After seeing that one of the contestents on Masterchef this week had cooked butternut squash risotto, it made us fancy it ourselves. I had a look for a recipe in some of the usual places, and then decided to make one myself (with a little help from the example risotto on the back of the rice packet).

• 1 Onion (finely chopped)

• Handful of mushrooms (chopped)

• 1 litre of light vegetable stock

• 150g Risotto Rice

• Blob of Butter

• Butternut Squash (cubed)

• Couple of sprigs of fresh parsley

1. Preheat oven to 200 degrees C

2. Drizzle Butternut Squash with Olive Oil and roast for 30 minutes

3. Once the Butternut Squash has been roasting for about 15 minutes, heat the butter in a frying pan and add the onions - fry them until the are soft.

4. Add the mushrooms followed by the stock and rice and stir.

5. Leave the rice mixture to simmer until all the water has gone (should be about the same time as the butternut squash is finished)

6. Mix in the squash and the fresh parsley and serve.

After talking about different bible software with some people at life group on Sunday, I thought I'd do a bit more investigation into some of the free bible software available. The main software I've looked at so far is: In the beginning was the Word, The SWORD Project (for Windows). I also tried MyBible - but didn't get past the installation, as it failed to download the texts.

Here's my initial findings, I intend to investigate some others and post some more details as I use them a bit more later on...

In the beginning was the Word

Highlights

• Clipboard Monitor that pops up a verse when you copy a reference from anywhere

• Excellent Interface

• Personal Note storage

• Lots of texts available (including original languages)

Disadvantages

• Doesn't have footnotes to the text

• No cross references

SWORD Project (Windows)

Highlights

• Lots of texts available (including modern translations)

Disadvantages

• Difficult to use Interface

• Flashes a lot when you change passage or settings

This weekend Laura and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary by having a nice relaxing weekend away over at my parents caravan on Hayling Island (more on that to follow). It's amazing how time has flown by in these four years, but it's been wonderful and lots of different things in each one of them!

• 2002 - 2003 - My Graduation, preparing for Uruguay

• 2003 - 2004 - Mostly in Uruguay

• 2004 - 2005 - Laura's last year at Uni and lots of church stuff

• 2005 - 2006 - Pregnancy and moving House

...awaiting new content...

Matthew 18:5

Last weekend I finally got my laptop to talk to my wireless network in Ubuntu, I'd tried following some instructions before when I had Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) on the laptop, but never got anywhere with it. I know I could have changed my network to use WEP instead, but I didn't want to have to change too much just to get my laptop to work occasionaly when I booted into Linux.

With Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) it wasn't as straight forward as I'd have liked, but it was much simpler than the method I'd attempted initially. I found the instructions at fredericiana. It was simply a case of doing an

sudo apt-get update

to update the package library, followed by

sudo apt-get install gnome-network-manager

and finally commenting out the all but lo from /etc/network/interfaces and rebooting.

When the laptop rebooted I was supposed to be able to go to the new icon in the tray and select the wireless network, however as it was a little more complicated as we hide the SSID on our network and it seems that the SSID was treated as case-sensitive, which I don't think was the case on windows.

Time is flying by - Laura is now 32 weeks pregnent so we've got less than 2 months left before our little daughter is due to arrive. It's exciting and at the same time scary! I'm really looking forward to being a dad, but it's quite daunting at the same time

The other morning before I went to work, Laura was very tired and had drifted back off to sleep, I put my hand on her bump, and our little baby recognised my hand there and started kicking (or poking) my hand - It was lovely!

We've been busy getting things ready and have built up a list of things we need to buy. This week we've been focusing on getting the bedroom ready. All the walls are now painted and we're working on tidying up and repainting the woodwork.

Generated using the generator at Aharef.info

Interesting image of the site - Of course - having put this post here will probably change what the result is anyway!

Here's the explanation of the colours:

blue: for links (the A tag)

red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)

green: for the DIV tag

violet: for images (the IMG tag)

yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)

orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)

black: the HTML tag, the root node

gray: all other tags

It's now almost a month since we moved house, but I've been meaning to blog about our hectic week as we moved for a while! We completed fairly late on the Friday, and booked the removals for the Wednesday in order to give us time to get the bits and pieces done that we wanted to sort out before we moved in.

The first thing that we had planned was for someone to come in and check for woodworm, as that had come up on the survey, so we'd booked them in Friday afternoon thinking that if we'd completed at lunchtime we'd have the keys in plenty of time - as it was it was quite tight for time, but worked out ok. Unfortunately though they found traces of woodworm, so we needed to get it treated and they wouldn't have been able to do it in time - so we booked another company to come and do it on the Tuesday morning. We'd decided that we would need to clean the carpets before moving our stuff in and reserved the carpet cleaner for Monday (also when NTL were coming to install the phone and broadband).

Over the weekend we did the bits of work that needed doing with help from my parents who were really helpful, and my Mum stayed on till Wednesday to help us finish the packing and other bits and pieces. On the Monday Mum and I picked up the carpet cleaner and got started at cleaning the carpet, starting with where the wardrobe would go so as it would be dry first (or so we thought) - turned out that we got it a lot wetter as we were learning to use the cleaner so it needed help to dry. We then had to take up the bedroom carpet ready for the woodworm people who were coming the next morning and in taking it up we discovered that we would have to replace the underlay as well as it was falling to pieces.

On Tuesday, the woodworm people came as planned and we left the windows open to let the floorboards dry from the treatment while we returned to the flat to pack - only by the evening was it dry enough to put the carpets back down for them to finish drying for the removals the next morning.

It's very exciting, Laura is now 19 weeks pregnent so we're nearly halfway there. We're due on October 6th, although the scans have put it a bit later so we'll see. It's been so amazing to see our little baby on the scans and how (s)he's growing.

On my birthday as we settled down to watch "The Legend of Zorro" we both felt the baby kick for the first time (although Laura had felt movements earlier) - what a nice birthday present! Since then, there's been a lot more kicking and moving, and it's been wonderful to feel it from time to time. This morning at church just as the preacher was coming to the end of the Sermon, he was talking about being a willing volunteer for God - and the baby got quite excited and started moving and kicking quite a bit - it was almost like it was a response

Recently I've been working on a new community website which I've just launched:

Latin Mission is a new community site for people with an interest in Christian work in Latin America. It currently consists of:

Forums

The forum is a place members can discuss recent events, their Latin American experiences or even seek prayer support.

News

The news section collects news from across the internet and filters it to show news items relating to Latin America. The sources currently include BBC News, Google News, Newsvine and Christian News Service

Stories

As a community site, all members can submit stories or articles to the site that others can read and comment on.