I've just come across this so take a look. There are some extraordinary historical stories there. His own description of his blog is:
Pearls of wisdom about little known facts/events in history and day to day life. A little social commentary on current events is also possible to be found here as well.
Take a minute to have a look. I don't think you will be disappointed (shocked maybe!).
This post is as a result of coming across 60 Miles or Bust - the extraordinary venture of Laurie and Nikki. Both 30, they have decided to take part in the 2008 Dallas Breast Cancer 3-Day 60 Miles Walk. You read that right:
60 MILES IN THREE DAYS!!!!
Even I can do the maths - an average of 20 miles a day. For three days...
I've run two marathons in my life; I know what the training involves. And believe me when I tell you that it makes very little difference whether you run or walk the distance - it just means you are going for longer if you walk it. At four miles per hour (and that's a good pace and not easy to keep up for too long) twenty miles would take five hours. I ran two marathons but with a year's interval between them. They are doing the same thing three days running.
The training is really tough. It affects absolutely everything you do. You eat, sleep, drink (water!), dream your training and your ultimate goal. You don't shift furniture because you might hurt your back and then...You eat pasta three times a week - or more. You really wonder why you have to go and train 10 miles when the rain is torrential and the wind is going to be in your face - but you go anyway. Like I said, training for an event like this is tough.
OK, that's enough of the statistics! Why am I supporting this? My sister had breast cancer about 12 years ago. She survived and more and more women ARE surviving today thanks to research into the disease and new medicines available. But research is a bottomless pit of funding. There can never be enough money to fund the research required for a guaranteed cure. The fact that I have a very close relative who had Breast Cancer puts me in the category of "oh yes, a close relative" when I see the doctor. It makes you think.
So please, if you can support Laurie and Nikki do so. Moral support is as important as financial. If you just leave them a message on their website I know they will be grateful and it will help them through the blisters and sore, tired legs which are coming their way.
Once again, this is THE LINK TO THEIR WEBSITE.
THIS IS NOT A PAID POST!!!
OK, this is a great competition and the prize is wonderful:
By blogging about it I am gaining an entry into the competition being run by Lori on My Wooden Spoon.
If you want to take part click here, where you find all the rules. They are not complicated! Basically one or all of the following:
Leave a comment
Put a post with a link on your blog
Put in your Technorati favourites
Stumble it
So there you have it. Go over there and try and win it for yourself!
Today I went up to the bees for their weekly inspection and as last week I'd noticed the dreaded varroa count was on the rise I decided to try a sugar-shake treatment. Many varroa mites are resistant to the chemical treatments and this is a treatment that is chemical free (well, my sugar is not organic but it's the best I could do).
Basically you sieve about 250 grams of icing sugar into a container and then you shake this over each side of each frame of bees, giving them a really good coating. Two things then happen: the bees start to clean each other and the varroa mites are dropped off (through an open mesh floor onto a tray) and secondly the mites sucker-type feet are clogged up with sugar dust and they can't use them for suckering. Before I did the treatment I put some clean paper in the trays and I will go up later to see how many mites dropped.
Looking around beekeepers forums and websites there are opposing points of view on this treatment. I don't think there is any doubt that it helps but the question is asked: does it stress the bees? Well, judging by mine today I would say a guarded "only a bit". We had absolutely no problems with the first five frames. Then unfortunately we banged one by accident and of course the bees don't like that! The remaining five frames were a bit of a game but overall the bees were tolerant of what we were doing.
Depending on how many varroa fall I will have to decide whether or not to do another treatment in about two weeks time. I would prefer not to disturb the bees so much again during the high season but equally if I have to I will - it's got to be a better solution than putting chemical strips in just before they start bringing in honey to the supers.
In the great scheme of things that is not a huge green gesture but we are just starting here and are doing our best. In the meantime I've been looking around other green blogs and thought I would give you a short list.
Number one on my list is Green Me - I like her straightforward down to earth approach to green living.
Number two is Greedy Green - her blog (in February) about the Wonder Wash machine really appealed to me. I WANT ONE!
Number three is Environmentastic! - started by environmentalist Caleb Hartley this blog focuses on green products, green politics and how we can help ourselves to make this a better, greener world.
Finally we have The EcoChic - a thirty-something mother working hard to be as green as possible.
I hope you like some of these and if you have any other green favourites please leave me a comment.
A big thank you first of all to Polly from Pollys Peri-wrinkles for her encouraging comment on my last post. For those who don't know a Google Page Rank is an indicator of all sorts of good things for us bloggers and helps boost the ego enormously. It also helps boost the income! I'm not there yet but I live in hope despite the somewhat opposing view of my children ("Why would YOU get a page rank from GOOGLE!?").
I've recently joined up with Social Spark which has been created by the same people as PayPerPost. So far I've had zilch in the way of paid posts and unless I get a ranking I suspect it will stay that way. All the same I've found a few new blogs over there and one which you should check out is La Vie in English. I have never written more than a thank you letter in French as quite frankly my written French is not up to it. A long time ago the French decided that being able to speak French was just too easy and so whilst in English you pretty much write as you speak, the French have "spoken French" and "written French" - and they are not the same. My written French is full of such ridiculous errors that I always have to put in an apologetic disclaimer. So to come across a French woman who blogs in BOTH languages is spectacularly impressive to me. She writes about food (and we all know how good French food is!) and shares some recipes. If you have time go and take a look. I'm off to the kitchen....
Many moons ago when I was first pregnant people kept asking me whether I wanted a boy or a girl. I got so sick of this that I just came out with "Four boys". It was not expressing a preference; simply trying to get them off my back and I have to say it worked. By the time they'd digested the answer I'd usually managed to change the subject.
My first two children were indeed boys and then along came pregnancy number three. "I expect you're longing for a little girl this time...?" was the new refrain. Aaaaaarghhhh! To my mind both these questions are just plain stupid. I couldn't choose, therefore it was a matter of be very grateful for what you get. And along came a third boy. I have to admit I was thrilled. Apart from anything else I wouldn't have to deal with a teenage girl like her mother...ie me!
Three boys is hard work but great fun. I'm quite sure three girls, or two girls/one boy, is too but I'm not qualified to comment. The curious thing is how many friends I have who also have three boys. Maybe that's because in the early years (when the girls were still "Oh no, we don't want to play with girls!") we inevitably met the parents of more boys.
All day yesterday it was raining - pouring in fact - and I just wasn't motivated to do anything; so I went looking around the web at other blogs. To my surprise I came across Puppy Dog Tales which is full of very familiar stories from another mother of three boys. Hers are much younger than mine and she still has plenty of hard work ahead. I well remember those potty training days, the temper tantrums (oh boy, those were tough!) and the "Really, why am I doing this?" as I drew yet another wretched fish to be scribbled over. The mess in the bathroom, the toys all over the floor, the untidy bedroom. But it's a bit like going through a long tunnel with air holes. Just as you think you really can't cope anymore the kids turn gorgeous and come over to give you a cuddle and say "I love you Mummy". Or they make clearing up lego a game and actually do it.
The great thing is that as they grow up they become even more lovely. The issues don't change though: boys always leave the bath dirty, they never replace the shampoo, the loo seat is ALWAYS up and they NEVER seem to tidy their rooms. But who cares?!
I must say the French have a great sense of solidarity for some things. A couple of years ago in Brittany for example there was a hoo-ha because most of the houses in one village were owned by English people who used them as holiday homes. It didn't help that these Brits bought everything they wanted for their holiday with them and therefore didn't contribute at all to the local economy. It made the French news. I don't know what the outcome in Brittany was but I do know that during the next fortnight I received THREE telephone calls from people I didn't know asking me if I had any English friends who wanted to buy their house, which just happened to be for sale. Maybe I was being cynical but it made me think they may not like the English but they certainly like their money!
Yesterday, however, was a different sort of solidarity. We were driving through the village to the sports hall and were coming to a roundabout when we passed an elderly lady on a bicycle frantically wobbling as she made "slow down" signs to us with her hand. Sure enough, we arrived at the roundabout and the police were there doing a "controle" of papers and of course - at 10am on a Sunday morning - drink/drive tests.
The gendarmes have been policing this roundabout on Sunday mornings for some months and it caused a rumpus in the local Maire elections. Basically a couple of, well, let's just call them "not honest types" realised the police were well occupied and took their chance to break into a couple of houses (this is at 10am remember), scaring the householders; they then went to the local tiny supermarket where one of them occupied the shopkeeper while the other one just wheeled out the cash distributor. Talk about nerve!
When we came home yesterday the rain was falling and the garden was not an attractive prospect so I started looking at other blogs. I came across Lakshmi the Rattler who writes about "Anything 'n Everything" from her home in India. Some of her posts are very poignant - the story of the two donkeys for example, or the post about her best friend leaving for America in a few weeks. But my favourite is the follow up to her post about her car breaking down. This is an inconvenience we all suffer at some point but I have never had a car break down because a rat had eaten it's way through the acceleration pipe. I'm glad to say she and her garage managed to sort out the problem - but what if it happens again?
It is no secret that I have started trying to earn some money from my blog. I am having moderate success but thought I would look around and see if there were any other companies I could sign up with. I found Smorty yesterday and decided to give it a go. The sign-up procedure was straightforward and this morning I had an email informing me that my blog had been accepted. There is not a great deal of difference between Smorty and other sites where you get paid for blogging - of course it is VERY early days and I am hardly the most experienced blogger around! The two differences that are immediately noticeable are 1) that you have to leave the post on the blog for the lifetime of the blog and 2) that you are paid (in theory!!) after a week rather than after thirty days. I don't think the first condition is too arduous and certainly the second is more interesting!! I will, of course, always do my best to make it clear when my posts are commercial.
Congratulations to one of my favourite bloggers, Polly Peirce who has managed to achieve that almost impossible accolade: a Google Page Rank. Boy, I'm jealous! Why does it matter? I don't know really but certainly it's an indication that people are reading your blog.
In desperation I asked my techie son if there was anything I could do to improve my chances of a Google Page Rank. I was expecting some sort of explanation about SEO's, keywords, links, trackback, followed by a happy half hour being shown what to do - ie he does it for me. How silly can you get? I should have known that all my new-found enthusiasm was going to get the following response:
"Sure, write about something people actually want to read about. That might help." Grrrrr!
About six years ago our youngest son came back from school and gave me grief about the rubbish bin in the kitchen. I had a composting bin for fruit/vegetable scraps but everything else went in the bin. We probably got through a couple of bin bags per day mostly with that wretched packaging that covers everything from toys to meat in the supermarket. And so it was, with this 8 year old giving his mother a hard time, that we entered the world of recycling. We were both late in world terms and early in local French terms.
We had to start gradually. I put three plastic boxes in the shed outside the kitchen and spent ages taking out of the bin what others, less keen than me and R, had put in. Then I realised that one of the biggest problems was that the rest of the family simply couldn't be bothered to take the trip across to the shed - well, it must have been at LEAST five metres and just occasionally it was even RAINING! So I bought the plastic boxes inside the kitchen and that changed everything. Now we empty the bin about twice a week, three times if we have a lot of people staying.
Soon afterwards our department bought in a recycling system coupled with an incentive: a reduction in our council tax if we recycled more. Basically we would pay for 26 rubbish collections per year and would be charged more for each collection over the 26. They too decided to make it easy and provided us with special bins so we no longer have to go to the dump - although we can for larger items.
What happens to all the stuff we recycle? A lot of it is plastic so I went on the hunt to find out what recycled plastic can be used for. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. It turns out all that plastic waste from supermarket packaging goes ... straight back to wrap up dog food and the like!
Take a look at HDPE Regrind if you want to read more.
