Category: Challenges
-
Joys of warmth and cold . . .
Awaking early this morning to -4ºC, and a heavy frost that has the snowdrops sagging, it was such a joy to start the wood fire in our cosy room, the room we call the Craft Room, and to enjoy the warmth. Our heat pumps are struggling, but we have hunkered down next to the fire…
-
When things work . . .
I’m a great fan of the mundane, things trundling along as they should, and being able to live within the constraints that make sense. My joy came crashing in, today, apparently because I managed to re-install our pair of passive antennae, so-called SlimJim dipoles, to facilitate communication of our smart meter to the electricity supplier’s…
-
The ‘whew!’ of a successful road test (MOT)
The MOT inspector followed me and Harry Hymer into the inspection bay. ‘That’s an immediate fail,’ he opined, as matter-of-fact as you please. ‘Your brake light’s off.’ I know Harry’s been through the wars, and this particular side end has had an unfortunate encounter with our own little Fiat Panda as it scraped out around…
-
Looking back, looking forward . . .
After a rush of busy, just at the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, the doldrums of mid-January are beginning to bite. I rushed around tidying up my workspace in the shed. I got my new Christmas present, a 3D printer, configured and making useful things. I replaced a faulty shower valve, and…
-
Joys of the unexpected
In mid-October, after a bout of heavy frost, so heavy there was thick morning ice on the windscreen of the little Fiat Panda, I’d have thought the bees would be safely ensconced in their hives for the duration. Not a bit of it: come the warm mid-day sun, and the Mahonia, rampant in our front…
-
The joy of challenges resolved
Life has felt rather fraught, over these past two months, and joys have mostly been subsumed in fretting. So it’s a delight, finally, to share some resolutions to some of these infrastructural, if prosaic, challenges, and to be looking forward to new creative projects. Considering that the ancient Romans had wonderful spas, indoor plumbing, and…
-
The joys of busy-ness
There are a lot of ways to find joy in life. I often think that creativity is the most exalted of those ways, but there’s a certain joy in being busy, in doing things that have an urgency. You could say, ‘just being busy’ but it’s more than that. The busy is yet another means…
-
A new language
This is fun! After a somewhat restless sleep, spent half-awake, half-dreaming about a persistent problem with some web pages I’m sharing responsibility for, I awoke with a simple idea. Why not use emojis as the icons to indicate the various types of files I wish to serve from within cells of a table? They’re small…
-
Bells of joy . . .
It’s been a bit breezy these past few days, here in the GlenKens, so we’ve been enjoying the wind chimes rather a lot. Compared with our previous life high up on a fellside of the bleak and blustery North Pennines, of course, these southwest Scotland zephyrs are like balm to the resting soul. I managed…
Roads to Joy 