Today’s mission in what we’re calling the Chicory House – our home while our actual house gets repaired – was to unpack the kitchen. I think it’s looking pretty good!
Next weekend’s mission will be to set myself up a workspace that isn’t the conservatory dining table. 😬
I remain a huge fan of Kev Quirk‘s “100 Days To Offload” blogging challenge. And today… I just completed it for the seventh time!
Kev announced that he completed it again today, too. He uses a different metric to me – he counts “posts over a twelve month period”, while I use a slightly more-restrictive subset of that: “posts in a calendar year”, because it was easy for me to make a table out of in my blog stats.
| Year | Posts | Success? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 |
221
(64 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | Barely made it this year (ignoring reposts, of which I did lots), with my 21 December article about a little-known (and under-supported) way to inject CSS using HTTP headers, which I later used to make a web page for which View Souce showed nothing. |
| 2021 |
190
(57 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | A cycle to a nearby geocache was the checkin that made the 100th post of this year, on 27 August. |
| 2022 |
168
(55 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | My efforts to check up on one of my own geocaches on 7 September scored the qualifying spot. |
| 2023 |
165
(86 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | My blogging ramped up again this year, and on 24 August I shared a motivational poster with a funny twist, plus a pun at the intersection between my sexuality and my preferred mode of transport. |
| 2024 | 436 | 🏆 Yes | Writing at full-tilt, my hundredth post came when I found a geocache near Regents Canal, but pedants who disregard reposts and checkins might instead count my excitement at the Ladybird Web browser as the record-breaker. This year also saw me write my 5,000th post on this blog! Wowza! |
| 2025 | 458 | 🏆 Yes | |
| 2026 | 379 | 🏆 Yes |
* Pedants might claim this year was not a success for the reasons described above. Make your own mind up.
After some discussion, Kev agreed that the earliest year I could claim for was 2020.
Personally, I feel like each of the hundred posts should occur on different days too. This is relevant to me, because sometimes I post multiple times in a day… but it’s 100 days to offload, not 100 posts to offload, right?
Therefore, by my own restrictions… the soonest I could achieve the goal in a year would be the 100th day of the year. Right?
Which is today.
Which I just did. 🎉
I started the year knowing that I’d be trying to do this “speedrun”. What I didn’t realise was how hard it would be.
The disruption of getting flooded out of our home in February and the many weeks since of short-term accommodation (of varying quality) has made just living a vaguely normal life very difficult this year (although I’ll admit that it’s also given a topic to write about time and again!).
Anyway: that feels like a win. My fastest ever – the fastest possible, under my ruleset – #100DaysToOffload achievement unlocked.
I wonder what I’ll do next.
(Max props once again to Kev for inventing the challenge.)
Long ago, you could move to a new area, scan for local WiFi networks, and fully expect to see a wonderful diversity of different network names. Some named for their locations, sure, but others named for people, or fandoms, or just “fun” ones.
Has this art form died? Most residential SSIDs nowadays seem to just be the default one that comes with the basic router supplied by the ISP. Most commercial ones are just the name of the business. Sometimes you’ll spot a phone configured for tethering but even that’s usually just “Alice’s iPhone” or similar.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a “Chicken Crossed the Road to Steal Our Wifi” or a “Russian Hackers” or a “Routy McRouterface” or a “All Your Bandwidth Belong to Us” (okay, that last one’s a bit dated). Has the art form died?
The dog is concerned. Why, despite all her warnings, am I still letting these men take all of our (surviving) furniture?
It’s fifty-five days since my house flooded. Since then, I’ve lived in hotels, with friends, on volunteering retreats and – mostly – in a series of one- or two-week AirBnB-style short-term lets. It’s been wild. It’s also been wildly disruptive. To our work. To our kids. To our general stability.
Today, we make a change. Today we’re moving into a medium-term let: sonewhere we can stay for the… say… six months or so it’ll take to actually repair our house so we can move back in. We’ll have our own space again in a way we haven’t in a couple of months.
I know the hard work isn’t done. Our house is still a wreck! But it feels like, perhaps, we’re beginning the second act of the three-act play “The Year Of The Flood”. And that feels like progress.
Right, I’d better go move house! (for like the seventh time this year…)
On our last day out at our current AirBnB, we searched for a takeaway.
Google Maps found me a Chinese takeaway, but it had an unexpected suggestion when I asked for an Indian:
It’s my final day in the cute garden office of the AirBnB we’re living in, this week, and every time I step through the door I catch a glimpse of our small, sandy-coloured dog squatting in the garden.
Except the dog isn’t even here. My brain keeps getting tricked… by this statue of a pig:
I’ve lived in a LOT of different places these last few months while we’ve been arranging a place to live for the next six months or so of our house repairs. Each new AirBnB has had its pros and cons (and each hasn’t felt like “home”).
But man, I really like the “garden office” at our current one. So nice to work in the sun!
(I don’t like the slow WiFi as much, but yeah… pros and cons!)
I guess I’ll need some “assistnace” from Tesco to explain why my (long-neglected!) Clubcard didn’t work when buying some emergency sunscreen this morning. 😂
![Photo of a self-checkout screen reading "Sorry, we don't recognise this Clubcard. Try again or call for assistnace." [sic]](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q23u/2026/04/1000134048-640x384.jpg)
Today I had a Cadburys’ Cream Egg… for breakfast.
I am a monster.
The final of the short term lets we’re staying in (before we switch to a medium-term one!) while our flooded house is repaired is also perhaps the prettiest. Our village this week is peak-Cotswolds, for sure!
Two decades ago this month my friend Matt posted five predictions about the future of the world. I’ve revisited these predictions twice since: ten years later and twenty years later, and “scored” his predictions both times.
I love that the Web’s memory (and the persistence of URLs) makes this kind of long-term conversation possible.
There was no mixing bowl in the house large enough to make enough pizza dough to feed all of the Three Rings volunteers present at this year’s 3Camp, so I just had to pour out all the ingredients onto the surface and work from there.
I’d completely forgotten that my website pranks visitors on April Fools’ Day with a randomly-selected one of a selection of “features” until I went to it myself and got “party mode”.
So yeah, this year I managed to April Fools’ myself.
Some days, developing Three Rings is about being hunched over a keyboard alone in the middle of the night, swearing at Rubygem incompatibilities.
But just ocassionally it’s about getting together in beautiful places with some of the most dedicated geeks I know… to swear about Rubygem incompatibilities.
Either way, a walk in the garden can lead to the insight that gets you to the solution.
