Welcome to Xander Emil Grant!

There he is. Looks a bit like Stephen did when newborn. Very sweet expression and looks funny in big brother's clothes which are obviously far too big. He weighed 6lb 10oz which is about average, but it seems that after having had a little giant in Elian Mummy and Daddy are worried about him.  He'll catch up in no time, I'm sure.

We are going to visit them at the end of November, I can't wait to see him. He'll be about 6 weeks old by then, which is just the right time to visit, I think.  Hopefully everybody will be over the initial tiredness and we'll be able to help as well.

Stephen still looks pretty tired in the first picture, but the smile in the second tells it all.  Proud father with two gorgeous sons, he should be happy!!

Not much else to report since my last post.  We have been away in the South orienteering, which I enjoyed tremendously.  As I didn't have a team I had to run the Open Short Course on both days and loved it.  This is an interesting sand dunes type terrain, which amazingly I have not yet competed on. The forest was just starting to change colour (see above!) and the sun was shining brightly. I took it carefully, although you'll see that on Day 1 I went too far left en route to Control 1, no matter how careful I thought I was.  The rest went reasonably well.  Today, on Day 2 things were going quite well until Control 11 when I suppose I had oxygen starvation to the brain and wasted about 2-2 1/2 minutes doing a headless chicken act.  Still, my times were not bad on two days when the general consensus of opinion was that all courses were too long.

Day 1 was 4.2k which took me an hour. Admittedly I took it easy as there was no point in rushing and these type of very technical areas require a slow and careful getting used to the map and the planning at the start. There were some very soft open sandy bits too, which are very tiring, but on the whole I was pleased with my run.  The main complaint (apart from the length) was the poor printing quality causing difficulty of seeing the contour lines.  They were far too faint and on such intricate dunes they were important to see.  The only good thing I can think of is that having scanned it, the trek stands out.

Day 2 was only 3.5k, which took me 48 minutes, but we had some excitement at the beginning caused by the failure of the start box.  Absolutely typical that nobody tested it. As it happens, I don't care, I have my GPS watch to tell me everything I want to know, but still, bad show. I didn't even get a printout of my splits (not even from control 1) because they ran out of paper. Now that is worse than bad show, that is downright negligence, but who am I to complain?

In spite of all this I enjoyed myself this weekend, with a new grandson and two reasonably good runs and fantastic weather with sunshine in the 20's, not to mention the fantastic dinner (see Roy's heart attack cocktail!) at our favourite inn, it was a good'un. It also showed that I am slowly recovering from the injuries of early season and the resultant lack of fitness, so that was a plus point too.