Mower no more.

For years now, and for various reasons, I've been giving out about Lawns and mowers. 'Grass', I will declaim given even a hint of an opportunity, 'is for Cattle!'. Meaning 'Cattle' in the sense of any grazing animal. We fool ourselves into maintaining large tracts of the stuff by telling ourselves it's for the kids to play on. We go into 'annihilation' mode at the first sight of a dandelion, which are a favourite of the beleaguered honey-bee, and fate forbid we should suffer the site of flowering clover. We maintain petrol-engined, carbon-emitting lawnmowers in order to help us keep order on this aspect of the (small 'e') environment at the expense of the (big 'E') Environment. We grumble through pushing the mower around the garden when we feel we have to in order to maintain the neighbours good opinion of us (I'm still in this last camp myself but am making plans to leave 'any day now').

See what I mean? Mentioning lawns to me is virtually guaranteed to get you an express ticket to rant city.

So it added greatly to my personal 'happiness index' to learn of the existence of a growing 'no-mow' movement. I'm not going to list all the sites here - if you're reading this you're already using a Google service (blogger) and there's a good chance that the page it appears on has it's own little Google search box. Off you go now, search for all the reasons why mowing might be killing us all  <calms self> might well be perceived as a significant detriment to the state of the Environment, and then make your own mind up. And while you're at it, have a look for alternatives to 'traditional' lawns. There are lots of ways to use your outdoor space (if you're lucky enough to have some) that can actually contribute to both beautifying your neighbourhood AND the health of the Environment simultaneously.

Get your kids Coding!

In case you hadn't noticed, there's a movement gathering momentum on the web. CoderDojo (I'm a Mentor), Black Girls Code, Codeacademy - the list is getting longer every week, it seems. So it's never (ever!) been easier or cheaper to get the training you need if you want to start to write computer code. Even if you don't have a computer in your home, a few minutes a few times a week on Codecademy in your local public library should be enough to get you started. No Dojo/Coding club in your town? Start one. There's almost always an underemployed space that someone will be willing to let you use in a good cause.

Free resources (there are loads more but I'm in a hurry! :D I'll add more at a later date):
scratch.mit.edu
coderdojo.com
codecademy.com

iPad apps:
Hopscotch
Daisy the Dinosaur

Man vs. Van #1

Right so. We went mad a few months ago and bought a used campervan. It's an LDV Convoy in it's (as I later found out) School-Bus variant. We thought, at the time, that all we had to do, really, was hand over the money and we'd be away. The shell on our backs, as it were - and it ain't fast, so the snail analogy works on a couple of levels.

But as it turned out, things weren't quite that simple. To get this thing legal and roadworthy I've had to spend a bit more time and money than originally planned, and we haven't even spent a night in it yet. It WAS insurable, taxable, and certified roadworthy when I bought it - I'm not THAT much of a car-tard - but somehow the simple fact of the change of ownership drew the wrath of the Insurance & VTN gods. I'll be posting some of the things I've found out about campervans in Ireland here when I can; hopefully the information will be of some use to someone!

Twitter

I've been sort of avoiding Twitter. I could never see the point, and from what I can see, there is still an ocean of #totalselfobsessedhorseshit surrounding islands of actually quite useful stuff. But on those islands? Wonderful things to discover. I'm old enough to remember the early days of the web, when you never knew where you were going to end up, and everything was actually interesting. Maybe it was because it was relatively difficult, then, to set up a website? Not really. We had a site for our wedding, in 1999. Don't tell anyone, but it was mostly built in MS Word with photos printed from 35mm and scanned, with a sprinkling of Photoshop - the clouds from Windows 98 made an appearance  in one photo to replace a typical Irish Summer skyline.

It HAS become easier, though, to publish your views to the world, and now it's rare to find a site that doesn't have a comment stream. So everything is cluttered up by trolls and their victims, and we wonder why things take so long to download. Where they find the time I don't know. Sometimes I find myself getting sucked in to the point where I'm on the verge of feeding a troll myself, which is possibly as pointless an act as one person can perform. And that, to me, was the essence of 'the twitter problem'. Lots of time wasted by twitchy thumbs on smartphones, posting the minutiae of lots of 'fascinating' lives.

And the experience is still weird in some aspects, but that may be just my viewpoint, coming, as it does, from not-quite-the-top-of the tower of middle-age. The fact that complete strangers started following me from the second I logged in - why? I hadn't even SAID anything yet! Weird and 'skeevy' as some of the 'kids' are wont to say on the US TV shows. So I had an account (because everyone else has one) that was effectively dormant. But I had an epiphany around the recent CoderDojo conference. Lots of interesting people have interesting things to say to anyone who will listen, and Twitter gives them as much of a voice as it does to the pop-stars. And it's a huge ongoing conversation that anyone can join without having to wait for a gap in some wind-bags train of thought, or feeling like you're somehow unworthy. Sorry if that seems obvious, but if it does you're probably already a 'Twitterer'; these musings are for someone else's benefit. The big payoff for me though, comes from following people like... well, I'll let you find your own definition of interesting. But they're out there, laying stepping stones through the aforementioned ocean. If you haven't tried Twitter yourself yet, give it a go. Find someone whose opinions you respect, or even someone you never thought you'd listen to. Follow them back to the real reason we used to love the web.