rachel.blog

insignificant ramblings of a 50-something woman

  • Dunedin homes

    On my run this afternoon I took some photographs of some of the homes in the local area. I quite like seeing things other than the usual tourist attractions when exploring a different city, like streetscapes and the types of homes people live in. So here are some of these scenes from Dunedin:

  • Dunedin Botanic Gardens

    I managed to escape my computer briefly today to visit the Dunedin Botanic Gardens; a place that is always well worth a visit.  

  • Magnificent Dunedin

    We’re in Dunedin for a few days: my favourite New Zealand city. Dunedin is right at the bottom of the South Island while Auckland is right at the top of the North Island. It’s a lovely city: small, fairly compact for the Antipodes, magnificent views from most parts, and in my view, it’s the most…

  • Getting E. coli to make propane

    Apparently some scientists have made propane in a lab with little more than the bacteria in our guts: E.coli. This is interesting for a number of reasons. It would make propane produced in this way a renewable fuel. You don’t hear the words renewable and propane together in a sentence very often! It’s also a synthetically…

  • Music

    I haven’t had much to say recently so I thought I’d share some music instead. I also want to try publishing a post from my iPhone, something I’ve not done before. I hope it works! Enjoy the song:

  • Installing Minecraft mods on a Mac

    UPDATE: This post has been updated in How to install Minecraft mods on a Mac. My son is obsessed with Minecraft. He knows everything there is to know about the game, he has Minecraft toys, Minecraft books, he plays the game at school, and if we let him, he’d be at the computer all day…

  • Scotland, here we come!

    A couple of weeks ago we sent off our visa applications for the UK. They had to be sent to Manilla for processing along with all our passports, including old ones, and original birth certificates for the kids, and our marriage certificate. We also had to have fingerprints and mug shots taken. The applications themselves…

  • Masturbation is sinful!

    But only for men and only if you’re Catholic. We women can masturbate as often as we want 🙂 Ok, this is complete nonsense. Masturbation is not a moral issue and nor is sex for that matter. The reason I’m bringing it up is because Richard Dawkins found himself in the middle of a Twitter storm…

  • Funny things my kids say and other stuff

    Elizabeth’s kindy put on a fundraising disco last night for charity. It was sponsored by local businesses and there were raffle tickets with prizes. Elizabeth got a raffle ticket and won a prize – a huge bag of products from Chelsea sugar. In other words, she won a bag of sugar. How ironic is that,…

  • Taking climate change to the streets

    How do we get the majority of the population engaged with the problem of climate change? Apparently some young Australians don’t even know what climate change is. How can this possibly be? There are plenty of websites about the topic: masses of them, in fact. But you can’t force a disinterested person to go and read…

  • What’s in store for your habitat?

    What’s going to happen to your habitat with a changing climate? I thought I’d skim through chapters 22 – 30 from IPCC report part II which deal with regional impacts. I actually wrote this quite a few months ago and never finished it but a recent post about the impacts of climate change at …and…

  • An Australian family history

    Inspired by AndThen’s recent post about his family history, I thought I’d write a bit about my own. My family history is quite colourful. My great-great-great-great-grandfather was some kind of representative for Germany in a trade dispute in Cape Town, South Africa. His name was Maximilian Thalwitzer and he was born in Germany but later…

  • WordPress.com versus WordPress.org

    Full disclosure first: I love WordPress.com and I want to acknowledge that I might be a bit biased for two reasons. Firstly, I blog at WordPress.com and secondly, I work for Automattic, the company behind it.  I work in support at Automattic and so I get to see first hand the sorts of things users are doing with…

  • Princess teeth

    Elizabeth had her operation today. She was scheduled for 7am this morning so we left home at 6:30am thinking that we’d miss the Auckland traffic but no, the traffic was already thick. A journey which would normally only take about 15 minutes, took 35 minutes.  Elizabeth was in good spirits and quite excited about the whole thing. She knew…

  • I will be a hummingbird

    This is a nice story with an important message. The world needs more hummingbirds.

  • For the love of coffee

    This is a good video from Kew Gardens (h/t HotTopic) about the world’s second most traded commodity after oil: coffee. According to scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, climate change could make wild Arabica coffee extinct in less than 70 years. So if you don’t care about the people in Bangladesh, and you don’t care…

  • Rejecting the advice of experts simply because you don’t like it is unwise

    Today I took Daniel to the same paediatric dentist Elizabeth saw last week. He’s been seeing the school dental nurse since he was four but I couldn’t help wondering whether they had missed something with him as well? After all, they only discovered one cavity in Elizabeth’s teeth when the dentist found four. Thankfully, his…

  • Oops, sorry

    Sorry, folks! I accidentally made a post to my ‘real’ blog that should have gone to my test blog. It was just text from a recent post and I deleted it almost immediately but it got sent out to my email followers (all three of you :)). I have lots of test blogs which I use regularly…

  • Cockroaches, visas, and the Copenhagen wheel

    I’ve discovered there’s something called the Madagascan Hissing cockroach. These are big mother-fuckers and there’s absolutely no way I’ll be letting Elizabeth adopt one of these as a pet. Fortunately they’re not found in New Zealand. We’ve begun the UK visa application process. There’s an online form that needs to be filled. At the top of…

  • Fluffy has escaped!

    Fluffy escaped. There were tears. There was much searching, but we can’t find him. I did manage to get this photo of Elizabeth letting him out of his home for a walk before he disappeared though : I’ve just come back from a run and it was fabulous. My bike has a flat tyre. I really must learn…