made by CJ Wildbird Foods, and were very reasonably priced. After we got home we were looking at their website and found that they only charge £2 delivery for orders under £50 and free for orders over. We wanted to add a base to support the pole and also got a variety pack of the peanut cake tubes and a squirrel resistant peanut feeder. I had them delivered to work and they arrived on Thursday; I’m glad I did as the box was enormous, it only just fitted in the car.

Continue reading » Birds galore

Tags:bird feeder

Using the data from marriage certificates that arrived yesterday, I have managed to push back another generation on three lines of my family tree. I have posted the information on my family tree blog.

Tags:marriage certificate

Yesterday we went to London Zoo; we were going to visit a couple of weeks ago when I was on holiday, but I went down with a streaming cold, so we put it off. The weather forecast for yesterday had been looking good all week, so we got up fairly early.

The kids were excited, they hadn’t been on a train before and there was the zoo as well. We travelled from Hemel Hempstead station rather than Luton, it’s a smaller station and made the London change easier. We had previously bought a Family and Friends Railcard which gives discounts on family rail fares. It would have made a bigger saving if we had been travelling during the week as originally planned, but still saved us some money. We only had to wait about 5 minutes on the platform for the train and were able to get seats as the train wasn’t full at all. After about 35 minutes we arrived at Euston and (after a toilet break for the kids at 30p a visit,) changed onto the Northern Line underground for one stop to Camden Town. I had printed out the zoo’s directions for getting to them, but didn’t need them as it was signposted from outside the station. It took about 15 minutes to walk from the station to the zoo and then we were there. After presenting our Friends of ZSL passes we were in. Time to take my obvious camera bag out of my plain backpack.

Continue reading » Our visit to London Zoo

Tags:Gorilla Kingdom,London Zoo

I had to repost all of the links for the Big Bang - World Record posts, as the original posts had over 500 links and it appears Wordpress 2.6 cannot support this, so it deleted all the post content.

Continued from Big Bang - World Record pt2

Continue reading » Big Bang - World Record pt3

Tags:big bang - world record

I had an email when I got back from holiday that hopefully will allow my brick wall to crumble.

I have written about it on my family tree blog - My Brick Wall is crumbling.

Tags:family tree,Henry Hedges