insignificant ramblings of a 50-something woman
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A Highland Dancer
Elizabeth has her very first Highland Dance exam coming up at the end of this month and her kilt arrived today. It’s a little bit long and I’m not keen to take up the hem because there are so many pleats at the back. Maybe I can put her on a stretching rack instead? That…
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More sledging bloopers
These were taken last weekend. All the snow has gone now and we probably won’t see it again until next winter. It was fun while it lasted. No one was injured in the making of these videos. Me speeding down the hill …. or not. Daniel speeding down the hill and falling off. Daniel speeding…
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Emotional attachment to a place and good bread
Have you ever felt an emotional attachment to a place or even a landscape? A feeling of belonging when you go there even when you’ve never been there before? I feel that way about Scotland and to a lesser extent, England. It puzzles me a bit because the environment I grew up in was so…
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Growing your own food
Climate Café no.5 was on in Aberdeen last night. If you live in Aberdeen I highly recommend this series. It’s an initiative of Aberdeen Climate Action, a community organisation for which I’m a volunteer, and we are spreading inspirational messages to encourage our communities to tackle the problem of climate change. Inspirational is absolutely the…
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Nutcrafter Creamery Vegan Cheese
Today I was feeling particularly decadent and bought myself some vegan cheese from Nutcrafter Creamery. Foodstory sell some of their artisan cheeses and I got the Aged Smoked Chipotle. It’s not cheap at £8.50 for 190g but it was oh so worth it. The main ingredient is cashews. The nutrition information doesn’t make much sense.…
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The Beast from the East
We haven’t been as badly affected as other parts of the country by the extreme weather. We’re close to the sea which always helps to moderate the temperature but we also haven’t had the huge snow drifts they’ve had elsewhere. No one is panic buying food and it hasn’t been particularly cold. That said, we’ve…
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Sisters
I got to see my sister on my recent trip to France. And my niece and nephew. It was my niece’s birthday. I have visited Antibes several times over the past 20 years. This next photo of me was taken on one of my first trips, when I was about 21. I’m now 42 and…
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First day of spring
I’ve never seen so much snow outside our front door before. Aberdeen is looking gorgeous this morning for the first day of spring. I flew back to Aberdeen from Nice yesterday afternoon and I’m very lucky to be here. All other airports in Scotland were closed and all BA and Flybe flights in and out…
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Antibes, France
I’ve been quiet for a little while because the past week I’ve been in Antibes for a team meeting. Here’s my team (photo courtesy of CK): We are nine Happiness Engineers working from six different countries. I met three of my team members for the first time last week which was great. I love working…
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VPud – vegan black pudding
I tried the world’s first vegan black pudding this week. It’s made by a firm in Lancashire called The Real Lancashire Black Pudding Company. It was delicious! It’s made mostly with oats and pearl barley, two of my favourite foods. They use beetroot to give it a deep red colour. It’s very easy to make:…
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Minecraft and pubic hair
I’ve never paid much attention to where my site’s traffic comes from until recently and now I’m intrigued by the amount of search engine traffic I get for an old Minecraft post I published in 2014. Google Webmaster tools shows me all the search terms people use to find my site. The top 30 search…
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Don’t eat my muffin!
Daniel left this note before going to school this morning: It says: Dear Dad and Mum and Elizabeth, make sure you save a muffin for Daniel. I have not had mine yet. That’s not entirely true. I made a batch of twelve muffins yesterday and he’s already eaten two of them. This will be his…
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Enabling debug in WordPress
In my post about troubleshooting WordPress plugin problems I expalined how to disable plugins and themes when you don’t have access to the wp-admin dashboard. But what if that doesn’t fix the problem? Suppose it’s not a plugin or theme breaking the site but something else. The next step in this scenario is to turn…
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Vegan banana choc chip muffins
Is there anything more delicious than banana and chocolate mixed together? This has always been my favourite combination for a muffin. These are very quick and easy to make and they’re also a great way to use up elderly bananas. Ingredients 2 ripe bananas 2 tablespoons ground flaxseed 6 tablespoons water 1/4 cup vegetable oil…
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Troubleshooting plugin problems in WordPress
You’ve just installed a new and exciting plugin on your WordPress site which you can’t wait to use but it breaks the site. You can no longer access the wp-admin dashboard and all your visitors are seeing a white screen of death when they try to load the page. Fortunately there’s an easy way to…
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Shared spaces
I want to write about shared spaces. These are road spaces that everyone shares – pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, buses, and taxis. Rather than segregating users into their own space, all signalling and road markings are removed and everyone is thrown in together. The theory is that if you remove all the road markings, traffic lights,…
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Creating Minecraft mods: setting up the environment
Note: I’ve created a two YouTube videos showing how to do this – part 1 & part 2. Yesterday I posted a guide for installing Minecraft mods on a Mac. The logical next step to this is is creating your own mods. This is not quite as easy as installing them – you will need…
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How to install Minecraft mods on a Mac
My most popular post of all time by far is a documentation page about how to install Minecraft mods on a Mac. Nothing else I’ve ever written has come anywhere close to the popularity of that post. I guess no one really cares how I spent my weekend but clearly a lot of people want…
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A winter person
I didn’t want to leave Ballater today. It started snowing heavily this morning and it was the kind of snow that settles for a few days; the best kind of snow. The flakes were huge and dry and it wasn’t windy or particularly cold. The snow followed us all the way back home, turning to…
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