My last cache in the USA before I fly home to the UK this afternoon. Seeing
the lake (which, aside from human intervention in creating a reservoir, fundamentally exists because of a millenia-old fissure along the fault line) really helps put the scale of the
fault into perspective. A delightful walk to the GZ with only a smattering of drizzle plus a chance sighting of a doe and her fawn made
this expedition perfect. If I find myself in this part of the world again, I shall try to hire a bike in order to better explore these trails. TFTC; FP awarded for the assistance in putting this world-famous fault line into perspective.
Thanks for sharing (and maintaining) this cache, and for making it possible for me to discover this wonderful corner of the city. SL,
TNLN, TFTC, and greetings from Oxford, UK! FP for possibly being my new favourite cache.
My first US cache: greetings from Oxford, UK. I’m over here for a conference and a little sightseeing and as I woke early this morning (my internal clock still thinks it’s in Britain
despite my incredibly long day off travelling, yesterday!) I figured I’d walk from my hotel to the conference centre and pick up a couple of caches on the way. I made a cache of my own
in a similar style to this, recently (GC86MHH/OK04AC) but yours is way more resilient-looking. SL, TNLN, FP for being my first cache on this continent (and for it reminding me of one of my own!).
Second of the two caches I set out to find this morning after spending last night at nearby Wilderhope Manor to celebrate my partner’s husband’s sister’s wedding. This leg of the walk
was especially beautiful, providing a fabulous view of the valley in the morning sunshine before the drizzle began, a little after 08:00. Cache was one of those where my geo-sense was
tingling as soon as I was in the vicinity and the cache was soon in hand.
Cache’s pencil missing, found in bad condition nearby and returned to the container but I opted to sign the logbook with my pen rather than chance its structural stability!
Thanks for this and #6 in the series. I’d love the opportunity to return to the area and complete them all, but for now I have to get back to the Manor, have some breakfast, and begin
my journey back to Oxfordshire. FP awarded for the care and attention that’s clearly gone into these caches.
My partner fleeblewidget and I have been cycling around Scotland as part of celebrations of the twelfth anniversary of us becoming a couple (a
relationship that started in Edinburgh). On the way, we’ve been cherry-picking some of the most-interesting geocaches to hunt for as we’ve travelled.
After cycling our last leg from Glasgow to Edinburgh yesterday, we spent today visiting parts of the city we’d not seen before, including the hidden gem that is Craigmillar Castle.
Fortunately, fleeblewidget has a life membership of English Heritage and as a result of a reciprocal arrangement with Scottish Heritage, and so our entry to this wonderful medieval
castle was free of charge. An extended exploration of the grounds found us the relevant spot where we took the pictures attached. Email to the CO with the challenge answers will follow
soon.
Thanks for setting up this virtual and helping us discover this corner of Edinburgh. FP awarded, and TFTC!
Somehow in the intervening years I’ve gotten way out of practice and even more out of shape because our expedition was hard. Partly that was our fault for choosing to climb on
one of the shortest days of the year, requiring that we maintain a better-than-par pace throughout to allow us to get up and down before the sun set (which we actually managed with
further time in-hand), but mostly it’s the fact that I’ve neglected my climbing: just about the only routine exercise I get these days is cycling, and with changes in my work/life
balance I’m now only doing that for about 40 miles in a typical week.
For the longest time my primary mountaineering-buddy was my dad, who was – prior to his death during a hillwalking accident – a bigger climber and
hiker than I’ll ever be. Indeed, I’ve been “pushed on” by trying to keep up with my father enough times that fighting to keep up with Robin at the weekend was second nature. If I want
to get back to the point where I’m fit enough for ice climbing again I probably need to start by finding the excuse for getting up a hill once in a while more-often than I do, first,
too. Perhaps I can lay some of the blame for my being out of practice in the flat, gentle plains of Oxfordshire?
I’d have loved to have gotten a shot of me actually managing to get some use out of my crampons, but by that point visibility wasn’t great and we were rather cold and wet to be
stopping in a wind to take photographs. So this rocky stretch will have to do.
In any case, it was a worthwhile and enjoyable treat to be able to be part of Robin’s final reflection as well as to end the year somewhat-literally “on a high” by seeing off 2018 in
the Scottish Highlands. If you’ve not read his blog about his adventures of the last 52 weekends, you should: whether taking a Boris Bike from Brixton to Brighton (within the rental window) or hitching a ride on an aeroplane, he’s provided a year’s worth of fantastic stories accompanied by some great photography.
Following yesterday’s Challenge Robin adventure during which I sent my partner’s brother on an extended treasure trail covering London and
Penzance, we decided to have a more-relaxed day today with a gentle hike to a few geocaches (and with a pub lunch in the middle).
This was the first of the caches we found as we made our way down from the River Valley Caravan Park where we’d been staying and
hacked our way through the damp paths to this GZ. What a remarkable ruin – one of several like it, our subsequent explorations showed, but still quite remarkable how well-concealed and
overgrown it is. A beautiful spot, and well-worth the journey. FP awarded; TFTC
In hindsight, visiting this cache might have been a mistake as a storm was beginning to roll in, but I got there before things got TOO hairy! I was in the vicinity preparing an
adventure-trail thingy along the coast path anyway, and couldn’t miss the opportunity to head for this exciting location. And it was a real treat to see a container like this: I’ve only
ever seen them before when I’ve placed them myself (e.g. GC7QG1Z). Great container, hide, and description: FP awarded. TNLN, TFTC!
As of next week, I’ll have been blogging for 20 years, or about 54% of my life. How did that happen?
I’d been “blogging” – not that we called it that, yet – since late 1998, but my original collection of content-mangling Perl scripts wasn’t all that. More history…
The mid-1990s were a very different time for the World Wide Web (yes, we still called it that, and sometimes we even described its use as “surfing”). Going “on the Internet” was a
calculated and deliberate action requiring tying up your phone line, minutes of “connecting” along with all of the associated screeching sounds if you hadn’t
turned off your modem’s loudspeaker, and you’d typically be paying twice for the experience: both a monthly fee to your ISP for the service and a per-minute charge to your phone company for the call.
It was into this environment that in 1994 I published my first web pages: as far as I know, nothing remains of them now. It wasn’t until 1998 that I signed up an account with UserActive (whose website looks almost the same today as it did then) who offered economical subdomain hosting with shell and CGI support and launched “Castle of the Four Winds”, a set of vanity pages that
included my first blog.
Except I didn’t call it a “blog”, of course, because it wasn’t until the following year that Peter Merholz invented the word (he also commemorated 20 years of blogging, this year). I didn’t even call it a “weblog”, because
that word was still relatively new and I wasn’t hip enough to be around people who said it, yet. It was self-described as an “online diary”, a name which only served to
reinforce the notion that I was writing principally for myself. In fact, it wasn’t until mid-1999 that I discovered that it was being more-widely read than just by me and my
circle of friends when I attracted a stalker who travelled across the UK to try to “surprise” me by turning up at places she expected to
find me, based on what I’d written online… which was exactly as creepy as it sounds.
AvAngel.com
While the world began to panic that the coming millennium was going to break all of the computers, I migrated Castle of the Four Winds’ content into AvAngel.com, a joint vanity site
venture with my friend Andy. Aside from its additional content (purity tests, funny stuff, risqué e-cards), what we hosted was mostly the same old stuff, and I continued to write
snippets about my life in what was now quite-clearly a “blog-like” format, with the most-recent posts at the top and separate pages for content too old for the front page. Looking back,
there’s still a certain naivety to these posts which exemplify the youth of the Web. For example, posts routinely referenced my friends by their email
addresses, because spam was yet to become a big enough problem that people didn’t much mind if you put their email address on a public webpage somewhere, and because email
addresses still carried with them a feeling of anonymity that ceased to be the case when we started using them for important things.
Technologically-speaking, too, this was a simpler time. Neither Javascript nor CSS support was widespread (nor
consistently-standardised) enough to rely upon for anything other than the simplest progressive enhancement unless you were willing to “pick a side” in what we’d subsequently call the
first browser war and put one of those apalling “best viewed in Internet Explorer” or “best viewed in Netscape Navigator” banners on your site. I’ve always been a believer in a
universal web (and my primary browser at the time was Opera, anyway, as it mostly-remained until Opera went wrong in 2013), and I didn’t have the energy to write everything twice, so our cool/dynamic
functionality came mostly from back-end (e.g. Perl, PHP) technologies.
Meanwhile, during my initial months as a student in Aberystwyth, I wrote a series of emails to friends back home entitled “Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University
Of Wales, Aberystwyth”, and put copies of each onto my student webspace; I’ve since recovered these and integrated them into my unified blog.
Scatmania.org
In 2002 I’d bought the domain name scatmania.org – a reference to my university halls of residence nickname “Scatman Dan”; I genuinely didn’t consider the possibility that the name
might be considered scatalogical until later on. As I wanted to continue my blogging at an address that felt like it was solely mine (AvAngel.com having been originally shared with a
friend, although in practice over time it became associated only with me), this seemed like a good domain upon which to relaunch. And so, in
mid-2003 and powered by a short-lived and ill-fated blogging engine called Flip I did exactly that. WordPress, to which I’d subsequently migrate, hadn’t been invented yet and it wasn’t clear whether its predecessor,
b2/cafelog, would survive the troubles its author was experiencing.
From this point on, any web address for any post made to my blog still works to this day, despite multiple technological and infrastructural changes to my blog (and
some domain name shenanigans!) in the meantime. I’d come to be a big believer in the mantra that cool URIs don’t change: something that as far as possible I’ve committed to trying to upload in my blogging, my archiving, and my paid work since
then. I’m moderately confident that all extant links on the web that point to earlier posts are all under my control so they can (and in most cases have) been fixed
already, so I’m pretty close to having all my permalink URIs be “cool”, for now. You might hit a short chain of redirects,
but you’ll get to where you’re going.
And everything was fine, until one day in 2004 when it wasn’t. The server hosting scatmania.org died in a very bad way, and because
my backup strategy was woefully inadequate, I lost a lot of content. I’ve recovered quite a lot of it and put it back in-place, but some is probably gone forever.
One of the longest-lived web designs for scatmania.org paid homage to the original, but with more “blue” and a WordPress backing.
The resurrected site was powered by WordPress, and this was the first time that live database queries had been used to power my blog. Occasionally,
these days, when talking to younger, cooler developers, I’m tempted to follow the hip trend of reimplementing my blog as a static site, compiling a stack of host-anywhere HTML files based upon whatever-structure-I-like at the “backend”… but then I remember that I basically did that already for six
years and I’m far happier with my web presence today. I’ve nothing against static site systems (I’m quite partial to Middleman, myself,
although I’m also fond of Hugo) but they’re not right for this site, right now.
IndieAuth hadn’t been invented yet, but I was quite keen on the ideals of OpenID (I still am, really), and
so I implemented what was probably the first viable “install-anywhere” implementation of OpenID for WordPress – you can see part of it
functioning in the top-right of the screenshot above, where my (copious, at that time) LiveJournal-using friends were encouraged to sign in to my blog using their LiveJournal identity.
Nowadays, the majority of the WordPress plugins I use are ones I’ve written myself: my blog is powered by a CMS that’s more
“mine” than not!
I no longer have the images that made my 2006 redesign look even remotely attractive, so here it is mocked-up with block colours instead.
Over the course of the first decade of my blogging, a few trends had become apparent in my technical choices. For example:
I’ve always self-hosted my blog, rather than relying on a “blog as a service” or siloed social media platform like WordPress.com, Blogger, or LiveJournal.
I’ve preferred an approach of storing the “master” copy of my content on my own site and then (sometimes) syndicating it elsewhere: for
example, for the benefit of my friends who during their University years maintained a LiveJournal, for many years I had my blog cross-post to a LiveJournal account (and backfeed copies of comments back to my site).
I’ve favoured web standards that provided maximum interoperability (e.g. RSS with full content)
and longevity (serving HTML pages from permanent URLs, adding
“extra” functionality via progressive enhancement so as to ensure that content functioned e.g. without Javascript, with CSS
disabled or the specification evolved, etc.).
These were deliberate choices, but they didn’t require much consideration: growing up with a Web far less-sophisticated than today’s (e.g. truly stateless prior to the advent of
HTTP cookies) and seeing the chaos caused during the first browser war and the period of stagnation that followed, these choices seemed intuitive.
That body font is plain old Verdana, you know: I’ve always felt that it (plus full justification) was the right choice for this particular design, even though I regret other parts of
it (like the brightness!).
As you’d expect from a blog covering a period from somebody’s teen years through to their late thirties, there’ve been significant changes in the kinds of content I’ve posted (and the
tone with which I’ve done so) over the years, too. If you dip into 2003, for example, you’ll see the results of quiz memes and
unqualified daily minutiae alongside actual considered content. Go back
further, to early 1999, and it is (at best) meaningless wittering about the day-to-day life of a teenage student. It took until around
2009/2010 before I actually started focussing on writing content that specifically might be enjoyable for others to read (even where
that content was frankly silly) and only far more-recently-still that I’ve committed to the “mostly technical stuff, ocassional bits of ‘life’ stuff” focus that I have today.
I say “committed”, but of course I’m fully aware that whatever this blog is now, it’ll doubtless be something somewhat different if I’m still writing it in another two decades…
2014 may have included my most-prolific month of blogging, but 2003-2005 saw the most-consistent high-volume of content.
Once I reached the 2010s I started actually taking the time to think about the design of my blog and its meaning. Conceptually, all of my content is data-driven: database tables full of
different “kinds” of content and associated metadata, and that’s pretty-much ideal – it provides a strong separation between content and presentation and makes it possible to make
significant design changes with less work than might otherwise be expected. I’ve also always generally favoured a separation of concerns in web development and so I’m not a fan
of CSS design methodologies that encourage class names describing how things should appear, like Atomic CSS. Even where it results
in a performance hit, I’d far rather use CSS classes to describe what things are or represent. The single biggest
problem with this approach, to my mind, is that it violates the DRY principle… but that’s something that your CSS preprocessor’s there to fix for you, isn’t it?
But despite this philosophical outlook on the appropriate gap between content and presentation, it took until about 2010 before I actually attached any real significance to the
presentation at all! Until this point, I’d considered myself to have been more of a back-end than a front-end engineer, and felt that the most-important thing was to get the
content out there via an appropriate medium. After all, a site without content isn’t a site at all, but a site without design is (or at least should be) still intelligible
thanks to browser defaults! Remember, again, that I started web development at a time when stylesheets didn’t exist at all.
My previous implementations of my blog design had used simple designs, often adapted from open-source templates, in an effort to get them deployed as quickly as possible and move on to
the next task, but now, I felt, it was time to do a little more.
My 2010 relaunch put far more focus on the graphical design elements of my blog as well as providing a fully responsive design based on (then-new) CSS media queries. Alongside my
focus on separation of concerns in web development, I’m also quite opinionated on the idea that a responsive design has almost always been a superior solution to having a separate
“mobile site”.
For a few years, I was producing a new theme once per year. I experimented with different colours, fonts, and layouts, and decided (after some ad-hoc A/B testing) that my audience was
better-served by a “front” page than by being dropped directly into my blog archives as had previously been the case. Highlighting the latest few – and especially the very-latest – post
and other recent content increased the number of posts that a visitor would be likely to engage with in a single visit. I’ve always presumed that the reason for this is that regular
(but non-subscribing) readers are more-likely to be able to work out what they have and haven’t read already from summary text than from trying to decipher an entire post: possibly
because my blogging had (has!) become rather verbose.
My 2011 design, in hindsight, said more about my mood and state-of-mind at the time than it did about artistic choices: what’s with all the black backgrounds and seriffed fonts? Is
this a funeral parlour?
I went through a bit of a lull in blogging: I’ve joked that I spent more time on my 2010 and 2011 designs than I did on the sum total of the content that was published in between the
pair of them (which isn’t true… at least, not quite!). In the month I left Aberystwyth for Oxford, for example, I was doing all kinds of exciting and new things…
and yet I only wrote a total of two blog posts.
With RSS waning in popularity – which I can’t understand: RSS is amazing! – I began to crosspost to
social networks like Twitter and Google+ (although no longer to Google+, following the news of its imminent demise) to help those readers who prefer to get their content via these
media, but because I wasn’t producing much content, it probably didn’t make a significant difference anyway: the chance of a regular reader “missing” something must have been remarkably
slim.
The 2012 design featured “CSS peekaboo”: a transformation that caused my head to “hide” from you behind the search bar if your cursor got too close. Ruth, I hear, spent far too long playing with just this feature.
Nobody calls me “Scatman Dan” any more, and hadn’t for a long, long time. Given that my name is already awesome and unique
all by itself (having changed to be so during the era in which scatmania.org was my primary personal domain name), it felt like I had the opportunity to rebrand.
I moved my blog to a new domain, DanQ.me (which is nice and short, too) and came up with a new collection of colours, fonts, and layout choices that I felt better-reflected my identity…
and the fact that my blog was becoming less a place to record the mundane details of my daily life and more a place where I talk about (principally-web)
technology, security, and GPS games… and just occasionally about other topics like breadmaking and books. Also, it gave me a chance to get on top of the current trend in web design for big, clean, empty spaces, square corners, and using pictures
as the hook to a story.
The second design of my blog after moving to DanQ.me showed-off posts with big pictures, framed by lots of white-space.
I’ve been working harder this last year or two to re-integrate (in a PESOS-like way) into my blog content that I’ve published elsewhere, mostly geocaching logs and
geohashing expedition records, and I’ve also done so retroactively, so in addition to my first blog article on the subject
of geocaching, you can read my first ever cache log without switching to a different site nor relying upon the
continued existence and accessibility of that site. I’ve been working at being increasingly mindful of where my content is siloed outside of my control and reclaiming it by hosting it
here, on my blog.
Particular areas in which I produce content elsewhere but would like to at-least maintain a copy here, and would ideally publish here first and syndicate elsewhere, although I
appreciate that this is difficult, are:
Reddit, where I’ve written tens of thousands of words under a variety of accounts, but I don’t really pay attention to the site any more
I left Facebook in 2011 but I still have a backup of what was on my “Wall” at that point, which I could look into reintegrating into my
blog
I share a lot of the source code I write via my GitHub account, but I’m painfully aware that this is yet-another-silo that I ought to learn
not to depend upon (and it ought to be simple enough to mirror my repos on my own site!)
I’ve got a reasonable number of videos on two YouTube channels which are online by Google’s good graces (and potential for advertising
revenue); for a handful of technical reasons they’re a bit of a pain to self-host, but perhaps my blog could act as a secondary source to my own video content
I write business reviews on Google Maps which I should probably look into recovering from the hivemind and hosting here… in fact, I’ve
probably written plenty of reviews on other sites, too, like Amazon for example…
On two previous occasions I’ve maintained an online photo gallery; I might someday resurrect the concept, at least for the photos that used to be published on them
I’ve dabbled on a handful of other, often weirder, social networks before like Scuttlebutt (which has a genius concept, by the way) and
Ello, and ought to check if there’s anything “original” on there I should reintegrate
Going way, way back, there are a good number of usenet postings I’ve made over the last twenty-something years that I could reclaim, if I can find them…
(if you’re asking why I’m inclined to do all of these things: here’s why)
This looks familiar.
20 years and around 717,000 words worth of blogging down, it’s interesting to look back and see how things have changed: in my life, on the Web, and in the world in general. I’ve seen
many friends’ blogs come and go: they move into a new phase of their life and don’t feel like what they wrote before reflects them today, most often, and so they delete them… which is
fine, of course: it’s their content! But for me it’s always felt wrong to do so, for two reasons: firstly, it feels false to do so given that once something’s been put on the Web, it
might well be online forever – you can’t put the genie back in the bottle! And secondly: for me, it’s valuable to own everything I wrote before. Even the cringeworthy things I
wrote as a teenager who thought they knew everything and the antagonistic stuff I wrote in my early 20s but that I clearly wouldn’t stand by today is part of my history, and
hiding that would be a disservice to myself.
The 17-year-old who wrote my first blog posts two decades ago this month fully expected that the things he wrote would be online forever, and I don’t intend to take that away from him.
I’m sure that when I write a post in October 2038 looking back on the next two decades, I’ll roll my eyes at myself today, too, but for me: that’s part of the joy of a
long-running personal blog. It’s like a diary, but with a sense of accountability. It’s a space on the web that’s “mine” into which I can dump pretty-much whatever I like.
I love it: I’ve been blogging for over half of my life, and if I can get back to you in 2031 and tell you that I’ve by-then been doing so for two-thirds of my life, that would be a win.
A late journey home and a slight diversion brought me up the wonderful Thames Path through Binsey and up to here to find this brilliant cache. It took into the final 150m from the GZ
that I realised that really: a bike was NOT the right mode of transportation for this one (see if you can spot my route in the attached photo)! Still I pressed on and got to within 50m
of the GZ before having to leave my vehicle behind and brave the nettles, fence, and boggy ground.
Cache in bad condition: missing log and writing implement, mild damage to container. If it’s true that it’s been abandoned I’d be happy to adopt it to keep this great location and cache
alive! I’m moderately local (my commute isn’t far away and I’m sometimes caught drinking at the Trout) and I have the perfect replacement container just sitting in my shed ready to go,
so I’ll contact the CO.
TFTC. FP awarded. I’m so bored of yet-another-magnetic-nano or city-centre-puzzle that it was genuinely a treat to see a cache that ticks all the boxes of things I love best about the
sport.
1997 was the year my family got torn up when my dad was killed. Which became the reason I joined @NightlineAssoc. And @samaritans. And @BritishRedCross, and @3RingsCIC. The reason,
basically, I discovered how important it was to be there for people that can't go through it alone.
Yesterday, Ruth and I attended a Festive Breads Workshop at the Oxford Brookes
Restaurant Cookery and Wine School, where we had a hands-on lesson in making a variety of different (semi-)seasonal bread products. It was a fantastic experience and gave us both
skills and confidence that we’d have struggled to attain so-readily in any other way.
I am the Master Baker! The Bread Winner! (Okay, so everybody got one of these certificates…)
The Oxford Brookes Restaurant is a working restaurant which doubles as a place for Brookes’ students to work and practice roles as chefs, sommeliers, and
hospitality managers as part of their courses. In addition, the restaurant runs a handful of shorter or day-long courses for adults and children on regional and cuisine-based cookery,
knife skills, breadmaking, and wine tasting. Even from the prep room off the main working kitchen (and occasionally traipsing through it on the way to and from the ovens), it was easy
to be captivated the buzz of activity as the lunchtime rush began outside: a large commercial kitchen is an awesome thing to behold.
Working in our kitchen at home I often have less space than my entire work area in this, the smallest room of the Brookes’ kitchens.
By early afternoon we’d each made five different breads: a stollen, a plaitted wreath, rum babas, a seeded flatbread, and a four-strand woven challah. That’s plenty to do (and
a good amount of standing up and kneading!), but it was made possible by the number of things we didn’t have to do. There was no weighing and measuring, no washing-up:
this was done for us, and it’s amazingly efficiency-enhancing to be able to go directly from each recipe to the next without having to think about these little tasks. We didn’t even
have to run our breads in and out of the proofing cupboard and the ovens: as we’d be starting on mixing the next dough, the last would be loaded onto trays and carried around the
kitchens.
Start from the right and weave to the left: over, under, over. Repeat.
The tuition itself was excellent, too. The tutors, Amanda and Jan, were friendly and laid-back (except if anybody tried to short-cut their kneading of a wet dough by adding more flour
than was necessary, in which case they’d enter “flour police” mode and start slapping wrists) and clearly very knowledgeable and experienced. When I struggled at one point with getting
a dough ball to the consistency that was required, Jan stepped in and within seconds identified that the problem was that my hands were too warm. The pair complemented one another very
well, too, for example with Amanda being more-inclined than Jan towards the laissez-faire approach to ingredient measurement that I prefer when I make bread, for example.
It looked a little lopsided at this point, but Ruth’s challah looked among the best of all of them among the final products.
The pace was fast and Ruth in particular struggled early on to keep up, but by the end the entire group – despite many hours on our feet, much of it kneading stiff doughs – were
hammering through each activity, even though there was a clear gradient in the technical complexity of what we were working on. And – perhaps again thanks to the fantastic tuition –
even the things that seemed intimidating upon first glance (like weaving four strands of dough together without them sticking to one another or the surface) weren’t problematic once we
got rolling.
Having great equipment like large hot ovens, a proofing cupboard, and an endless supply of highly-active live (not dried) yeast might have helped too.
Our hosts, apparently somehow not having enough to do while teaching and supervising us, simultaneously baked a selection of absolutely delicious bread to be served with our lunch,
which by that point was just showing-off. Meanwhile, we put the finishing touches on our various baked goods with glazes, seeds, ribbons, and sugar.
It looked a little lopsided at this point, but Ruth’s challah looked among the best of all of them among the final products.
And so we find ourselves with a house completely full of amazingly-tasty fresh bread – the downside perhaps of having two of us from the same household on the same course! – and a whole
new appreciation of the versatility of bread. As somebody who makes pizza bases and, once in a blue moon, bread rolls, I feel like there’s so much more I could be doing and I’m looking
forward to getting more adventurous with my bread-making sometime soon.
Tired-but-proud would be a pretty good description of Ruth here, I think.
I’d really highly recommend the Brookes Restaurant courses; they’re well worth a look if you’re interested in gaining a point or two of Cooking skill.
Beautiful site, even in the rain, and amazing home-cooked food.
My partner, her toddler and I spent two midweek nights in August in the larger “Showman” caravan to celebrate our anniversary. In a long field that twists its way alongside a babbling
brook, the owners have set up a trio of traditional horse-drawn caravans, each in a wooded clearing that isolates it from the others. Two of the caravans are smaller, designed just for
couples (who are clearly the target market for this romantic getaway spot), but we took the third, larger, (centenarian!) one, which sported a separate living room and bedroom.
Wriggles Brook combined a beautiful setting, imaginative and ecologically-friendly accommodation, and about a billion activities on your doorstep. Even the almost-complete lack of phone
signal into the valley was pretty delightful, although it did make consulting Google Maps difficult when we got lost about 20 minutes out from the place! But if there’s one thing that
really does deserve extra-special mention, it’s the food:
Our hosts were able to put on a spectacular breakfast and evening meal for us each night, including a variety of freshly-grown produce from their own land. We generally ate in their
mini dining room – itself a greenhouse for their grapevines – but it was equally-nice to have pancakes delivered to the picnic table right outside our caravan. And speaking as somebody
who’s had their fair share of second-rate veggie breakfasts, it was a great relief to enjoy a quite-brilliant variety of vegetarian cuisine from a clearly-talented chef.
tl;dr: First time here, clicked Wishlist Search, and it suggested the person whose song I was listening to at the time. Spooky as hell.
So here’s what happened to me today. Feeling unwell – bit of a cold and grumpy about it – and sipping a Lemsip to try to stave off the worst of the sore throat, I found myself
stalking a few people on Reddit, discovering new subreddits based on what they’ve commented in etc., and I discover /r/Random_Acts_Of_Amazon.
I put on some music while I surf – just a selection of MP3s that I’ve bought recently. The song that’s just come on is Peter Hollens’ and Malukah’s awesome cover of Christopher Tin’s
Baba Yetu (better known as the “Civ IV theme”). If you haven’t heard their cover of it yet, here it is on YouTube.
“Random Acts of Amazon?” I think to myself, “What’s that all about then?” I read a little bit of the newbie guide, then try clicking on the “Random Wishlist” button, just to see who
it picks out for me and what kinds of things they want. It picks out a random user… /u/peterhollens.
Wait, what? That’s got to just be a naming coincidence, right? That can’t be the same Peter Hollens whose song literally just started coming out of my MP3 player right
now, can it? I hop across to his intro thread and read some of his other
posts. “What the fuck,” I say out loud, “Is this random wishlist tool psychic or something?”
But no, it just turns out that on the one and only time I’ve ever been to this sub, and the one and only time I’ve ever clicked Random Wishlist, it happened to choose the
person whose song I was literally just listening to at that time. That’s insane.
So here’s a gift, Peter. Clearly the Universe wants me to send this to you. I don’t believe in destiny, but clearly it believes in you and
I.
