Notes – Dan Q

Frogs in a Hollow pt 2

This evening I used leftover cocktail sausages to make teeny-tiny toads-in-the-hole (my kids say they should be called frogs-in-the-dip).

It worked out pretty well.

Micro-recipe:

1. Bake cocktail sausages (or veggie sausages, pictured) until barely done.
2. Meanwhile, make a batter (per every 6 sausages: use 50ml milk, 50g plain flour, 1 egg, pinch of salt).
3. Remove sausages from oven, then turn up to 220C.
4. Put a teaspoon of a high-temperature oil (e.g. vegetable, sunflower) into each pit of a cake/muffin tin, return to oven until almost at smoke point.
5. Add a sausage or two to each pit and return to the oven for a couple of minutes to come back up to temperature.
6. Add batter to each pit. It ought to sizzle when it hits the oil, if it’s hot enough. Return to the oven.
7. Remove when puffed-up and crisp. Serve with gravy and your favourite comfort food accompaniments.

Frogs in a Hollow pt 1

Got the ratio of chipolatas to bacon wrong for your Christmas pigs-in-blankets and now have more cocktail sausages than you know what to do with? No, just me?

Here’s my planned solution, anyway – teeny tiny toads-in-the-hole! (Toad-in-the-holes?) Let’s see how it works out…

Trifle for Breakfast

The fifth day of Christmas, and perhaps my last opportunity of the season to justify having trifle… for breakfast.

Note #25419

On a midnight train back from a London theatre trip, somehow the 8-year-old is still awake (and reading comics to me!); the 10-year-old is understandably wiped-out.

A fun night out though!

Book Exchange

Our family Christmas Eve tradition, which we absolutely stole from Icelandic traditions (cultural appropriation? I’m not sure…) via some newspaper article we saw years ago, is a book exchange.

verybody gives each other person a book,then we sit around and read until people retire to bed (first the kids, then – eventually – the adults).

We love it.

Note #25413

Christmas Jumper Day at school, and I’m continuing my never-ending effort never to rest on my laurels, proving myself time and again worthy of my title of Most Embarrassing Parent.

Xmas Post

At first I thought “Christmas post” had something to do with letters and parcels, but then I found one in the wild.

Note #25406

Today I put 550 Christmas cards into envelopes, sealed them, put address labels on them, and stamped them.

Because these were the “lick and stick” kind of envelopes rather than a self-sealing variety, I’ve been unable to taste anything except glue ever since.

Too Late

You know you’ve stayed up too late when… the milkman arrives and hands you your milk.

Note #25383

Today I learned that you can use reportValidity() on a HTML5 input of e.g. type="email" to force the browser to run it’s own validation, without waiting for the containing form to be submitted (which in some cases might not happen, e.g. if you’re handling input using JS).

That’s cool.

Note #25375

Today, while I cooked dinner, I introduced my two children (aged 10 and 8) to Goat Simulator.

Within half an hour, they’d added an imaginative twist and a role-playing element. My eldest had decreed themselves Angel of Goats and the younger Goat Devil and the two were locked in an endless battle to control the holy land at the top of a rollercoaster.

The shrieks of joy and surprise from the living room could be heard throughout the entire house. Perhaps our whole village.

Bacon Solves Little, Improves Much

Even when you’re not remotely ready to think about Christmas yet and yet it keeps getting closer every second.

Even when the house is an absolute shambles and trying to rectify that is one step forward/one step sideways/three steps back/now put your hands on your hips and wait, what was I supposed to be tidying again?

Even when the electricity keeps yo-yoing every few minutes as the country continues to be battered by a storm.

Even when you spent most of the evening in the hospital with your injured child and then most of the night habitually getting up just to reassure yourself he’s still breathing (he’s fine, by the way!).

Even then, there’s still the comfort of a bacon sarnie for breakfast. 😋

Note #25369

Here in Oxfordshire we’re nowhere near the epicentre of Storm Darragh, but we’re still feeling the effects. A huge tree came down and blocked the Thorney Leys road in Witney near Burwell Meadow and the kids and I needed to take an ad-hoc diversion.

🤞 Fingers crossed for all my friends and family in worse-hit places!

Note #25356

For my final bit of Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day, I’m working on improving the UI of a new upcoming feature: a spreadsheet-like page that makes it easy for administrators to edit the details of many volunteers simultaneously (all backed by the usual level of customisation and view/edit permissions that Three Rings is known for).

It’s a moderately-popular request, and I can see it being helpful to volunteer coordinators at many different types of voluntary organisation.

Don’t have time to write up the test instructions today, though, because I’ve got to wrap up my volunteering and go do some childwrangling, so that’ll do for now!

Note #25347

Even when it’s technical, not all of my International Volunteer Day work for Three Rings has been spent using our key technologies (LNMR [Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, Ruby] stacks).

Today, I wrote some extra PHP for our WordPress-powered contact form to notify our Support Team volunteers via Slack when messages are sent. We already aim to respond to every message within 24 hours, 365 days a year, and are often faster than that… but this might help us to be even more-responsive to the needs of the charities who we help look after.