Mike's 101 things thing.

Ah, the inevitable coda.

2011-12-04T14:31:00.000-08:00

Ok, so it's December.

I've failed at 101things. I got so far and then got interested in other things. Some of them are things I still want to do, some I did and never got round to writing up, some of them fell by the wayside for health and wealth reasons, and some were werk-displacement activities which became null after I got a new job. I do eat more fruit, generally for breakfast, and I try harder not to stop off for coffee on the way in, although that's quite difficult with Alex's place open a tiny diversion from my way into work of a morning. I swim more often and next year I'm entering a 10k. I wrote a business plan, learned what planning codes mean (and promptly forgot), took more photos (although one every day for a year, or one for publication? alas, no (sort of)), walked to work more often.

I failed to see a lot more of my friends (and I feel pretty guilty about that) although we did have a nice big party in 2009. I didn't eat at a Michelin restaurant, either. I wrote nothing on my "oh, I really have to get this book written" novel, Silver. Failed at the Farmer's Market, the English vineyard, the Civic Trust. No SCUBA, not that many libraries (although many closed during the 1001 days), no horse riding or rifle shooting. I made jam, but not from foraged fruit. No beetroot pasta, either (I couldn't get it to maintain colour during cooking).

I did go to I Love West Leeds, twice. I may have sent something to postsecret but that's a bit passe these days. I voted, I Did Something About It when it morphed into 38Degrees, made souffle and visited my LBS (and a foreign country, but that's by default), who is doing much better. Beekeeping happened. As did ginger beer, and writing letters to a couple of people. I grew stuff, too. And I did things not on the list, like sourdough and clowning and Light Night and the chocolates at Dock St last year, and things that make me wish I'd kept my LJ more up to date since I got the new job, because I'm forgetting stuff and that upsets me.

Anyway, it's Sunday, it's sleeting and I've just finished off some pear crumble and custard (finally, got the right ratio of eggs to milk and it was exactly right). Am practicing making bread, so my jumper is covered in flour and dough, and my grandmother was 87 last Friday and I'll be 49 years younger than that in ten days time. I have a job I like more than the last one, a partner I (still) adore, and friends who I don't seem to have pissed off too much by being too busy to see them.

Maybe I am too busy. Maybe I should stop and stand still for a while, but... since I started doing the 101 things I've felt more like I'm living my life instead of passing through it, even - or perhaps especially - when I'm doing things that were never on the original list. The year before I started doing 101 things I made a resolution, which I never really did before, or have since: to say "yes" more. It was probably the best resolution I ever had, to be perfectly honest. People should do more of that sort of thing, where they can.

I did, and look where it's got me.

Task #42 COMPLETED: Beekeeping

2011-07-11T06:24:00.000-07:00

I've not updated this for a year, but I have been slowly getting on with things. I won't complete, but I will get a good number ticked off my list - including this one.

Over the last weekend I was doing something new and exciting. I was looking after some BEES.

Ok, learning how to look after them properly rather than being, like, a babysitter or something. Which is harder than you might think. There's about a billion ways in which they can go wrong, there's disease, there's what to do if they swarm, or you accientally squash the queen, there's recognising the different things you find on a comb, and numbers and grubs and mites and the fact that ivy honey is vile, vile stuff.

There's legislation to read, and stuff to buy (or build, but in the first instance just cough up), and sites to find and people to notify. There's how to sell your honey (if you're lucky enough to get any) and recognising that bees are pets as much as a cat or dog. You have to learn how to spot an egg, and to stop pointing at bees going "there's the que- oh, wait no it's a drone".

Two days wasn't nearly enough, and it was done in the wrong order. So we were bombarded with terminology from the get-go which would be explained in later sessions but because we didn't know what it was, we asked the questions in too-early sessions. Beekeepers like to talk - well, this lot do, anyway - and so we'd get off topic and by the end of day one we were half an hour over and a session behind. Yes, we caught up on day two but we were still an hour over by the end of the day.

We got two sessions in the apiary; on neither occasion did I spot the (unmarked) queen. On the second, neither did the tutor, so that's ok. But when stuff looks like this:

then it's hardly surprising.

Basically, though, I loved it. I liked the bee suits, the hives, the way you can tell how annoyed the bees are after a couple of minutes being surrounded by them. The calmness that you absolutely must have before doing anything with the hive. The descriptions of diseases were a bit scary but being given hard data was satisfying. And extracting honey is a total joy (and I have a jar of honey from Temple Newsam that I extracted myself [well, partially]! And it's tasty!) even when you get flecks of stuff that looks suspiciously like bee bits floating around in it.

Am currently on the lookout for somewhere to deposit hives. I want city centre, but I will probably take anywhere...

(more photos from the weekend are here.)

It's all a bit quiet here

2010-07-14T04:02:00.000-07:00

Erm, it's gone a bit quiet here. Sorry about that.

I'm still doing 101Things, but I need to sort out in my head exactly how to write up some of the things I've been up to - series goals, especially are a bit of a pain. There's been a change, too; I'm never going to visit every LS swimming pool, not least because I'm worried my car will be halfinched while I'm visiting at least one of them, but the spirit of the quest was to get me fitter which is happening, just in the same pool, not different ones.

I'm writing up some personal project things on my non-101things blog, which is at http://www.backwardslion.co.uk and there's some bloody interesting stuff on there, like my talk on cake and the day I spent drinking coffee in indie coffee shops here in Leeds.

I'll get back on the writing up horse for this soon, as well as catch up on ticking things off the list. Keep reading :)

How is it May already? (Swimming)

2010-05-11T03:22:00.000-07:00

I missed all of April? How?

Right; time to pick up on some stuff, then. I've restarted the swimming in every LSx pool (task #38 by going to the new public access pool at work. About seven weeks ago I stopped going swimming at my usual pool for medical reasons, and in the meantime a swimming pool opened on campus, twenty years after the idea was first suggested. The intervening twenty years has seen us take over a school site that had its own pool, which we demolished because it was grim as anything, have no less than three sets of plans drawn up as to where a new pool might go, and all sorts of backpedalling and excuses trotted out by the establishment. It was only when LCC said "we're closing the City pool" and the subsequent uproar from the public caused them to go into partnership with the University over this that the money was forthcoming. So, we got a new fitness centre.

The pool is fab; a 25m, widescreen pool that uses less water than conventional pools (how? Magic, AFAICT) and has a revolutionary treatment plant that uses a quarter of the chlorine that pools usually do (how? Silver and UV, apparently). It has magic energy efficiency stuff going on, too. The upshot of this is that the pool is lovely. It doesn't hurt the eyes or the lungs, it's the right temperature (although possibly a bit warm for "proper" swimmers), the changing rooms have underfloor heating and fantastic showers, there's a steam room and sauna and although 2/3 of the pool was reserved for swim team practice sessions there was enough room for about twenty normal people to splash about. £4, which is 30p more than South Leeds.

I managed 16 lengths in 30 minutes, which isn't bad seeing as I was last in the water in March. Getting there early is a good idea, but one held by many people. So I'm back in the saddle; twice a week I go swimming, the other three days I walk to work. Saturdays and Sundays are cycling and running days. I was starting to miss exercise (and the Wii Fit has told me off for gaining weight - a whole pound in two weeks, BMI floating about the 29.4 mark), stiffening up too much and getting achey, so I'm glad to be back on the treadmill again, even if I don't actually use a, yanno, treadmill.

Day 382: Run 5k, volunteer

2010-03-23T04:10:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Penny:

The GPS got a bit confused as to distance because we were running through built-up streets and it kept losing signal, but I did the route (3 miles) in 36:48 with an average HR of 161. The first mile took 11 mins, the second took about 14 and I tried to run for more of the last mile than the second, but still took 12 minutes. Stitch, although not as bad as the last time, and I had to walk in a couple of places, but all in all I'm quite pleased by it. Emil beat me hollow, obv.

Seen on the route: two people in gimp suits (how the hell do you run in those things?), a bunch of firemen, a whole load of people juggling, hula-ing, some people walking their dogs, far too many people just wearing pants and a whole load of red paint, some bloke in a spangly thong (my eyes!), and loads of corporate teams.

I got a medal, which was nice. And a prune. But the queue for tea was far too long.

Right, I now have a PB; time to start training properly for 5ks.

And, thank you for sponsoring me. You're all good bunnies. I raised £145 and counting! Not bad, not bad at all :)

Just for the record, though: I'm not considering 44 & 45 to be done yet. I have to do much more training and my aim for the summer is to get a sub-30 min on the 5k route. On the other hand, I am considering task #20, volunteer for something, to be COMPLETED. So far in this 101things I've helped raise well over £200 for charity and I'm not intending to stop, but I think I can tick #20 off.

Ask me next week and I'll probably change my mind :)

Bad Mike, no biscuit.

2010-03-15T02:50:00.000-07:00

I've been very, very poor at keeping this updated. More details for the below will come along in the next couple of days (I hope!) but this is a quick state of the blog, a couple of days past one year into the experiment.

1. Training and running the 5k is still going ahead (tasks 20, 44 and 45). That's happening on Sunday 21st at 9:30, starting at Victoria Gardens in Leeds - cheerleaders welcome, as is anybody who would like to sponsor me.

2. I've not been visiting different swimming pools (task 38), but I have been consistently going to the same one twice a week before work. As this task was primarily an exercise one I think I'm doing quite well here.

3. I discovered that Open Street Map doesn't have my area particularly well covered. So I'm going to fill in the blanks as part of the "explore my grid square" tasks (5 & 6).

4. Thanks to some interesting pointers and online documents I've learned more about planning regs (task 75) than I ever wanted to. And I've discovered just how much commercial rents in nice areas go for (task 74). A lot, is the answer.

5. Walking isn't happening as much as I'd like - 30 miles in any given week is a lot. I can do 20-mile weeks reasonably frequently - I've done eleven so far - so task 4 is getting modified downwards, I'm afraid.

6. New lightbulbs don't get hot enough to make a proper lava lamp (task 84), so I'm having to rethink the original plan. Thankfully I came across this, which has given me ideas.

7. Wordle-ing the blog posts has dropped off. I think I'm more cross about this than anything else; they're there as a prompter for me to actually update the blog, and didn't work. I shall have to kick myself into writing proper updates to this, and expand on the things I've written about in this entry.

So: bad Mike, no biscuit.

Day 333, 310110

2010-01-31T08:56:00.000-08:00

I'm a third of the way through the time allowed for my 101things, and I'm nowhere near a third of the way through my list. This is not good. Time for drastic action.

Sport Relief is the activity wing of Comic Relief. You do sports for charity, and so far, so good. It came to my attention yesterday morning eating Crunchy Nut Cornflakes in front of the telly in my dressing gown - about as slobby as I can get - and Gary Lineker's earnest appeals touched me. And, as I thought about it, I can knock off three goals from my list as one thing. I've resisted double-dipping in the past, and this is sort-of treble-dipping, but if it all goes to plan I'll be repeating the experience later in the year in the Tree-athlon (but more of that later).

The three goals are: volunteer for something (task 20), run 5k (#44) and train for the 5k (#45).

The way it works is that there are a series of events held in your local area on Sunday 21st March; some 1 mile races, a couple of 3-milers and one or two six-milers. After thinking about it for a bit I decided I could do the 1 miler without too much trouble, so I should really enter the three-mile version in order to push myself. 3 miles is a bit less than 5k, but that's fine by me and when I was signing up through the website they have a three-week training plan that might just cover me.

So, yes, I signed up. I have a sponsorship page now (so please, sponsor me!) and will be getting paperwork and sponsorship forms and stuff through the post in the next couple of days. If anybody else in Leeds wants to run that would be pretty nifty also - we could start a team :)

I'm not exactly at a standing start for my training but it's not going to be easy. I have six weeks to get up to scratch, and that will be seriously hard work. But I like a challenge, and will begin my training on day 334, 010210.

I have a target for sponsorship, too; it's only £100, and if I get that I'll think of something T&C-related to do on the run - like handing out cups of tea or gingerbread men or something fun like that. So please, think about sponsoring me and if you're local join in, or show your support by cheering me on during the race! And if anybody wants to put together a cheerleading squad I'm not going to complain :)

Day 300 wordle

2010-01-31T08:55:00.000-08:00

Still a bit behind on the Wordles...

From Wordles

Day 307, 050110 - The Ukulele

2010-01-05T03:08:00.000-08:00

For Christmas my delightful lady wife bought me a blue ukulele. It's blue, and lovely, and smells of wax and woodworking classrooms. I was going to take the penny whistle as my "learn a new instrument" task (#51) but this is a lot more fun, and playing it doesn't annoy other people quite as much as the penny whistle might.

I've been tinkering with the uke for a week and a bit now - trying to have at least five minutes with it per day, just tuning and doing a few chord changes if nothing else - and have a few thoughts on the wee beastie that I want to get down.

First of all, tuning. Standard soprano uke tuning is AECG (looking from the top), and would you look at that, the A is one note lower than the G. It's not a low A, it's a high A. This threw me completely for the first day, as I had no audio samples to tune against and so I read the tuning was AECG, and as I can whistle a decent C without needing to pitch it I could tune against that. Except the A was tuned low, not high, so the string was very slack and the uke sounded very peculiar.

Strings; I've been used to playing a steel strung guitar since... lord knows. 1988, at the latest. Nylon strings were on my second, 3/4 guitar, but I've been playing steelies since I acquired our Tony's Les Paul knockoff (no humbuckers) and played it a capella. Going back to nylons has been really odd, and interestingly playing barre chords seems harder.

Once the tuning thing - high A - was sorted I discovered the peg was slipping; it would stay in tune for a few seconds, then drop out very quickly due to the string tension being higher than the peg would allow. Ten minutes research told me that unscrupulous music shops would take the uke, say that it was broken and you'd need a new one, or replace the peg completely charging for the labour. Or, you could have a look at the screws on the back of the pegs and tweak them a bit, as these adjust the tension in the pegs. Don't overtighten, as you could gouge holes in the headstock, but 1/8th of a turn sorted out the tension on mine nicely and it'll stay in tune for a whole session (and longer).

I saw a few chord diagrams (and eventually came across this one [pdf] which I promptly printed off and stuck on the wall above my desk), and started thinking in terms of aECg rather than EAdgbe. The standard chords all have a similar shape - more or less - but the tuning puts them in different keys. So, a D shape on a guitar is a G on the uke. A G on the guitar is a C on the uke. An A is a D, and so on. I love A-D-F progressions on the uke, as they're all in roughly the same zone on the fretboard and sound great. There are only two problems with chords, really. 1: my fingers aren't loose enough to do fast changes, and 2: I keep on making guitar-tuned shapes for named notes. That's a case of retraining my brain, and why I need to spend time practicing chord changes.

Tab is something I was never really bothered about on the guitar, but I'm having fun with it on the uke; practising two songs in particular (A-Ha's Take on me and REM's Losing my Religion), whilst simple as far as tab goes does help get my brain into gear for thinking about this sort of thing. I use them as exercises for warming up my fingers, and in this weather that's really necessary.

So, I'm enjoying it. More time is needed on practice, like all things, but it's just beginning to get there. I can certainly see why the uke renaissance took off the way it did in 2007. Must learn more punk songs, though. I reckon most things by the Clash would sound nifty as anything on the uke.

Day 306, 040110

2010-01-04T04:33:00.001-08:00

First proper post of the new year; let's go with something positive.

Because of time constraints and needing to be in two places at once I didn't manage to make the dip at White Wells this year (although Alex did). My 101 tasks over the yule season were somewhat warmer affairs.

I made chocolates and humbugs as Christmas presents for many people, and took two days over making them. At the end of day 1 I had these:

This is what 7kg of sweeties look like after sorting:

And this is the representative sample of what I made

Let's get the humbugs out of the way, shall we?

Boiled sugar and peppermint oil, basically. You heat the syrup to 154° C, and then fold and stretch it into a rope which is then cut into smaller pieces while still soft. I didn't make a big enough batch for my sugar thermometer to work properly so I was doing the "drop some into a bowl of iced water" method of testing the stages, and boiled it for about 10 seconds too long. As a result a lot of it crystallised too quickly on the slab, and it set far, far too fast for me to cut completely. Argh. Still, I managed to get about 70 wrapped and although some are a bit larger than others they're bloody tasty. Dangerous for fillings, though - don't chew these.

These do count as task #92 - make a batch of boiled sweets - as these are exactly what I had in mind, but... I'm not happy with the results, so not counting this as completed. I'll have another try when the weather is a bit warmer, as I'm sure the coldness of this winter, and our kitchen especially didn't help matters.

Thinking about it, I'm not sure that overcooking the syrup made that much difference. It was supersaturated of course, but it was the coldness of the ambient that made the sugar crystallise so quickly and I may have been a bit violent with the spatula when folding it over on itself, again causing crystallisation. I understand that using cream of tartar (tartaric acid, formed on grape skins) makes the sugar easier to handle but makes the results more hygroscopic. As they're fairly susceptible to atmospheric water anyway I'm not sure I want to make these any more sticky on the surface. Still, practice makes perfect.

As for the rest of the sweets...

Truffles, next. I made two batches of "big" truffles (ie, hand-rolled) and one of small (piped into shells); the big truffles were coffee (made by adding 2 tbsp good instant coffee to the cream, then finally rolling or dusting with some chocolate offcuts flavoured with coffee oil)

and Amaretto, made by flavouring with 50ml amaretto and rolling in crushed amaretti.

The small truffles were cocoa pops, folded into a basic mixture and piped into moulded shells.

Salt caramels are lovely; basic caramel made with milk and cream (and again, had the same problem with the sugar thermometer so was doing the drop-into-ice-water method, but got it right this time), salt added, dipped (because caramels are hygroscopic) and decorated with sea salt crystals.

The fondants are made by mixing warm water with (what is basically) icing sugar to form a stiff paste, and adding peppermint oil, then piping into moulds. I tried to be clever and colour the moulds with a little green cocoa butter, but this failed (the warm chocolate melted the cocoa butter), hence the gap at the back end.

The pralines are only technically pralines; I used a neutral paste, which is made up of fat, sugar and nut paste, but doesn't have a flavour of its own so you have to add flavour to it. In the case of the lemon pralines I added some lemon puree and some sicilian lemon oil, and piped into some white chocolate moulds.

The Orange pralines were made with the same neutral base with cointreau, orange puree, and then some candied peel dropped into the top of the shell before piping the flavourings in. It was only later, when I realised these looked exactly the same as the cocoa pop truffles that I added the blob on top of the dome...

Finally, the B&Cs. These are made by making a layer of chili jam, allowing it to set, then covering with a layer of blackcurrant ganache, then cutting and dipping, finally decorating with some white chocolate coloured with purple cocoa butter. These are seriously labour intensive and impossible to make in batches smaller than 140. By the end of dipping these my back was killing me. But they're so, so worth it.

There's a set on Flickr containing all these photos and a few more of the construction process - feel free to have a look. They're all really tasty, but if I could redo any it'd be the humbugs, because I boiled them for too long, and the hand-rolled truffles, because they're just too big and need to be about half the size.

Well worth the two days, I think. In the end it made sufficient presents for 24 people (some of whom were getting "proper" presents as well, but it all counts), and there were plenty of leftovers - there's still about 40 B&Cs and a similar number of humbugs - to pick at and put together a "randoms" box to scoff on NYE.

Next: Ukulele!

Day 306 wordle

2010-01-04T04:25:00.000-08:00

I'm way, way behind on everything to do with this.

So, let's get the Day 270 Wordle uploaded.

From Screen Captures

The day 300 one will come after a couple of updates. Those updates are:

1. Boiling sugar is harder than it looks.
2. Blue Ukulele!

There's also a "I'm never going to be able to do this, so I'm changing it to that" -type update to come, and something to do with clowns. Once I've done them, then I'll do the day 300 Wordle.

Sorry, guys. I'll be trying harder.

Day 268, 271109 (gingerbread)

2009-11-27T02:13:00.000-08:00

Concerning gingerbread people.

You know, if we were professional bakers we probably could have had this done and dusted in half the time. A third of the time. Total man hours required for myself and Sam (of Tea and Cake fame) to make 100 gingerbread people turned out to be about 14; my standard hourly rate (for callouts) is £50, which makes these some of the most expensive gingerbread men ever made. Or, would do, if we were charging for anything other than ingredients.

But, we did it, they are done and we did them. 100 gingerbread people, as a T&C enterprise for one of Sam's friends, getting married on Saturday and wanting wedding favours for people. You know how I say things like "try everything once, just so you know you'll never have to do it again"? Well, without a bigger oven, a higher working surface and something to pulverize crystallised ginger without gumming up I'm never making this many gingerbread men again...

The recipe was the standard one that I swiped from my mother, and modified slightly with some different spices and some maple syrup, with the extra addition of a couple of tablespoons of blitzed crystallised ginger. It's a bit gummy, that stuff, so my hand mixer didn't really like it very much. It makes quite a difference to the mixture, though - a bit of texture and some more ginger in there, without having big lumps of mouth-searing surprise. Fifty raw gingerbread men look like this:

... and as they were cooling, but before I put them in airtight tins, they looked like this:

They stayed crisp overnight (hoorah!) in the airtight tins, but I did have to make another batch before going to bed because some were a bit too singed around the edges and were more like those biscuits you get in plastic packets when you order coffee in hotels that are trying, but don't quite get coffee. Perfectly edible if you like that sort of thing, but not really suitable.

Met Sam at the station, we went home and took out the ladies that she'd done, melted some chocolate (which set really quickly, so I decided that properly tempered chocolate was a luxury we couldn't afford in this situation and went for speed and simplicity over my own "technique above all else!" aesthetics), and decorated the ladies.

Then we set the chaps out, melted more chocolate, and did them. By the time we got to the end of the chaps it was 10pm, we were shattered and backs were really aching, and you can tell by the lack of suits and more... odd decor some of the chaps got. There was a skellington (userpic), someone in an X-ray machine, and a member of the Syndikat.

We did special ones for the bride and groom, too. Lots of chocolate! We did comment on the decoration as we were doing it; some of the ladies were very obviously grannies, some were in evening wear, some in dungarees. The gents were... eclectic, I think.

We certainly had fun making them - a lot of fun - but it's hard, hard work. I have much more respect for bakers, especially ones who do artisinal things like this. We could have done single colour, five blobs and a smile, and be done in ten minutes, but where's the artistry in that? This was all about the handmade product, the joy of uniqueness, and I think we did a pretty good job with that.

Richard was a star and ran out for tupperware with mere minutes to go before Sainsbury's closed; when packed up, the 100 gingerbread people looked like this:

Fun, yes. Next time though, I'm charging more :)

Day 262, 211109 (Thought Bubble)

2009-11-23T05:17:00.000-08:00

This weekend was the best sequential arts fair in the North, and possibly the country (although Birmingham may argue on size, I think this is the friendliest). By which I mean Thought Bubble.

In a city with two indie comics shops (one of which does games) and a FP, you'd think that a comics convention wouldn't be a huge thing here, and if there was one it'd be a small affair, stuffed in a church hall or in the basement of the Town Hall, or something. In fact, in year one it was in the basement of the town hall, and it was a fairly sedate affair with only a handful of names attending, and it wasn't bad, but not really enough to hold interest for very long (also, I was very ill at the time). Then in year two - it amazes me that it's only three years old now - it exploded into Saville Hall, a huge conference venue by the Armouries. It was rammed solid last year, with the queue stretching quite some way at opening time and not really shortening very much before lunch. At that one I looked after the fetishman stall for a bit and pretended to be Geof for an interview, and spent a bit of money - but not that much - on indie comics.

This year was something else entirely.

I went with a budget, and with the intention of spending money on indie comics. I arrived at lunchtimeish, found Mavis who gave me a quick tour - showing me some Doctor Who artwork that made me think "Oh, it's a shame t'other Penny isn't here" on the way - and then stood with me as I carried out my first purchase of the day, and one I've been looking forwards to for two years, a copy of Grandville.

A quick note from my diary from back then:

[...] A two-hour session with Bryan Talbot as part of the Ilkley Literature Festival, who was talking about his techniques in graphic novel design with specific reference to The Tale of One Bad Rat. He started off with a retrospective of his work up to that point - which took 40 minutes - and pointing out how he learned to use a brush, crosshatching, lines of convergence, vanishing points, use of colour (which happened very late on), and some seriously interesting things about passage of time - how he spread a six-second sequence in Luther Arkwright across 72 panels, for example - and plotting. Then he gets into One Bad Rat, which pulls all of this together. He talked about the nine-frame grid a lot, and intuitive reading, and how people's brains work when reading comics - their eyes jump everywhere, even though the conscious brain is only aware of the linear flow - and putting little things in a frame which aren't necessarily supposed to be seen, per se, but help the brain work out what is supposed to be happening. Really, it was an incredible session. I made a ton of notes, made a note of all his references and work, and thought "gosh, that's the sort of thing I learned in photo classes!" a lot.

Just as we were leaving he pulls out his portfolio and asks if people want to take a look at some of his stuff for Grandville (the first ten pages, which looked outstanding), the thing he's currently working on ("Steampunk meets Sherlock Holmes, with animals instead of humans.") so of course I did, and then someone suggested a beer. So, three of the attendees (a graphic designer, a philosophy lecturer at UoL who is taking a year out to write about comics, and, erm, me) took Bryan to a boozer where we spent the time between his two events getting gently sloshed, discussing his work, who is up-and-coming, why comics aren't really taken seriously in the UK as opposed to, say, France or Belgium, trying to get graphic novels published and how much easier it's getting - aha - and technology. Plus going over two versions of Grandville, one in vibrant colour, the other slightly desaturated and trying to work out which was the best ("I brought these along to get opinions - here, what do you think?") It was at this point that I learned about Thought Bubble, as we started talking about conventions and the characters who turn up.

Bryan is a nice chap, and seeing as I've known about him since I was nine years old and stealing my Dad's copy of Luther Arkwright (Book 1), it's quite nice to realise that one of my childhood, um, heroes is really accessable. No kidding, being asked to rate his work? That's a bit of a "wow" for me.

Of course, I got Grandville signed by Bryan, we had a quick chat about a panel in Luther Arkwright I'd been wondering about for over twenty years, and I mentioned my perhaps somewhat dodgy thought that his cover for Erskine's Dan Dare does look a bit like a, erm, "book cake" shoot (look, those cruisers are seriously phallic, ok?). Anyway.

We headed back to Geof where I deposited bags and biscotti, with the instruction to use the biscotti as they saw fit. Geof had a bottle of "Mr Reynold's Genuine Hand-Squeezed Kraken Ink".

Next, to see John Allison, bought badges and a poster, and pestered Ellerby for more ellerbisms and requested he sign things. Also demanded "what's new?" of Lizz Lunney and had a quick chat to the guys at We Are Words and Pictures, from whom I bought my favourite print of last year.

I spotted Bunny! So went and got volume two, having loved volume 1; this is one of those comics that really deserves to be read in print. Reading it on the web is fine, but this is something else when it's a book. Next door to Bunny (ish) was Gunnerkrigg Court. Wandering over to the chap behind the desk my opening gambit was "where do I know your name from?" and we eventually worked out it was from John Allison. I picked up his book, thinking it was a little expensive, but was instantly hooked. This was some seriously good writing and printing, and whilst the art seems a little naive it picks up really quickly. When I got home I read Grandville, and then I read this; it was stunning work and I loved every panel. Much hard work has gone into producing this and I can't recommend it enough.

Some people had work that looked fun, but wasn't my cuppa; a book of lovingly rendered watercolours telling a mermaid's tale was startlingly expensive but obviously a lot of love went into it's production, for example. I just didn't like the story that was being told enough. There was a lot of "trying too hard" stuff; semicompetent artwork and writing basically consisting of vomit, scatalogical references and poorly-thought out storylines, all of which turn me off. Some sort-of big press items that were ok, but there were better artists not getting book deals. Oh, and I didn't queue up to see any of the Names other than Bryan (and there wasn't much of a queue for him). I should have gone to see Paul Cornell, but he wasn't there when did go to see him and the crush of people trying to see Templesmith was getting ridiculous. And then Tony Stark turned up (sorry, rubbish photo - my decent camera was at the bottom of my bag by this point) and everything stopped wherever he was standing.

Ollie East was there for Blank Slate, who are publishing Trains Are... Mint and Proper Go Well High (instead of him selfpublishing). I bought copies of both, and loved them; these were sweet watercolours with a nice, otherworldy feel to them, the stories being Ollie's walks from Manchester to Blackpool and Liverpool respectively. Love these books; they're great artifacts, beautiful objects to have. Won't be everybody's cuppa, though. (I later discovered Ollie was the cover artist for Seldom Seen Kid.)

I bought far too much small indie comics costing under a fiver, too. I'll do proper reviews of them when I've read them all, but particular highlights were My Cardboard Life (oh! so lovely!), and The Rainbow Orchid, the first volume of a gorgeous-looking series of three, inked in the very best Belgian style. Brilliant work, can't wait for volume two.

Finally, I coughed for some Fetishman stuff as well, including a mug this time. Swag:

Penny joined me, and we decided to make up some sort of creative salon. There was a talk about Grandville held in the casino, so I had to go along to that (learned all about anthropomorphic cartoons through history, as well as some of the in-jokes in Grandville itself), then I made balloon doggies for a bunch of people, and then I was shattered and had to come home. But I did well, and did my bit to support the indie comics industry. In amongst everything else I met the model for the Doctor Sketchy's event they were doing - I love that idea, a burlesque evening where you're encouraged to draw - and had an extended gossip session with Michelle Culturevulture.

Oh! When I left it had been raining, and Clarence dock looked like this:

Seriously, this was an outstanding day; Lisa does a brilliant job of organising the festival and it showed on the day. Of course I'll be back, and loving every minute, again.

Day 258, 161109

2009-11-17T07:28:00.000-08:00

This is a bit of a catchup post.

I've not been doing much on 101things recently, because of other stuff getting in the way. Fully aware that you chaps aren't necessarily interested in that, I won't write about those things in great detail.

The beetroot pasta task (#36) needs a little explaining; I don't want to make pasta out of beetroot per se, but to use beetroot as a colouring agent so I end up with reddy purple pasta. Funky colours, see? The problem is, you need quite a lot of beetroot to get the colour. As an example of this, I present some marshmallows that I made a couple of weeks ago:

See that faint pinky colour? Two beetroot (grated and steeped in 100ml boiling water) in about 750ml of liquid. If a normal pasta dough is 500g of flour, I'm going to need the colour of six beetroot to get anything like the colour I want, and I can't have that much fluid in it, as the dough is basically egg and flour, with only a few sprinkles of water. Cooking beetroot juice turns it brown, too, so I can't concentrate it through evaporation. This is going to take some thought. Yes, I could cheat and make gnocci, but where's the fun in that?

Sam and myself are making a gingerbread army. Wedding favours for a friend of Sams, with proceeds going to charity, like we did with the Charming Armley Cake Comp. This has meant my making a lot of trial runs of gingerbread, but the final batch will be started next week; a mixture of maple syrup, pulverized stem ginger and careful use of bicarb will make these the finest gingerbread men and women the world has ever seen. Photos when available.

Exposure Leeds (#85) continues to skip lightly forwards; I think I've attended all the indoor ones to date and given talks at three of them. I was thinking about this the other day; in the 18 months since I met Jon Eland I've given four separate talks at Photocamps and three talks at Exposure Leeds sessions, and become involved in a pretty huge technology project. It's fun, I enjoy doing it, it's just an odd thing. Anyway, at the last Exposure I gave a talk on Panographs and Panoramix, the slides of which are available in four parts: [part 1] [part 2] [part 3] [part 4]. If you'd like me to present this anywhere - because obv, 80% of this is in the delivery - I'll do it for expenses :)

Because I needed to do proper research for my talk I popped into Leeds University's Arts library, the Brotherton. This enabled me to tick off another library from task 17. The Brotherton is a fab library, with special collections, books that are never checked out, and little corners to hide in. The little corners can be occupied by "characters" as in the case of the Library Foot-Sniffer, the scourge of many when we had open access to the libraries, but on the whole it's a lovely place to be. As a part of the talk I made a panorama of the interior...

... and came across a book that I had to check out; David Hockney's Cameraworks. This book contains most - not all - of his "joiners" and some I didn't know existed, and has an interesting monograph at the front by the compiler about the hows and whys. I may spend a bit of time writing about this book at some point.

Once the gingerbread army is out of the way I'll be making more chocolates, and trying to write up some articles for T&C. But... I had an idea for a cookbook. I shouldn't waste time on it, but as an idea I love it and want to take it forward, just a little bit.

That'll do for now. Just a quick state of the nation -type posting.

Day 240 301009 Wordle

2009-10-30T07:34:00.000-07:00

On time, for once.

From Screen Captures

Day 236, 261009

2009-10-27T09:01:00.000-07:00

Britain's Best Dish is now, at least for me, over. If you want to watch it, ITVPlayer will have it for the next 29 days at time of writing.

After recording and winning my last heat on the Monday, the following Thursday, I got the train down to London and stopped at the City Road Travelodge. It was bloody hot in there; I always overheat in London, and this time was no exception, but it wasn't helped by the blessed hotel having a broken heating system that was pumping hot air into the corridors, and no aircon anywhere. Well, I say no aircon, but in an attempt to prevent my death from heat exhaustion I had to keep the window open, and there were some noisy compressors just outside it. The room was clean and spartan, but really it was like trying to sleep in a server room without the nice cool airflow.

To Hackney Community College, where the gas wasn't working properly amongst other things. Every now and then, to find out why the oven in one station wasn't working, they'd reset the system, which had the added bonus of putting out all the other burners and ovens around it. Before we got to that point there was a lot of hanging around, the usual furore, much swearing as the crew had moved from Teddington that morning and didn't know where anything was. I met the opponents, who were all lovely; one bloke ran a club in Accrington and was an example of your charming Manc motormouth, and he was seriously funny. We had a glamorous granny, a Scots chap who'd shot his own pigeon the day before, a Welsh trades unionist, a mumsy type and a tiny Indian lady who was full of stories about her homeland. And me. Three of us were doing dishes that involved shrimp, two were a seafood medley, there was a risotto, a salmon tartare, pigeon breast salad, and a chicken wrap.

Prep happened and my dough was done, we had lunch, and hung around some more. And a bit more. I wasn't worried about my dough, because you can't really overrest it. When we eventually made it into the kitchen - they were nice little pods we were working in - and had started, I did everything I was supposed to before rolling out my pasta. I poked my dough, only to discover a whole chunk of it had dried out under the lights. Foolishly, I started to see if I could knead it out, and instead I got little blobs of dried pasta working their way through the dough. JBR & Ed came over to see what I was up to, and instantly told me to stop what I was doing and make my dough again. I had 44 minutes to re-make my dough that needed an hour to rest. Argh.

Well, I pulled a rabbit out of the hat. My new dough came out really quite good - far better than I could have hoped it to, if I'm being honest - and I managed to get my ravioli done and in the water on time, just. It made quite good telly, although I did get bleeped at one point. I suspect I may be told off by my parents and Grandmother for that.

This time we didn't see the judges reactions, but the food was also being eaten by proper food critics. We were told "ten minutes" and taken outside for some air. Instead of 10 minutes we ended up hanging around for over an hour and a half, waiting for the decisions. Eventually we were all gathered up and the usual trio gave the verdict, and I was out, beaten by the salmon tartare and the risotto.

We were hanging around for postmatch interviews, and one of the critics - Charles Campion - came out and said hello, so I asked whether he liked my dish. "Loved it," he said. Someone else asked what he thought of theirs; "total disaster," so at least I knew he wasn't just being nice. Ah, well.

Watching the programme was interesting; I had no idea how it was going to pan out with the critics and judges. This time I was properly nervous watching the show, because the critics could have been awful. As it was William Sitwell made a barking suggestion - keep the peas whole - which thankfully received the "whu?" it deserved, and although JBR thought it was underseasoned I am positive that it was fine. Still, not to worry; I at least produced something to go on the plates, and it could have been so much worse.

So concludes this adventure in Tellyland, where the sun always shines and the grass is an incredible shade of green.

Britain's Best Dish

2009-10-23T07:47:00.001-07:00

Ok, I can now confirm that my next instalment of Britain's Best Dish is on Monday 26th October, 5pm, ITV1.

Woo! &c.

In other news, I'm mad busy; decorating cakes, making portfolios, writing a talk on panoramic photographs, and thinking about gingerbread recipes does take it out of a chap. I've done nothing on 101things for about a fortnight, but hopefully that'll change next week.

In the meantime, have a poster wot I made. I'm thinking there's a T-shirt in this.

If you're looking for something to read, ask Alex, because she's doing a 24-hr readathon over the weekend. Nutter. But she might have recommendations for you when it's all over, and if you meet up with her you could get a BookCrossed book!

Monday, 5pm.

Quick post about Britain's Best Dish.

2009-10-07T15:12:00.000-07:00

As I've been asked by people:

Programme one is here and programme two is here. People not in the UK may be unable to watch, I'm afraid.

As far as I can tell the next bit is October 26th, but I'll confirm that when I know more.

Day 216, 061009 (telly, part 3)

2009-10-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

After winning my previous heat I had a couple of days off, and then I was back down to Teddington again for the next round. My opponent this time is a very nice lady from Filey, making three different crab dishes, but all on the theme of a layered salad. The results (when we’re done) look incredible. The other players were: a corned beef pie with a roasted mashed potato cake, salt cod with black-eyed peas and rice, and an interesting matchup between a just-finished-A-levels young lady and not-started-GCSEs-yet young man (mini victoria sponges with lemon curd and tea bread ice cream, and sticky toffee pudding with cinder toffee ice cream respectively).

So we go through the same rigmarole as last time. Mark gives us a pep talk, warns us what he's going to talk about, we do walkons and intros, and I slice some radishes. We get taken off, the judges do their thing, and as we're outside we hear that the judges really weren't happy with this morning's lot; they'd tried too hard, and as a result their dishes had lost some of what made them great. We're called back on, and get rolling. I've changed the order of how I cook stuff (pasta gets rolled last) but I have acres of time.

Cooking the peas and sauteéing the shrimp is done in a flash, and I'm laying out sheets of pasta rather than cutting discs. I spend more than two seconds on the garnish, and start assembling. Alas! The second sheet of pasta has dried out and is cracking, and they stick to the worktop; out of the five ravioli I complete, one cracks just as I'm about to drop it in the water and one has a hole in I don't notice until I fish it out and the filling is four times the volume it should be!

Instead of being taken off for the judge's comments we're left on set, and filmed as they try the food. Jilly described the pasta as "muscular" whilst Ed and JBR think it's a bit overcooked, and not the fine quality of last time (this is because of the eggs being larger than usual). Other than that, though: they love it. Big thumbs up. They do the same to Debra and her crab, then we're taken off and I go to find something to drink, then we're taken back in for the verdict.

To say that I was pleased to win is underplaying it a little. My reaction will be on telly for all to see; at the moment, though, all I can remember is Mark building up suspense and then calling my name, and getting the biggest grin I've had in weeks plastered across my face. I was asked, in post-match interviews, "what went through your mind" and in all honesty I couldn't think of anything. "Wow" doesn't come close. The winners are handed red envelopes containing slips of card to represent the small prize we get for winning this stage, which are taken off us when we get off set. "Budgets," we're told. I don't even get the card as a souvenir!

The odd thing about this show is that I was filmed doing hobbies, as a background thing for my segment. So in June I gathered up some people I knew wouldn't be at work, and persuaded them to meet me in Whitelocks one lunchtime to watch me making balloon animals and be filmed for telly. Daag, Penny and Jo all came along to support me doing daft things, and I can't thank them enough. What was really odd was that they'd never met, all three being from totally disparate groups of friends. Made me think.

It's still on ITV's catchup service at time of writing; episode 15 of this series.

Day 214, 041009

2009-10-06T04:19:00.000-07:00

On Sunday I completed another one of my things; enter the Charlie Cake Competition. This year the theme was "Make, Bake and Grow", and I'd mentioned to one of the organisers that Tea & Cake would love to be involved somehow. By maybe having a tea stall, or something. And I could enter, too. We were given approval, and so after a swift half-hour planning meeting on Friday after work with Sam, Biscuit and J9 (at Zouk on Leeds Road, excellent masala chai) we divvied up the tasks, and met at Charlie Cake Park on Sunday.

I'd made a cake to enter into the competition; my usual chocolate and marmalade loaf cake, this time covered in chocolate and cointreau ganache - it was covered because I'd used cheap greaseproof paper and the cake had stuck to it, so I needed to hide the holes. So after we'd set up the table and got the kettle on to boil I registered, had a wander about the stalls, and went back to our shed to await the hordes.

The stalls, by the way, were very interesting. The new Leeds City WI was there, who are called "Buns & Roses". I'd join, if it weren't for the pesky Y chromosome. Average age is well below the norm for WI groups, and my mum (who runs her local WI) laughed in a very good way when I told her about it. We also had - it was obviously the day for puns - local crafty people "Fox Bunting". Made me laugh. And there was us, of course:

We had a near-constant hot water crisis. We went through about 40 litres of water, 160 insulated paper cups, "some" plastic cups for squash, two cans of gas, a tonne of teabags, half a jar of coffee, ten pints of milk and some sugar. We weren't charging a set amount, just soliciting donations for the Armley Common Right Trust, Water Aid and the WWF; people were asking how much, we said "no set price, put what you think it's worth into the bucket". In the end we ran out of hot water, cups and milk at about the same time, around 2:30 and decided to pack in early. Biscuit totted up; we had only the vaguest idea how many cups of tea and coffee we'd sold - we used 160 cups, but some people recycled cups and we didn't count the orange squashes - but we made £116.65, an average of about 73p per cup. Split three ways it worked out at £39 per charity; given that we only spent half an hour on planning this, I think that's not a bad result.

Also, look at Sam's banner on the side of the shed. It rocked.

I didn't even get placed in the competition, by the way. There was some excellent entries, and mine didn't look good compared to them. Leedsgrub entered a giant Crunchie! It looked and tasted fab, although apparently it was a nightmare to cut up.

It was a bloody brilliant day, and one well worth doing. Next time we'll double up on everything and rethink the hot water a bit, but I think we can be justifiably proud of what we pulled off on the spur of the moment. Much thanks to Emma and Michelle from The Culture Vulture for talking to us about it and providing a very helpful shed (and a loo, and kettle when we were really in trouble!), and the Charming Armley Tourist Board for putting the event on. Now we know we can do it, I'm sure we'll be giving this another try soon.

So, although I didn't get placed I'm going to count task #95 as COMPLETED. Yay!

Day 212 wordle

2009-10-02T06:19:00.000-07:00

From Screen Captures

Day 212, 021009 (telly, part 2)

2009-10-02T04:16:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit behind due to a quick holiday in Liverpool and a mini family crisis. Sorry about that.

So, last week saw Adventures in Tellyland parts two and three (task #7). Here's the story of part two.

After I did "Taste The Nation" in January, and was knocked out in the first round, I told the producer who was looking after me to keep me in mind if anything else popped up that I might be suitable for. I wasn't really expecting to hear anything, but the day after my programme aired in April a producer from another telly show, called "Britain's Best Dish" phoned me up.

"We'd like you to come for an audition," said Maxie, a very nice chap who turned out to be quite a senior producer on the show.

"That's lovely," I said. "What shall I cook?"

"Oh, you tell us. If we like the idea, then I'll tell you where to go and when to turn up."

After a bit of thought I came up with a recipe that might work quite well; a pea puree and brown shrimp ravioli. Italian food is quite popular and making pasta from scratch always adds an element of drama to cooking, because it sometimes goes wrong. It's quite British with the filling, too, so I thought I could get away with it being "Britain's" best dish. (There was a parsley butter and pea shoots as garnish, too.) So I emailed the recipe off to Maxie, who phoned back and told me to be in York on a Sunday about a week later.

I was up very early that Sunday, making the sauce to go with the ravioli and popping it in a thermos to keep warm. A quick drive to York, I parked up at the hotel the auditions were taking place, and got to meet the people I've been talking to about this for a couple of weeks and say hello to Tallulah and Julie, a couple of people I met on Taste The Nation. I plated up, bought a ruinously expensive cup of coffee, and waited with a bunch of other people who were auditioning. And waited. And waited.

The food I saw that I was competing against was interesting; a number of people had brought pies, full roast dinners, fish, and some of the stuff was ok. Some was very poor. The thing that got me was a dessert someone had brought, which was a work of staggering joy; lemon & white chocolate mousse in a tart made from almond pastry, served with a shot of lemon liqueur. This was stunning work, and by far & away the best thing I'd seen (and this also managed to get on the show).

Eventually I did a piece to camera about how my dish was the best, then got to chat to the producers about my ravioli (the sauce, alas, didn't survive the trip) and hopefully make a good impression. The producers were very nice and liked that I'd brought a photo along with the food, and whilst they didn't eat it (by this point it was stone cold) they liked how it looked and told me they'd be drawing up a shortlist in a couple of weeks' time.

Two days later, I get called and told I'd been shortlisted.

About a month, and several phone calls about what to do, where to go, how to cook and what the recipe was all about later, I'm waiting outside a hotel at Teddington in South-West London. It was likely that this would be my only show, but I was confident that I'd do ok. Gradually everybody else arrived - the six competitors and three reserves - and we headed over in some very nice cars to the studios. We all started chatting (as you do); there were Lydia and Vicky, doing puds, Peter and Calam on mains and Angela and myself on starters. Immediately we spotted an issue; Calam was 14 so it was a bit of a foregone conclusion that he'd win his course, the only question was which round he was in - and I breathed a sigh of relief when I discovered he was in mains.

Teddington studios is a large complex, but not as big as I was expecting; about the same size as a cottage hospital. We were dropped in the green room behind our studio, had a briefing from Juliet (producer), and then a run through the studio and what we were cooking happened. Karen (again, someone from TTN) and I had a quick chat, they found me a better pasta machine and a clamp, checked that my shrimp were on the way, and Juliet came over, introduced me to my wrangler (Dan) and told me what I was doing in five minute blocks, which was all fine.

Prep kitchen - a portacabin, but better equipped than my kitchen at home - was next. Making pasta from scratch is great, but you have to leave the dough to rest for at least an hour, so I made the dough (filmed whilst doing it) and left it on my station in the studio wrapped in damp muslin. I was taken off to makeup, examined by wardrobe (my shirt was deemed to be "just fine" - a somewhat flowery but lightweight thing; being told I couldn't wear black, white or red had limited my options considerably), and interviewed by the AP who recruited me, with the usual questions; because I'd done this sort of thing before Maxie said "we want soundbites" and I set to the task with aplomb. Being interviewed for this sort of thing is really odd, though, speaking in whole sentences, avoiding temporal references, and talking about inspirations, which seemed to be something they really liked.

Back to the studio to be fitted with aprons, we were told where to stand, how to walk onto set, "big smiles please, unless we don't want them", and Mark Nicholas came on set to say hello, talk about what he was going to discuss with us, and generally put us at our ease (he really is a nice chap, who normally does the cricket commentary). After being fitted with microphones we had some dramatic camera swooping shots, were put on a turntable and spun round, and we had to do "head-to-head" shots, staring our opponents down. That bit was really odd, and we couldn't stop giggling; also, I don't think I've stared into anybody's eyes for that long since Sarah and myself were getting married. The judges turned up; Ed Baines and John Burton Race, who are chefs, and Jilly Goulden, who has been doing wine tasting on telly for years and years. We did some odd bits of filming and quick interviews with Mark, then we were taken back for ten minutes whilst the judges did their "what do you think today will be like" pieces. Then, back on, and the timeline started. I had 55 minutes to make my ravioli.

I could hear the judge's comments every now and then, and they didn't like my technique (which was inefficient, I'll grant you); what I did was roll out the pasta first, then make my filling, then cut out discs of pasta and make the ravioli by dropping filling onto a disc and putting another disc on top. The comment I heard was that if someone was doing that in a restaurant they'd have to charge £75 for the dish, as it was really time-consuming, which is true. The butter sauce wasn't quite right, it was too acidic and the pasta dried out really quickly under the lights, but I was happy with how they came out and was really pleased with how it all looked on the plate.

I plated up, and was then escorted off the set, along with Angela (who made a gorgeous looking-and-smelling smoked haddock bread and butter pudding with horseradish creme anglaise and tomato & chili jam, which worried me because it was a very good dish), and that was that; we couldn't see the judges' comments, or any of the other competitors (who had another 20 and 40 minutes to go). Eventually everybody else came out, and we were summoned back to the studio. The judges were really taking their time to decide and may even have been having a serious argument in the back room, but eventually they came out. Cameras started rolling, Mark prolonged the suspense, and eventually told us who the winners were. And I won the starters round!

Although I did win my round I didn't know until later if I'd got through to the regional finals, as only 2 of the 4 winners go through. Thankfully, I did!

My recipe is on the Britain's Best Dish website, here, and is also published in the accompanying book of the series (on page 63, uncredited).

Next: a wordle, then part 3.

Day 201, 210909

2009-09-21T09:41:00.000-07:00

So, I'm a fifth of the way through.

Cor.

I'm nowhere near a fifth of the way through the tasks, though. Some are, of course, series tasks that will take a while, but it's still a bit daunting to see only 11 completeds - ten percent - in twenty percent of the time.

That's not what I'm writing about today. No, what I'm writing about today is this:
Yr Humble Svt will be appearing on Telly, again. So, task 7 rears its head again on Tuesday 22nd September 2009 - that's day 202 - at 5pm on ITV1. I shall be cooking on Britain's Best Dish, a starter of... well, you'll have to wait and see. I'll be writing up my experiences post-hoc (I wanted to write them up in advance, but didn't hear back from my producers), and the not-so-gory details will appear on here in due course. BBD is quite a bit of fun and worth watching anyway, just for seeing the state of British home cooking; the quality of the food coming through has been very high, so I'd say that state was pretty good.

Watch it, and let me know what you think!

Day 193, 130909

2009-09-14T05:06:00.000-07:00

On day 193 I completed something I've been meaning to do for a good ten years. Task #63, climb the bell tower at Leeds Town Hall.

The clock tower at Leeds Town Hall is very high; Phill and the LHES managed to wangle a comprehensive tour a few years back (link, but his images aren't loading at time of writing) but we only had the mini tour, which didn't involve being crapped on my pigeons or falling through floorboards. First of all, this is what LTH looks like from the outside.

And this is one of the sets of stairs we had to take to get up to the clock faces.

There were 220 steps in all; thankfully there was a breather at 140 steps; the room where the chandelier above the vestibule is hung. I took a sneaky photo through the grating, but it's not very good (on the flickr photostream if you care). There is a huge pipe in this room, a flue from when the chandeliers were gaslit. Too dark to photograph. Boo.

The chap taking us on the tour was Eric, the FoH manager, a really nice bloke who knew the town hall inside out. The piano competition had been going on over the previous week (broadcasts start Friday, IIRC) and he'd been with the BBC taking photos of the town hall all lit up from various vantage points across the city, and was touchingly fond of the old building. He told us about how they change the lightbulbs in the chandeliers, the amount of pigeon crap they shovelled out of here over the summer (80 sacks! 80!), the various nooks and corners the town hall has. When we got past the bell tower (below the clock faces), we were in the clock mechanism, behind the faces, and I wasn't sure we'd be allowed out onto the balcony. Then he said "you can stay up here as long as you like, and the views are fantastic" and that was all the encouragement I needed. Outside, the clock faces look fantastic close up, with incredible detail nobody at ground level will notice...

... but really, he wasn't kidding about the views.

West:

South:

East:

North:

The clock mechanism itself is fairly simple and clockwork, and that's really all there is to it. Some cogs, some weights, and a mechanical winder. I learned that standard practice for all stopped municipal clocks is to set them to 12 o/c, as it's the time most people are bound to realise it isn't. They had a problem earlier in the year that needed the mechanical winder to be replaced by an electronic one, and replacing the bulbs in the clock faces is no joke. Replacing the bulb in the cupola is really not funny at all; we weren't allowed up there, because there's only room for one person and that person has to stand on the trapdoor.

The rest of the town hall is still a working building; the great hall is used for all kinds of events (recently the aforementioned piano competition)

But the cells, bridewell, and court are now just museum pieces (although all were in use until 1993). Interestingly, none of it is below ground; all at ground level, but behind so much stone it might as well be underground. I spotted one of those cracking mirrors that allows you to view around corners - presumably in case someone broke out of the cells, or was carrying prisoners and didn't want to bump into people - and selfportraited myself in it.

Eric, bless 'im, gave us an extended show round the building because I couldn't find the courts. He loves the building, and it shows; it is an easy building to love, with phenomenal history and stunning architecture. I was very pleased to have been able to take the tour and meet this tremendous chap with an incredible capacity and enthusiasm for the place he works.

So, task 63 is COMPLETED! Huzzah!

Day 191, 110909

2009-09-11T01:57:00.000-07:00

A quick state of the nation post, just to keep track of where I am.

I have completed 10 - yes, that's ten - tasks.

climbing Pen-y-Ghent (#96)
had a go at archery (#68)
watched a play written by @wordweave, aka Mrs W, (#82)
attended four Exposure Leeds sessions (#85)
learned how to make chocolates (#8)
turned my handwriting into a font (#71)
visited Tropical World (#23)
appeared on telly (#7) but watch this space!
whacked some balls (#86)
and finally, registered for blood donation (#86).

Not a bad start!

What am I up to at the moment? Well...
In terms of explorations, I'm everso slowly working my way through all the libraries with an LS postcode (#17), even more slowly working my way through the municipal pools (#38), gone walking with Matt (#97) a few times, and have made serious inroads into visiting every museum with an LS postcode (#57). Roundhay park has been visited (#22), but I've not had a good poke around yet.

I have given away 17 books to charity (#60) and sponsored three people for doing things outside their comfort zones (#100). I gave away some of the photo stuff I don't need (#99) but need to give away more, I am still telling someone - guess who - that I love them every day (#13), and along with that am still being good and eating breakfast, not buying coffee, and eating more fruit (#88, #87 and #26, respectively). Also, I'm writing letters to people (#67). People like letters, I've found.

Exercise-wise, apart from climbing mountains I've been half-heartedly pursuing a training regimen, but not really talking about it because it's not been a concerted effort. When I get the focus for it, it'll join the other tasks such as getting the bike out (#81) about 14 times so far, and walking 30 mile weeks (#4), which is proving quite difficult. I'm getting lots of 25 mile weeks, four of them so far, but only one 30-miler.

Growing things has not gone well; not a good year for tomatoes and I lost heart when my chillies died out. I'll try those again next year. Herbs, as well; the parsley did ok, basil survived, just about, oregano smelled fantastic but didn't take very well. Again, reboot next summer. I'll have to restart my take 365 consecutive daily photos task (#3), too. I had a rough week about two months ago and it stalled, I lost track of where I was, and then it all descended into chaos.

But I am still doing quite well on bringing my lunch to work (#66); I'm on 80 out of 250! And I'm still remembering to wordle (#37), mostly.

I think that's where I'm up to right now. There may be a few things I've missed, but I'm fairly happy with how things are going. Not quite a fifth of the way through, and there's some good scores up there. Yeah, I'll take that.

Day 181, 010909, part 4 (the last bit!)

2009-09-11T01:56:00.000-07:00

After visting Kirkstall Abbey I needed food, so parked up in Kirkstall Valley entertainment complex, or whatever they're calling it these days. The point is, I could get a vegeburger and walk over the river Aire to my final museum of the day, Armley Mills. There's a bridge at the back of the complex, between Frankie & Bennies and the everso amusingly named boozer, The Aire of the Dog, which has a sometimes-padlocked gate that leads into the Mill. Today, I was fortunate in that the gate wasn't padlocked, but it was jammed shut by an errant breeze, so needed to give it a bit of a shove to open. The usual route in is from Viaduct Road, but I was feeling lazy by this point and needed to get into the museum before I started thinking all I really needed was a cuppa and a slab of something sweet and fattening.

I'm glad I didn't do that, because Armley Mills is brilliant.

First of all, there's a little steam train called Henry who jocularly threatened to run me over as I was trying to find the way in. Next, it has a huge millpond and stream fed off the Aire, and it runs underneath this astonishingly huge complex; just think of the architectural chutzpah needed to get this thing off the ground (literally, in this case)! I found the thought of all that water belting underneath this building a staggering one.

Once inside it was as most industrial museums; large hunks of metal that do fairly interesting repetitive tasks and some big signs in large type, with little detail. Except... there were some serious inconguities. Walking through one gallery I saw some balls of wool with a name next to them. Odd, I thought. Did this person make the wool, perhaps? There's a gallery of printing machinery with a brief history of printing in Leeds - which is great, but nothing actually to do with the Mill. Then it got really odd; a whole section full of old TV and film cameras and cinematic projection equipment from the 1890s upwards, with a chunk dedicated to Daguerreotypes and Louis Le Prince, for example. Le Prince, by the way, is a fascinating character. He didn't die, he vanished. Then I walked round a corner and found a small cinema.

No, seriously. Tilt-up seats, a little booth, and a silver screen with curtains across. I perhaps should mention that there was just me in the museum at this point, me and all the staff waiting for 5pm to roll 'round. So I was looking at this odd arrangement of stuff, when a little man, deaf in both ears, came over and started talking to me about why I was there, and where I was from, and so on, and then said "shall I put the film on?" and there was a film; 15 minutes of clips from silent slapstick black & white comedies, from the Keystone studios. Surreal? Yes. Being by myself in this little box cinema watching 1918 policemen dropping from a laundry chute into waiting cars was very odd.

The industrial galleries were hardly less odd. There were plaques everywhere with people's names on, and I was failing to work out why until I saw this:

I was pretty sure that the mills didn't put little clay heads on their bobbins. I realised that the plaques related to pieces of installed artwork - probably from a final year show - that were scattered all over the museum. Bless 'em. I was instantly enchanted by some of the more obvious pieces - those heads in particular made me grin - and promptly went back to see if I could spot the ones I'd missed. Alas: no. But I did find this:

which is equally as enchanting, although perhaps a little more peculiar.

Finally, there was an engine shed, filled with heavy chunks of metal used for pulling or pushing things. One side was filled with locomotives, including the now cooling down Henry (he made little pops and gasps as his boiler was expelling the remnants of the steam), and I spotted a sign on the wall that should be the motto of as many public bodies as you could possibly imagine:

Or maybe a CD cover. Hm.

The Mill is a seriously peculiar place; I like its eccentricities and being there by myself gave me a peculiar sense of responsibility, and the installations are wonderful if a little difficult to spot. Again, another place I'd be happy to drag people, if they understood the innate sense of fun the place has. It could be a thoroughly dull-and-worthy place, but somehow it is anything but.

And that concludes my writeup of my day exploring Leeds Museums. I did 5, and for those of you keeping score that means I have 4 LCC museums left, plus a wodge of others that is still somewhat in flux. Thanks for reading thus far :)

Day 181, 010909, part 3

2009-09-09T03:31:00.000-07:00

Right, where was I? Oh, yes.

After Lotherton Hall I was keen to carry on with my museum trips, and given I was quite close to the ring road thought the best place would be Kirkstall, for Abbey House and the Abbey itself. Although it was approaching lunchtime I thought I could fit in the two before needing to get some food, so made reasonable time getting there and parked up in the big car park next to Abbey House.

The last time I stopped at Abbey House was about five years ago, when we - that's Angela, Iain, Chris, Sarah and myself - went on a hard hat tour of the Abbey, and the museum was the meeting point. Didn't go in, which was probably remiss of me, as the museum is utterly, utterly barking and fun at the same time. It is a lovely building, the gatehouse to the Abbey, and now contains a somewhat peculiar pair of cobbled victorian streets, complete with skies, shops, undertakers, and cramped artisan cottages lifted brick-by-brick from Beeston back in the day. No kidding, this place would freak me the hell out if I was even remotely out of it for whatever reason.

The main street has a boozer at the end, a hatters, grocery, all sorts of shops. There's a barrow, and if you look carefully, some electric fans, all the rage in 1887.

The back alley was very different; it's designed to make you think about the juxtaposition between worlds in Victorian England.

The undertakers is here, as is the Sunday school and barbershop, with an interesting plaque about washerwomen, and how husbands would buy mangles as presents for their wives, just in case they became unable to work (or died) so their wives could take in washing to keep the wolves at bay.

Upstairs is a gallery of children's toys, the Tuke Map, and a small collection of local art influenced by Atkinson Grimshaw, which is deserving of more close study than I had time for. Also, the original artist skteches for the Town Hall; somewhat different to the reality, despite being done only three years before completion.

Popping over the road to the Abbey was a no-brainer. It has been many years since I'd had a good poke around Kirkstall Abbey, and it has changed quite a lot since then. The chapterhouse is now the entrance to the Abbey proper, and there's big fences around it to stop unauthorised access. Properly laid out routes exist, and all the really dangerous bits have signs on informing you that it is probably not a good idea to go scrambling over this loose brickwork or into these former drainage tunnels. I never tire of having a good look around ruined abbeys, and this is no exception, despite my first visit here being over 15 years ago.

There was a photoshoot going on off to one side and I had to be careful not to wander into shot. But the place is really photogenic and makes a fantastic backdrop to photograph against.

After I'd taken in enough crumbling architecture I decided to grab some food and go to my last museum, Armley Mills.

Day 185, 050909: Photocamp

2009-09-08T01:52:00.000-07:00

September 5th 2009 was Photocamp09 in Bradford.

Thanks to various reasons I was very late packing my bag, and heading off to the National Media Museum for a day of discussing all forms of photography in Photocamp.

Yes, I arrived halfway through the keynote speech, missing the opening remarks, comments about missing people and the introductions (sorry, Jon). The keynote was presented by Miss Aniela (arguably nsfw, if you work in a puritan church). Now, some of her photos are incredible, but she does seem to have a bit of a cult following, and even though she says things like "some people may describe me as pretty and if that helps my print sales, I'm fine with that" I can't help but wonder if she would have a similar following if she took fewer photos in her pants. I know the techniques she's used to do some of the photos, too; I daresay that if I was selfportraiting like that I wouldn't get a fiftieth of the hits she gets, despite the wow factor of apparent levitation. Still, she makes a living from it, so who am I to comment. The speech was quite interesting, to be fair, and she did a good job of saying "at least my photos tell a story, unlike these" - examples - " where the photographer seemed to spend more time writing the copy that explains the photograph than actually taking it" which is something we can all relate to.

The keynote over, we had the group shot, then dispersed up some stairs to the conference suite. Where the a/c was buggered. Never mind! I had to find the room I was giving my pinhole workshop. Locked! So we started late, and there were a lot of people wanting to do this; I counted fifteen people (although I did need two goes at this), each making cameras from matchboxes, and I think it went pretty well; I found it hard to explain some of the bits, but everybody got there in the end, and it was a real pleasure to see people wandering around the museum with their little white-and-black cameras, taking shots of things. I even made it onto the NMM's blog :)

I stayed in the same room for Rick's talk on "how to make money from photography", an interesting talk on self-promotion and flogging your wares, and then got a breath of fresh air before heading off to lunch with Dave and Alex; a veggie curry buffet on Forster Sq, very tasty with some of the best chapatis I'd had in ages - you really shouldn't go to lunch in Bratfud and have anything other than a curry. The afternoon was the second of Natalie's sessions where I learned a little more about compositing, and then the print swap (I gave away a copy of Wastwater and took away someone's Anthony Gormley at Crosby sunset shot), then I had to shift the car, then I was up again, talking about Open Leeds, a project I've been working on that takes publically-owned data (specifically, OOC photographic archives held by local government bodies) but inaccessable due to having a shocking UI or some other faffy access layer, and makes it more accessable. I got a lot of interest from that, which was nice. The person who was on after me was talking about digital panoramas, something I'm interested in, and I thoroughly enjoyed his talk. Neil uses Hugin rather than Autostitch; I've had trouble with Hugin in the past because it doesn't like beach scenes and throws a wobbly whenever presented with lots of open, similar space, but apparently that's been fixed in more recent versions. And, to be fair, Hugin does give you acres more control than autostitch.

There was no closing session, no "thanks for coming"; it was all a bit messy at the end. Lots of people went to the pub (and, indeed, came back on the Sunday), but I wasn't able to think about alcohol by this point and just went home. A good day, but there were a few niggly bits that could have been done a bit better. I understand why we didn't have a closing session (the only space big enough was being used by actual paying customers watching a film), and the a/c was out of our control, but the print swap was a bit chaotic, there wasn't really any space to mingle, and there were too many sessions going on that I wanted to attend, but couldn't! We'll see what happens next year.

Also, I took two cameras with me (and helped build a further 15), and didn't take any photos at all. None. How daft is that?

Anyway, this isn't a thing per se, but it's a nifty bit of stuff that kicked off the whole Exposure Leeds thing, so is technically part of task 85, I suppose. And the Open Leeds thing is part of my volunteering project, (#20) which will start gearing up a little more soon.

Fun!

Day 181, 010909, part 2

2009-09-03T03:05:00.001-07:00

The Discovery Centre was enormous fun, and set me up for the rest of the day. I was in need of some breakfast by this point, so tried to find the closest museum to where I was, Thwaite Mills. Unfortunately I completely missed the turning due to the road signs being a bit confusing and me being a bit of a muppet, so rather than turn back I thought I'd head off to Lotherton instead.

Lotherton is best reached by following the road signs off the A1(M); just follow the brown signs and you'll be happy. Driving through some fantastic countryside with woods and parkland and excellent driving roads, with a great sense of "estate" to one side and "farm" to the other, was very pleasant indeed, and the hall entrance was well signposted with plenty of notice (although, the sign is starting to get a bit overgrown and will need cutting back soon). Parking was £3.60, which gave access to the bird sanctuary (more on this in a bit) and the estate and grounds. A toasted teacake and a cuppa in the cafe was very welcome - the cafe is lovely, by the way, and the catering in all the LCC museums is done very well by the same contractor - so after a bit of recuperation I was able to investigate the hall.

Originally a 12th Centrury village, the only remnants of which are the chapel (a lovely building but not terribly photogenic), the hall was the family home of the Gascoines, although they rarely lived there before this century, living instead at Parlington Hall just down the road (flattened in 1950). I found this out watching a short film with bizzare editing and no captions at the start of the hall ("sorry, no photography and you'll have to leave your rucksack with us", along with a further £2.40 entry fee for Leeds Card holders), which referenced the Barnbow plot (which was something about overthrowing Charles II, but seems to have been overlooked by Wikipedia) and the Irish parliament, amongst many other things.

The hall nowadays serves as an interesting but typical stately home (cracking rooms, brilliant main hall, no kitchens) that houses a few of LM&G's pottery collections. One of the rooms is an "oriental gallery" that has Qilins, Celadons and - amusingly - an opium pipe purchased from a "Save the Children Fund" shop in 1970. There is the original The Irish House of Commons by Francis Wheatley in the dining room, and a gallery upstairs shows some photographs of interesting tunnels and cellars (and led me to the National Monuments Record, something I had no idea existed before now).

One thing to mention; unlike the National Trust -type stately home, where everything is cordoned off and woe betides anybody who Steps Over The Red Rope, there are very few cordoned off bits in Lotherton. It's almost as if you're encouraged to poke around the rooms. Don't touch anything (of course!) but there's nothing to stop you looking under the pianos or getting a closer look at the bookshelves. I heartily approve of this. People aren't as careless as many curators would have you believe, and getting up close to the objects on display gives you a better feel for the environment. About the only thing you were actively discouraged from doing was sitting in the wrong seats, and how did they do this? By putting a sprig of holly on the chair. It was a great syntax - you can sit in chairs without holly on, you can't sit in the ones that'll put spikes into your backside. I loved that, and more places should be encouraged to do similar things.

Outside is very pleasant; the formal gardens are well laid out, have some nice plants and there's a temple towards the back of the gardens.

There's a deer park, some interesting woods, walks signposted all over the place which would take in a good afternoon's strolling, and a bird sanctuary. I was in a bit of a rush, and I'm not a huge bird lover, so didn't spend that much time in there, but they had some lovely iridescent tropical birds, plenty of flamingos and cranes, parrots, owls (I do, admittedly, love owls) and vultures. I didn't photograph any because of the time thing, but I will be going back to Lotherton to spend a bit more time poking around the grounds. The whole place is a very nice way of spending an afternoon with kids, parents and friends with a picnic, and if we're ever stuck for a "what shall we do today?" -type thing, would be happy to drag people out here.

Day 180 redux

2009-09-02T09:12:00.000-07:00

The book I forgot the title of was Carl Hiaasen's Basket Case. Because of this book, I've refused to pick up any other of Carl Hiaasen's ouvre, despite people saying "oh, you like Chris Brookmyre! You'll love this" at me. Erm, no.

Day 182 wordle

2009-09-02T08:10:00.000-07:00

From Screen Captures

Day 180, 310809

2009-09-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

(Not in order, sorry)

The bookshelves were starting to look desperately overcrowded, so a mini clearout happened over the weekend and a pile went to the usual recipient, Oxfam Books in Headingley. I managed to get rid of another six.

Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith. Originally given to me as a stocking filler by my mother way back in the mists of time, I never really got on with Highsmith. Of course, it's probably an out-of-print work of genius that'll sell for whole pounds on eBay, but never mind.
The Chimney Sweeper's Boy by Barbara Vine. This was a TSP book they sent me when I forgot to fill in the form saying "I don't want any books, please". It was ok, but was never really fussed about it. Having books foisted on me tends to leave me in an ambivalent state, and less likely to read them.
Yes, ok, I admit it, I had a copy of The Da Vinci Code, and I actually enjoyed it on first reading. Second reading made me throw it across the room, and I don't own a copy any more.
Modern-day writers doing "new" classic novels are, basically, fanfic writers with a better agent. In my opinion. This opinion was not altered by Sebastian Faulk's Devil May Care. It was a known author's name away from languishing on a website full of James Bond slash.
I didn't like Mark Gatiss' The Versuvius Club. Just... not that fussed by it. It wasn't bad, per se, but Gatiss writes better stuff for screen than the page.

There was one other as well, but I can't remember what that was! That's disappointing, although obviously didn't impinge on my thoughts very much. Anyway, I'm up to 17 books donated, which is... ok. Ish. Need to try harder, I guess.

Day 181, 010909

2009-09-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

I had a day of pottering about museums as part of task #57; this is part one of the writeup for this day. It was a seriously good - but busy - day.

Tuesday was one of those odd days off. It meant I could take S to the train station, then go my own way for a day and see where the wind took me. The plan was to see as many LCC-owned museums as I could, as detailed on their Museums and Galleries page, and I'd booked a trip around the Discovery Centre at 9:30 to start it all off. I was so anxious to get started, of course, that I was half an hour early, so I parked up (and found a bloody brilliant photographic subject that I'll have to shoot one day, while trying to find a parking space; an enormous tower, industrial complex, for what I think is industrial sand or glass) and went for a wander down to the river and around Clarence Dock. The river was looking particularly pleasant that morning, and there was a narrowboat-dweller who'd chosen to dry his socks (possibly washed in the Aire, bu-dum *tschh*) in the air.

Poking around Clarence Dock was interesting; I found out where the church that looks like Batman actually was (I can see it every morning on my bus into work, and it always reminds me of Batman), and there's some new shiny balls that just demand to be photographed from interesting angles.

There's a cookware shop there I keep meaning to visit, but forget that it exists. Hm. Anyway, the Discovery centre beckoned.

Alas, I forgot to ask about photography inside the centre - indeed, I forgot to take my camera out of my pocket, I was so startled by it. A purpose-built warehouse for the collections owned by LM&G, it's a huge room at 16°C, with three smaller rooms for document and photographic storage. They have large objects, but not many bigger than pianos; the star is a life-sized giant squid model made for an exhibition a few years back, but they have no need for it now and can't bear to throw it out. It hangs from the ceiling. Most of the collections are quite small. A selection of things confiscated by customs, like butterflies and turtles as souveniers (both of which are illegal to import). Some spears, and other arms and armour that the Royal Armouries don't really need. Clothing from house estates, porcelein (some of which is really horrible), board games, chairs, stuffed animals, victorian showers, cookers, random bits of rock, a fantastic geology collection including meteorites (I got to hold something that had come from outer space!). A previous curator had an interest in molluscs, so out of their fairly large natural history collection all the shellfish are incredibly well organised and the aim is to get everything in the store that well catalogued. They have formerly private lepidoptery and beetle and insect collections, including a case I randomly opened that was full of hymenoptera, with special emphasis on bees.

They also have photo archives that are uncatalogued. Now, I'm a huge fan of photo archives, and what they have are industrial archives, personal photo collections and a lot of stuff that isn't in WYJA or Leodis, such as the building of Headingley and LS6, social history stuff that I want to get my hands on. And all I have to do is get in touch with the curators. It's mostly uncatalogued, so I may offer myself as an intern, perhaps building a DB and front end to all this, inputting it, and plugging it into OpenLeeds. The thought of it gives me damp palms and cottonmouth.

The people there are lovely, too. Very friendly, exceptionally helpful and appreciative of thanks. If you live in Leeds and want to spend half an hour wandering about the things they don't show to the public you could do much worse than phoning them up and asking for a quick shufty.

My research has told me there are 9 LCC museums, plus the Thackray, Armouries, technically Harwood House is a museum, Horsforth Village Museum is on the list, as is the Otley Civic, although I expect the last two are a bit pokey. Still, they have LS postcodes, so count. At this point on the journey I am only 1/9th of my way through the LCC museums, but by the end of the day I hoped to be considerably further...

(to be continued)

Not a thing, but fun nonetheless

2009-08-17T01:40:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning I headed off into town to learn how to do screen printing at Arts@Trinity. Holy Trinity is, well, a church. Consecrated and everything. It has a crypt, and odd gantries, and space where you wouldn't expect space, and a cafe. And because all the buildings around it have been knocked down to build an enormous shopping centre it's standing by itself in the middle of town for the first time in decades. So I wandered in, found the group (who were in the vestry, the only room that could be blacked out) and the tutor (Louise) who were mixing emulsion.

Ok, this is how the process goes:

Mix some gloppy stuff with a silver halide to make it photosensitive.
spread a thin, thin layer of gloppy stuff onto some mesh that's glued into a frame.
let everything dry.
print off your image onto transparency. (I used the T&C logo, and because there was space for two I did a Seal of Rassilon, just for geek points.)
Put the image onto the photosensitive mesh, and turn a light on. Leave to expose for 15 minutes.

So at this point the wheels sort of fell off the day. We had one exposure unit so were doing screens one at a time, and the first person to expose his screen went into the vestry after the 15 minutes to discover the bulb had blown. We had no way of knowing when the bulb had blown, but one thing was for sure: we had no spare. So while Peter (his name was Peter) was washing his screen (the next step; scrub the screen, and the emulsion that was exposed remains on the screen, and the blacked out stuff washes out) I was deemed the most capable person in the group, so went with the organiser to find a new bulb.

The organiser was from Wakey, a nice lady called Helen, who didn't know the Leeds one-way system so I was giving directions to Maplin - which was hilarious, and involved me shouting "no! not that way!" as we were driving into incoming traffic a bit. Maplin didn't have the 1KW bulbs we needed, so we went to B&Q, which was quite a bit further away. Alas! No bulbs there either. Then I had a brainwave; Ring, the factory lighting shop, carries all sorts of whizzy kit that you never find anywhere else, so I directed Helen there, and joy! They had a bulb (we bought two) and even fitted it for us. Back to Trinity, having been out doing this for 45 minutes.

We got the exposure unit back to normal, put my screen on and exposed my images. Peter's, unfortunately, hadn't worked properly because they'd not exposed for long enough. But, mine did work. Here's my screen:

And everybody elses worked too, more or less.

So, when your screen has been washed and dried, you have lunch. Lunch was lovely, provided by Helen and eaten on trestle tables in front of the altar. The only space big enough to set out the tables we needed was up on the dais, and so we were sat there, munching tasty pie, looking at the stained glass and plasterwork. It was a somewhat surreal moment; thanks to my Catholicism I have a "churches should be quiet, contemplative places" thing, and this was anything but.

Once lunch was over we tidied up, and started printing. First, tape up any clear bits on the screen that you don't want ink to go through. Next, mix your colours. We were using System 3 inks, which are basically acrylic paints mixed with more gloopy stuff labelled "screen printing medium".

Mix the colour you want in a paper cup, then guestimate how much ink is in there and add the same quantity of medium, so if you're mixing a purple and have four squidges of crimson and one of cobalt blue, add five squidges of medium. This stuff dries quite quickly once it's spread thin, but in the cup it'll last for a while. Put whatever you're printing on underneat the screen, put some ink onto the bottom of the image, and using a squeegee spread the ink over the image. Then force the squeegee back over the image to scrape as much ink as you can off, then shift the screen out of the way as quick as you can, to stop the ink bleeding through your nice crisp edges. Voila! done.

We had some quite complex images from other people; one chap printed line drawings of a 1980s supercar, and a quite complex lion image. Another chap had a high-contrast monotone selfportrait, there were some self-penned works, and someone had a book of ancient greek designs that other people took images from (an owl was quite popular). We practised on some paper first.

Then we moved onto T-shirts if we had them. I only brough three t-shirts with me, so ran out quite quickly. Thankfully there was plenty of time so I ran out to get more, which I also ran through in no time at all. The problem then was drying them sufficiently to be able to take them home. We ended up using the pews as clothes horses.

The screens obviously had to be washed between different colours being applied, but also had to be washed if left for a couple of minutes without having ink applied, as ink would dry on the screen and cause splotches on the material. I was very impressed at the resilience of the screen; it stood up to quite a bit of scrubbing as we tried to get ink out that had set hard. There were buckets of water for washing stuff up in, and it was a good job there was tarpaulin on the floor!

Eventually, we were done. A quick tidy up, wrapping the still damp shirts in paper, and putting the tables away, it was like we'd never been there. Because I mentioned pinholes and matchboxes during the day, as well as Photocamp and Exposure Leeds (which is where I originally heard of the workshop) I've been invited to run a similar session sometime after September, and I'm looking forwards to that already.

I have to say; the organisation was perfectly fine, we had plenty of time and didn't feel rushed, and Louise, the tutor, did a fine job and was endlessly patient with us all. As part of an arts project called Trans=Send the unused prints were going to be used as envelopes and sent to a similar church in Sunderland; a great use of resources, I feel.

Results? Oh, I'm happy. I've learned a new technique, I have another thing I want to stuff into a studio (I might just bite the bullet and ask for space at Temple Mill), I met some fun people and I came away with whizzy t-shirts.

Result.

Day 159, 100809 Wordle

2009-08-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

Whoops! I miscounted and thought that 120+30 was 160. Foolish boy, can't perform basic arithmetic. So, have a Wordle that's 9 days late. Next one will be on Day 180.

From Screen Captures

Day 159, 100809

2009-08-10T07:35:00.000-07:00

Before I talk about this weekend, I just want to mention walkies from last Sunday (the 2nd) a bit. That particular Sunday I was up bright and early to go walking with Matt, Cathy and Mavis in the North Yorkshire Moors.

We met Matt at the Moorcock in Langdale End, possibly the most peculiar pub I've ever been in, and set off up a hill. Unfortunately Matt had to turn back about a third of the way in, and Mavis went back with him; Cathy and I carried on. It was a bit muddy, there were a lot of flying bitey things (I was bitten on the shoulder; it looks like I'm growing a second head), and at the turn-around point we had to ford a river and navigate through a whopping collection of of trail bikes all screaming around us; we couldn't find the path amongst all the routes the bikes had carved out of the ground and nearly lost a footbridge. Still, it was a pleasant walk and we made fairly decent time, picking Mavis up back at the pub (where I had a very tasty treacle sponge & custard).

This is the route:

The colour of the track refers to my heartrate at the time; the redder it gets, the more I was exercising. As you can see, there weren't many points where my bpm were particularly high, partially because it was ridiculously muddy and impossible to move very quickly. But, the views were nice:

and there was that really odd interface where two rivers, one clear but peaty, the other murky because of bikes churning up silt, met and mingled:

A good walk, overall, but probably not one to repeat.

So, this weekend saw a somewhat different walk. I had to be up at stupid o'clock on Saturday, S had to be up at less-stupid-but-still-very-early-o'clock, because we had trains to catch; S to London (to watch Phedre), me to Horton-in-Ribblesdale. Train departing at 6:19. Getting the train to Horton is really, really nice; it takes slightly less time than driving there, it's much more relaxing, a return costs about the same as petrol+parking for one (if there's two or more it's cheaper to drive, but what the hey) and it takes you through some fab countryside that normally you can't see because there's a bloody lorry ahead that's taking all your concentration. Plus lovely little towns that make you think "ooh! Can I jump off here and have a look around?".

Anyway, I got to Horton a mere 15 minutes late (points failure at Skipton) and once I'd sorted out my footwear and GPS, I started walking. As far as footwear went, I was in KSB trainers and lightweight hiking socks. Those socks are the most comfortable items of foot clothing I've ever worn; just putting them on felt fantastic. The trainers were because this was all about as fast a time as I could get, and they have better grip than my boots. Well, that may not be true, but I trust the grip on my trainers more than the boots, and I like to feel the rocks under my toes. Coming down P-y-G a couple of weeks ago was a bit hairy, not least because I didn't trust my boots enough, couldn't be sure of my stability and couldn't flex my feet enough, and was thinking "wish I had my trainers" all the way down the horrible rock scrambly bit on the south-western face.

Yes, I was going to Pen-Y-Ghent again, this time on my tod. When we - Mavis, Cathy, Matt and myself, the usual walking bunch - did it last our time was 3h 33m, and I reckoned I could knock the 33m off if I was sure of my footing and felt like running in places. Here's my trip:

See the red bits? Serious exercise moments. There's three bits on the downhill where I really was running flat out and keeping my footing, with a HR over 168bpm. I'm quite pleased with that. This time, rather than go up the steady face and down the startling bit, I decided to go up the startling face (which is a killer on the legs and lungs) and down the steady bit. I was passed by four people on the initial climb, two of which were fell runners, one was a 3-peaker (don't forget, it was only 8am) and one was a bit of a pikey kid carrying nought but a bottle of Buxton water^[1]. On the rocky startling bit I started passing people who were having trouble (thanks to my trainers I was actually having fun), and got a few nice snaps on the way.

(yes, the summit is in cloud. That was very changeable).

And on the summit? Were the views better than last time?

No.

But on the downhill, the cloud started lifting in a really pleasant way:

Clouds forming patterns on the fields. Lovely.

So I made it down, running for quite a lot of the way, and stopped the clock. My time? 2h 14m. I'd knocked an hour and twenty minutes off. Now, I'm very pleased with this; I would have been happy with under 3 hours, but this was excellent. However, now I know I can do it that quickly I want to knock the time down further; I want to get back to Horton under two hours; if the trains are running to time I can get off the train at 7:24 and get back on a train to Leeds at 9:21 if I'm quick enough, and be back in Leeds for 10:30. What sort of morning constitutional is that? "Just off to climb a mountain, dear. I'll be back for elevenses." As a heartstarter, I can't think of many things finer, or more civilised.

Saying that, though: when I got back home I was shattered. The rest of the day was spent snoozing, reading GPTF^[2] and fussing the cat who was wondering where the other twolegs had gone. And filling the 'fridge. And on Sunday my thighs were aching something rotten.

Anyway; I'm going to count task #96 as being complete, although I'm certainly going to be doing that route again to try getting my time down. 2hrs 14m is a good start, but I can certainly do better. I can add one to my walking with Matt total, too, despite his having to turn back.

1: On the downhill I found that bottle, screwed up and on the path, picked it up and nearly caught up to the kid (but missed him by maybe a quarter of a mile) where I would have presented it to him.
2: Guilty Pleasure Trashy Fiction, in my case Chris Brookmyre.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (94+/365, stalling, not sure where I am with this), #13, #26, #37 (4/<34), #60 (11/50), #66 (72/250), #67 (1/>1), #81 (6/250) #85 (5/4) #87, #88, #97 (2/8), #100 (3/>3)
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+), #96 (2/>1)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 10
Remaining: 91

Day 144, 260709

2009-07-26T02:32:00.000-07:00

Bad Mike, no biscuit. I've not updated for nearly a fortnight, so need to sort that out.

What's been happening? Well, getting faintly squiffy with friends (#56) is coming along, and there might be a part two to that in mid-September. The volunteering project (#20) has been kicked off and I'll be writing about that after the Bradford Photocamp (come along if you want to hear about it at Photocamp, as I'll be giving a talk on that and on pinhole cameras, slides will be linked in here after the event), but I've been having many meetings on this and learning all sorts of whizzy new stuff. Brewing ginger beer has occupied some of my headspace too (#50) but because we don't drink fizzy pop there's a shortage of storage vessels. I'll fix that in a day or two, though. Also, S got a piece of paper saying she has an MA. It's not part of this exercise, but still a very good thing.

Also upcoming: the local NHS PCT AGM is in September. For various reasons I'm on the list, so I might well take a day off and attend that (if we're not on holiday) because delegates get to wander about the Thackray Medical Museum (part of #57) as well as poke our noses into how the PCT is run. There's a huge redesign of Tea & Cake underway, and there's even a podcast up there now. It's not writing more (#58), but it's an improvement. Alas, I missed out on a chance of a backstage tour at the WYP, but there will be other opportunities. Cake comp (#95) is in October, and T&C will be involved with it, somehow.

There's other stuff as well, but this'll do for now.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (94+/365, stalling, not sure where I am with this), #13, #26, #37 (4/<34), #60 (11/50), #66 (66/250), #67 (1/>1), #81 (4/250) #85 (5/4) #87, #88, #97 (1/8), #100 (3/>3)
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+), #96 (1/>1)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 9
Remaining: 92

Day 131, 130709 (pt 2)

2009-07-13T08:07:00.000-07:00

Oh, and something else: I've made a start on writing letters rather than emailing people (#67). My Grandmother, bless 'er, has broken her arm so I wrote her an 8-page letter talking about my recent adventures in Telly (which I've not talked about on here yet) to take her mind off it. I can't think of a better reason than that, to be honest.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (94+/365, stalling, not sure where I am with this), #13, #26, #37 (4/<34), #60 (11/50), #67 (1/>1), #68, #66 (66/250), #81 (1/250) #85 (5/4) #87, #88, #97 (1/8), #100 (3/>3)
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 9
Remaining: 92

Day 131, 130709

2009-07-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

Walking in to work is easier than walking home. I want to get home as quickly as I can, and psychologically that means getting the bus, despite the bus stop being about 1/4 of the way home and I'd have to wait up to 30 minutes for the right bus anyway. Walking home takes maybe 10 minutes longer than getting to the bus stop, waiting for 20 minutes and having to battle through the traffic around Asda House. Walking in takes maybe 10 minutes longer than getting to the bus stop, waiting for a bus that never comes, getting on the next one that turns up - which deposits me in such a way I have to walk an extra half-mile to get to werk - which is promptly overtaken by the one I intended to get, and so on. Ultimately, I should just walk to-and-from every day that I can't be bothered togging up in cycling gear.

Even though my route varies slightly from day-to-day (I have proof of this, but as it identifies both where I work and where I live, I won't be making those GPS traces publically available just yet), coming into work is still sufficiently early that I can walk most of it in a zenlike trance, semimeditative, with a couple of subprocesses stopping me from walking into traffic (the routes I take are deliberately light on cars) and people. My mind starts thinking of random stuff, which I'm very happy to let it do.

The other morning, my branes started churning out Lewis Carroll, as a response to certain items on my To-Do list. No, I don't know why either. But, I was reminded of the chain of Belgian chocolate shops called Leodis, and decided that calling my chocolate company that would be foolish, and really it should be Loidis anyway (which sounds wrong), and if I were going to take the latin route the best I could come up with was Cambodunum (which is arguably wrong, but without a time machine or a cache of documents yet to be discovered...). Now, Cambodunum Chocolates does have a ring to it, but whether it's a good ring is open to interpretation. Loidis Chocolates is not going to float. What about Holbeck... and so on.

Anyway, the point is that walking to-and-from werk gives me 7.2 miles (ish, depending on the route it can be over or under) in a day, which over 4 days is 29 miles. I walk into town at lunchtimes, which would give me another 4 unrecorded miles a week, so over any given week where I walk at least 4 days, I can tick off one of my 46 weeks as part of Task #4. I'm going to include runs in with this as well as I gear myself up to the 5k, just because it makes the maths easier (and I can record those miles). Last week I walked a little over 35 miles on the daily commute and a few trips to the supermarket or lunch, so I'm happy to get one of my weeks of #4 out of the way. One down, 45 to go... and I'm already into this week.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (94+/365, stalling, not sure where I am with this), #4 (1/46) #13, #26, #37 (4/<34), #60 (11/50), #68, #66 (82/250), #81 (1/250) #85 (5/4) #87, #88, #97 (1/8), #100 (3/>3)
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 9
Remaining: 92

Day 125, 070709

2009-07-07T02:28:00.000-07:00

This isn't really part of Task 15, but I'm going to add it as part of the preamble to that task. Partially because, well, it was an outstanding meal in lovely company, but also because this place really ought to have a Michelin star, and it's astounding that it doesn't.

Last Friday we went for dinner at Anthony's (arranged by our good friend Tom, and I can't thank him enough).

I'm still wondering how to write this up, though. The photos of the food are in a flickr set, but they don't do it justice.

Basically: the food was stunning. Delicious, beautifully presented, never quite what you were expecting... surprising food. I decided to forego my vege/pescetarianism and just take whatever food looked great, so I went for a soft-shelled crab starter (fascinating, very tasty, with a slightly coleslaw-based addition that was still tasty and microherbs), monkfish with tomato, chili and chorizo tapioca, and a banana cake with incredibly tasty chocolate ice cream and - this was odd - a mozarella veloute. There were amuse-geules (a duck confit with foam that tasted like Wotsits) and pre desserts (odd quince pear/pistacio/pea thing that was almost certainly supposed to be a pun) as well, and a cheeseboard containing many tasty fermented milk products. S had an onion risotto that was a work of beauty - it tasted like great french onion soup, only as a risotto.

Deconstructing everything would take quite some time, and as I wasn't taking notes during dinner - how rude would that have been? - I think I'll save it until the next time we go. Yes, it was good enough to warrant a return visit. This trip out has made me wonder precisely how nifty a Michelin restaurant needs to be (although, given most of the starred restaurants outside France are in capital cities, perhaps "proximity to an airport" is one of the criteria). Looking forwards to completing this task, just to find out.

Day 121, 030709

2009-07-03T01:19:00.000-07:00

You know how you get into the habit of doing something, then all of a sudden you stop doing it, and then it takes an age to get back into the habit? Last year I was cycling to work, and then in August I stopped because it was getting too hot, and then all of a sudden we're 11 months further on and I'd taken the bike out twice in that time, and not at all this year. This is not a good state of affairs.

I love my bike; it's a Specialized hybrid with slick-ish (but wide) tyres, an insanely lightweight frame given the size of it, and lovely shifters that haven't given me a moment's gyp since I've had them. And, despite not even being looked at for six months, all I had to do this morning was give the chain a blast of WD-40 and pump up the tyres. Hop on, and bam, I'm at werk without having to wait for a bus or be tempted by the gamut of coffee shops en route.

The route in from home is fairly straightforward: up a bit of a hill, right a bit, down a HUGE hill that gets me touching 30mph if there's no traffic on it, under the motorway, past the huge office complexes, under the train station, up Park Row, over Millennium Square and up the road past the hospital. Done, 17 minutes door to door. Homewards takes slightly longer, as I have to go up the huge hill. That gets wearisome, but it's tolerable, just. Because of traffic flow I have to go through Holbeck, but it doesn't add much extra time (unlike the hill).

Still, I'm going to count home->werk->home as One Trip Out on the bike, which means I only have 249 left to go before I can count Task 81 completed.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (94+/365, stalling, not sure where I am with this), #13, #26, #37 (4/<34), #60 (11/50), #68, #66 (66/250), #81 (1/250) #85 (5/4) #87, #88, #97 (1/8), #100 (3/>3)
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 9
Remaining: 92

Day 120, 020709 wordle

2009-07-02T02:12:00.001-07:00

From Wordles

Day 119, 010709

2009-07-02T01:16:00.000-07:00

Exposure Leeds #5 was last night (task 85). Again, a pretty enjoyable use of an evening, but... lacking, somewhat. There were a lot of newbies there, and a bunch of them left at 8:30 (possibly because they were expecting it to finish at 8:30, like wot I woz, and I'm categorically not a newbie) when we still had quite a bit to go through. Anyway.

I was on the door again (although Gav likes hitting the big green button, so I left him to it, mostly), getting people to sign in and nametag up, and hanging the prints people had brought for the Flash Printswap (bring a print, get a post-it, give the print to us. We hang all the prints, hidden away, and at the end of the evening we do a grand reveal and people can put their post-it on another print, and take that away with them once all the prints are claimed - and I say you can). The quality of the prints were excellent, in some cases considerably better than last time.

Talks: a decent one on macro photography, although a bit flat did have some interesting technical detail, some of which was slightly incorrect, but never mind, it makes no difference to the results. I'm minded to repost my talk from EL2 on "The Dark Art of Exposure". The second talk was about travel photography, and whilst it was very interesting (and I really like Ade and his work) it was about 15 photos too long. This was a thing, really - Jon let the talks go on for a bit too long, so we were a bit rushed at the end. And, I had to really struggle to hear the speakers. Now, I know I'm having problems with my hearing at the moment - struggling to differentiate background noise from useful sounds, particularly in my left ear - but I don't think I was the only one thinking they were a bit quiet.

Finishing at 9:30 is a bit late, though. Could be a minority opinion, but 3 hours is pushing it.

All that aside, though: I came out of there thinking about how I could get going with some macro photography, and an inspirational evening is always a good evening.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (94+/365, stalling, not sure where I am with this), #13, #26, #37 (4/<34), #60 (11/50), #68, #66 (66/250), #85 (5/4) #87, #88, #97 (1/8), #100 (3/>3)
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 9
Remaining: 92

Day 108, 200609

2009-06-24T02:21:00.000-07:00

Task #97 is "go walking with Matt at least 8 times." Matt and I are old friends - he was the fourth or fifth person I met when I went to University - and we used to go walking a couple of times a year. That dropped off, as these things do, but we stay in touch and still go for the odd stroll every now and then, between bouts of socialising. After a walk last October (ie, outside the scope of this project), we decided to do the Yorkshire Three Peaks, and needed to do some training runs. Unfortunately, life got in the way, and whilst we'd said "midsummer's day" for one of the walks, hopefully the full run, it turned out to be the first of our training runs, just one of the three.

When we said we'd do it, some other friends decided they wanted to come as well, which was great. I'm always up for more company when walking, as it means there's a greater chance of one of us making it back to civilisation.

Saturday was an early start, with Cathy and Mavis being taken to Horton-in-Ribblesdale for a stroll up Pen-Y-Ghent. Arriving in Horton was awful; although we'd planned to do this on the 20th months back, because it was close to the solstice and thus we'd have maximum daylight, it hadn't really occurred to us that other people would have the same idea. It was packed. We parked up in a field, and decamped to the caff where we waited for Matt to turn up. When we were all assembled there was a quick scout about the benches to see if there were any Devenish-Phibbs plaques, a trip to the loo (where I was bitten a few times by midges) and we were off.

There were steady streams of people going up and down the mountain. Because we were only doing one, I thought "let's take the easy route up" and led us along Horton Scar and along the backbone of the mountain. Everybody else was going to go to Brackenbottom and up the really steep bit which does involve some rock climbing, so we kept on meeting people on their way down. Stood at the bottom of the mountain, we could see a wave of rain crossing the valley and got our raincoats on just in time; the final stretch up the hill was done in cloud, and if it weren't for the occasional call out from the many teams of DoE expeditioneers we could have been the only people in the world, emerging blinking from the cloud into a world changed by the Singularity, or something more scary.

Downhill was awful; remind me in future to never do the route in that direction again. It means going up will kill us through exhaustion, but there were moments on the way down I thought we'd die through falling off. It was greasy underfoot, muddy on rocks worn smooth by hundreds of thousands of passing hiking boots, and there were a few unpleasant steps. Thankfully I didn't slip badly enough to fall off until it was safe to do so (but slip and fall over I did), but in future I'll wear KSB trainers and go on a nice, sunny day that's been preceeded by several other nice sunny days. And go up. I still want to set a speed time on that hill, so I may take a day off in July or August and see just how quickly I can do the round trip. As it was, we were 3h33m (GPS data will be forthcoming), and finished off the day with rhubarb crumble in the caff. Lovely to see the guys, as ever, and it was an absolute pleasure doing the trip with them. Next time: Matt sorts out an 8-mile route somewhere in the North Yorkshire moors. Should be fun!

Day 106, 180609

2009-06-18T07:50:00.000-07:00

About two months ago I started an archery course, as part of task #68. Signing up with South Leeds Archers for a six-week beginners course, the first of the year, I thought I'd consider the task completed when I'd finished the course, not just after the first lesson.

Eight weeks later, archery is over, done and dusted, and all that jazz. What have I learned from it?

1. How to string a recurve bow.

This is harder than it looks, partially because it's counterintuitive. Fitting the limbs to the body is also counterintuitive, because they go on the wrong way 'round. When New World continent-conquering heroes had run out of bullets, they picked up the bows of their fallen enemies, and promptly took their own eyes out because they didn't understand the technicalities of recurve bows, and I can see why. But, get your head around the whole "you're doing it backwards" thing, and it's fine.

2. Consistency is everything.

Seriously, for three weeks it was all about "get your arrows in a good grouping without thinking about the golds". Then we moved onto using sights, which changed the grip and position, and that really threw me for a week. But, they're right. Concentrate on getting the arrows in the same spot, every time, then we can work on moving where that spot is. Changing your position on the bow, even a tiny bit, can make a huge difference to where the arrow will strike. I spent a week not realising that I should be touching the bow string into my nose and under my chin, not just under my chin; having two reference points is a huge help.

3. This is a survival skill.

Someone put a picture of a squirrel up on a target one week. It freaked me out a little. Reminders that really, this is a method of killing something did make me take a step back, because I'm not mad on the whole taking life away thing (I get guilt killing greenfly on my roses, which probably makes me some sort of big girly wuss). There is a huge element of skill involved in this, and it's skill I like to have, but the fundamental reasons for having the skill in the first place is something I have to think about.

4. Archers are nice people.

Generally, yes, people who carry weapons are quite nice to other people who carry weapons. The South Leeds Archers are fun people to be around, although social skills aren't necessarily a high priority. Not unlike geeks, really.

5. Arrows hurt.

Dropping the arrow off the guide rail onto your hand makes you go "ow". Doing it twice in quick succession gives you something that looks like fang marks and bruises that'll last a week on the back of your hand just above the thumb. Forgetting to put a bracer on your arm and then not holding the bow quite right means you'll get a bruice on your forearm that stings a bit. Not wearing finger tabs means your fingerprints will be worn off by the end of the session and you'll spend the next week wondering why the skin on your fingers is flaking off. Thankfully, nobody shot me, so injury was restricted to those things.

6. What all those bristly bits on pro bows are.

Stablisers. They're there to add weight to the bow, to make it move less when you're holding it. Of course, you have a fine balancing act between the amount of weight you need to provide inertia, and the amount you can hold without giving way. I added a stabliser and my grouping became much tighter; they are useful things to have.

7. How these things are scored.

It can be nuts complicated. It can also be very simple. Decide early on which way you'd like it to be.

8. Yellow = gold.

No matter how many times you call it yellow, and no matter how much it looks like a primary colour, someone will always correct you and call the centre circles the gold.

9. I enjoy the sense of peace.

You have to concentrate when shooting. Really concentrate. I would have enjoyed it more, I think, if there weren't two kids on the course constantly talking (or arguing with their Dads about how much money they'd get for hitting the target). However, in the brief moments where they were keeping quiet I could feel my concentration narrowing to a fine focal point, just in front of the arrow tip or on the other side of the sight, and there was an almost zenlike quality to those moments which I enjoyed. Concentrating at that level for any amount of time was very therapeutic and I really appreciated those moments when they came. Invariably, those moments came on shots where I hit the gold. It felt right.

So, that's that. I enjoyed doing it, and it's a skill I appreciated learning, but I think I'm done with archery for the time being. I'll be glad to get my Friday evenings back, and not have to keep an eye on the weather (out of a six week course, two of those weeks were rained off and one cut short) quite so much. I may go back to it, and if I get the chance to shoot I'll certainly keep my eye in, but for the time being I'm done.

Unfortunately, I'm putting task 3 on hiatus. I'm not keeping up with my photo-a-day thing, and so I might have to change it to "take 365 photos that represent a year's worth of shots over the course of the experiment". We'll see; I might pick it up again where I left off, but the "consecutive days" element will probably fall by the wayside.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (94/365, stalling), #13, #26, #37 (2/<34), #60 (11/50), #68, #66 (61/250), #87, #88, #100 (3/>3)
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 9
Remaining: 92

Day 104, 160609

2009-06-16T02:51:00.000-07:00

Strictly speaking trauma isn't really what happened over the bottom half of last week, except in one particular incident. But to use the modern sense of "trauma" to mean "nerve-wracking" then yes, we had that by the bucketload. First, some background: my parents-in-law are somewhat disorganised, have a flexible approach to time, attract drama like a theatre company and my Mother-in-law (let's call her M*) has a serious wheat allergy so we have to be very careful with her diet, whereas my Father-in-law (G*) has had a laryngectomy and can only talk in a whisper, and only when he has a valve in his stoma.

Chronologically, let's go back to Wednesday. S headed to Brum during the afternoon, checked into her hotel, and awaited the parental arrival. The reason S was back in Brum was the public workshop, where professionals take on the writings from those engaged in the MPhil in Playwriting and put them on stage. S is one of those who had a play on (the one about bees, if you read the press release). In fact, S was the last play to be put on over the two days, Thursday and Friday, which could be seen as a great honour; the headline act, if you will. It was referred to as "the headliner" repeatedly by her classmates. On the other hand, it just gave her more time to get twitchy. Her folks were attending the whole public workshop, to see S's play and to observe the rest of the competition. However, they were using a satnav to get from Norf Norf London to Brum, and were travelling after work. G* apparently spent most of the trip flicking V-signs at the satnav whilst M* was trying to keep him calm and drive after a busy day at work. They get lost in Brum's one-way system, but eventually park in the Pallisaides and try to find their way to the hotel.

They can't. They get lost.

Eventually they get hold of S, who gives them directions to a spot where she can meet them and get them to the hotel on foot. This is a good job, because the car park had locked up and M* couldn't get the car out of it. Then they get to the hotel, only to find that their room had been overbooked and the duty manager was being a c0ck; "I can't magically build a room out of nothing" was one of the phrases allegedly used, along with "there's nothing I can do" despite the room having been paid for in advance and checked no less than four times over the previous fortnight. Thanks to S knowing the trade, she was able to get past the muppet of a DM to speak to the GM (who was, astonishingly, still on site at 10pm), who went white at some of the commentary S was able to provide. Despite having to book them out to the Etap that night (the hotel was the 4* Burlington), they provided taxis, comped breakfast, upgraded their room for the following two nights and eventually bent over backwards to help them out. M* and G* decamped to the etap, and S phones me to get all this lot out of her system.

Thursday morning, M* & G* get back to the Burlington for breakfast. M* has a kipper. Unfortunately she missed a bone, and ended up with a fishbone in her throat. The best cure for a fishbone in the throat? A piece of dry bread. To which she's allergic. They needed to be on a particular train to Selly Oak, so after M* got herself sorted out after that, they went to the car to find G*'s jacket. Except they couldn't remember where they'd parked the car. S, at this point, throws up her arms in despair and runs to catch her train, after giving directions on where to go ("turn left at the firey demon, and you'll end up in Hell" was what she didn't say). They eventually make it to Selly Oak, an hour after S had been there watching some quite interesting pieces.

Eventually, after all of this I arrived, was told all the gory details about how the last 24 hours had taken 24 years off S's lifespan, and was given ten minutes to wash-and-brush-up before going out to dinner and afterwards we arranged to meet in reception at 10 the following morning.

Friday morning - yes, this isn't a week's worth of stuff, it's about 36 hours by this point - we got up in good time to get to reception, waited around for a bit for G* and M*, then said "fine, they're not here, let's go" and off S and myself went. We had a pleasant trip to Selly Oak (I'm still amazed by the train station more-or-less in the middle of the BU campus), then a walk up the road to the George Cadbury Hall, and I was shown off - sorry, introduced - to the classmates (I am no longer just "Mike", but "Mikeasseenontv", apparently) who were saying "oh, we're just the support act, S is headlining", and we saw the morning's worth of plays. Solely my opinion, but they were... ok. There was a post-Auschwitz play that was interesting, but the other two were competent, perfectly decent pieces of theatre (and I've seen worse put on by hardened professionals), but failed to grab me by the throat.

Lunchtime, and I wandered off to find a Private Eye and a sandwich, then met Mavis at the train station, as S was engaged in schmooze. On my way to the station I found M* & G*, who were walking somewhat slowly; it turned out that they weren't at reception on time because M* had fallen out of the shower. She'd hit her head (twice) on the tiled floor, and had an eight-inch bruise down her calf. She wasn't feeling too well, had practically given G* a heart attack, and he couldn't phone for help because his valve had come loose and he hadn't had time to fix it properly, so couldn't speak. Eventually they got some help from the day manager (who was a bit of a charmer), and M* decided - in spite of feeling sick and headachey - to struggle on and go to see S's play. So, they told me all of this, then said "but for goodness' sakes, don't tell S until it's all over."

Apparently, M* had gone to Boots to get some arnica tablets for the bruising and shock; she got them, then had trouble opening the box. After a couple of minutes of this she went back inside and asked the girl on the counter to help. After a couple of minutes, she couldn't get into it, so phoned head office to find out how this lid worked. M* was offered a refund - "I don't want a refund, I just want my tablets" - and it turned out that this batch of arnica tablets were sent out in faulty packaging, and M* was the first purchaser of this batch. The whole batch was taken off the shelves, as M* tried to find another Boots.

Mavis and myself headed up to the theatre, chatted for a bit waiting for S to finish schmoozing, and when she came out, all sparkly-eyed, M* and G* turned up having stopped in the pub for a bracer. Then we went into the auditorium, and sat through a play about a metaphysical detective (which was fun), and a (somewhat) kitchen sink drama by the writer of Another Paradise, before the headline act came on stage, The Bee Charmer by t'missus.

Not wanting to give anything away; it was excellent. I know I'm biased, but the writing was stunning, the performances were wonderful and expansive, and the director was over the moon to receive the script. They had a lot of fun putting it on, and I felt that S's writing had engaged the actors' imaginations. There was pindrop silences in the theatre, people rapt, their attention on the stage. It didn't feel like half an hour, but it zipped by. The writing reminded me a lot of Douglas Adams, where every word means something. The headline act was deservedly in the right place, in my opinion.

We decamped to the library next door for drinks and nibbles, where the writers were asked to attend a ten-minute individual panel interview with the invited guests. I thought there would be about half a dozen people on this panel. S was the last play, so she was the last one to attend. The previous day, the panel were a bit up themselves, giving the impression they weren't really expecting to find anything of note; one person said "send us your play when you submit; we'll probably read it and we might give you feedback. What will never, ever happen is that we'll put it on." So, S goes to the panel, opens the door and sees 19 people sat in a big circle. An involuntary "oh my god" escapes her lips, and a chuckle runs around the circle. The course director says "so, who wants to start?" and they were off. Everybody *loved* it. These are the great and the good in the theatre world, those people who can make or break careers, and they had a few criticisms, but all were making comments like "completely charming", "spellbinding", "captivating"... and before too long, ten minutes were up.

Steve wrapped things up - "thank you for coming, we can go & get drinks now" - and left, expecting everybody to leave with him. I saw him come down with a couple of people, and thought "oh, that's the panel", not expecting there to be 19 of them. S didn't appear. Hm, I thought. Maybe she's talking to the play director. Then another half-dozen came down. Another ten minutes went by, and then this mass of people, S at the rear, came back. She grabbed a drink, and:

"after Steve wrapped up, I was expecting everybody to go with him; that's what's been happening on previous sessions. Instead, almost everybody wanted to talk to me, and rushed my seat like a tidal wave; they were queueing up to talk to me. The woman from the National who said they will never put it on was saying that she could see it on a huge stage, a massive performance in a big theatre, and it was tremendously exciting work..."

There were people from radio being excited, our local theatre, the Rep, agents... No kidding; they loved it, and her. Clare, her director, said that she'd never seen or heard of anything like this happening before and was stunned.

So after that, Mavis left, M* & G* left, and S and me went for a pint by ourselves, then joined up with the remainders of the class for a (bloody good) curry. Back to the hotel, we picked up G* from their room and took him for a pint to get him out of M*'s increasingly painful hair. M* had at least a mild concussion in my opinion, but wouldn't go to A&E to get it checked out, she just wanted to sleep and there was no arguing to be had.

The following morning was reasonably calm; M* was feeling much better, so gingerly got into the shower, whereupon the shower head - an 8" whopper - dropped off the wall. Thankfully, not onto M*'s head, so she wrapped it in a towel and dropped it onto Reception. Then they came to find us, asked me for help shifting bags (which I did), and before too long we were all checked out and ready to depart. Some coffee and a muffin, a walk to the war memorial (which is lovely), and then I wandered into the museum while the others went shopping. I had a good poke around the museum, then went to wave off M* & G*. S and myself pottered around Brum, I took S up to the museum to see one particular artwork that fascinated me (Jacob Epstein's Lucifer), then it was time for our train home.

Seriously, this has been one of the oddest weeks I've had in a while (for many more reasons than I've mentioned here) and I've had some odd weeks recently. The next five days will be a cakewalk in comparison.

(Thanks to spending four hours on trains I'd been able to read Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based off a film rec by my sister; yes, it's good. Not great literature, but not Dan Brown either. If you see a copy in a secondhand bookshop, you might enjoy it. I don't mention every book I read, or even one in twenty, but this is worth a thought or two. Beware, though: the subject matter may be triggering.)

This is a huge entry, and doesn't even contain photos. Tut. There are a couple of photos to come, though.

Anyway, this means task #82 has been completed! I have seen a play written by someone I know (and adore, quite honestly), and it was great.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (94/365), #13, #26, #37 (2/<34), #60 (11/50), #68, #66 (57/250), #87, #88, #100 (3/>3)
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 8
Remaining: 93

Day 90 wordle

2009-06-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

From Screen Captures

Day 90, 040609

2009-06-04T06:17:00.000-07:00

I have been remarkably remiss in updating the blog over the past month. Very poor indeed, in fact.

Just about keeping up to date with the photo-a-day malarky (task #3), although I've not uploaded all of this week yet. Exercise has fallen by the wayside a little after an attempt at a very long walk, swimming pools and libraries have stalled somewhat, although I hope to pick them up again in a couple of days, and I'm being a bit rubbish about the plants; they're surviving, but I've not planted them out in growbags yet, and if this is all the summer we're going to get, they won't really do much.

On the other hand, I've got one more archery session to do, I've done four Exposure Leeds events, chocolate making continues apace and I'm doing some filming next week too. I'm keeping on top of the eat more fruit, remember breakfast and make lunch things, and plans are well underway for "get gently squiffy with as many friends as possible" later in the summer. My volunteering task has a serious number of contenders all clamouring for attention and going walking with Matt might happen before the end of the month.

Details, then.

Archery has gone well; the beginners sessions end tomorrow, and then we have to decide whether to join the club or not. As much as I have enjoyed the sessions I think this will be the last one I go to, at least for the forseeable future - I have too many other things going on, and the equipment is sufficiently expensive to require a "do I really need this?" conversation with my bank account (and would turn it into a "buy stuff" task, which I want to avoid). The element of calm archery provokes is therapeutic, but to do it justice I need to think hard about my reasons and have suitable kit, and I just don't feel it quite enough.

Exposure Leeds number 4 (task #85 was last night, and my last one for the purposes of 101Things. Unlike the archery, though, this one will be carried on way past the paramters set out here; I have thoroughly enjoyed every single one of the sessions that we've had. Last night we had a talk from Nick Efford about high dynamic range (HDR) postprocessing using Photomatix Pro, or whatever other tools there might be out there. I had a little tinker with Photomatix using Nick's suggestions, generating pseudo-HDR from single RAW files - really you should have a sequence of them with different EVs, but you can fake it as long as it is a RAW - and came up with one I'm really quite happy with.

Pardon the watermarks, but it's because I've not coughed up for the software yet! Speaking as someone who has gone "No! No! No!" in the style of Ian Paisley whenever HDR is mentioned in sensible conversation, last night opened my eyes considerably. It's not all about garish effects and nightmare saturations, but more about bringing closer the massive variance in contrast viewing between what we see and what technology is capable of displaying. Shame much of the stuff on Flickr is all about the former, really.

We were doing a print swap, too; bring a print, swap it for someone elses. It worked, too - someone took away my print from Spurn Head, I picked up someone's print of mountains.

After the HDR session was me speaking (again!) on "What Next for Social Documentary in Leeds", a somewhat cumbersome title but one that carries significance. We have a great local history scene here with plenty of resources available, but one or two could be improved upon... and this is where one of my volunteering projects comes in (#20). I don't want to talk about this too much at the moment because it's still a bit fragile, but I'm writing a scoping document as to how we could go forwards with this in the community (with local group backing, too), and soliciting opinions from the communities I would like to become users of whatever I come up with. Yes, it'll be Web-based, and it'll involve the Google Maps API, but before I start tinkering with code I want to get a decent project spec done and approved by the other parties involved at this stage.

Chocolates continue apace; I was asked to come up with a chocolate "involving blackcurrant and chilli". So I did;

They're a layer of chili jam (boil 3 chopped red chillies in 200ml cider vinegar for 15 minutes, strain, add 3g of sugar per ml of liquid, bring to a rolling boil for 2 mins and add 50ml of liquid pectin, take off the heat, leave for a minute, then pour onto a sheet of bake-o-glide with something to stop it pouring off the edges) and a layer of blackcurrant ganache (130g double cream, 25g glucose syrup, 70g blackcurrant pureé, 500g white chocolate, boil the cream and glucose, pour onto the chocolate, leave for at least a minute before you start sirring, then stir into an emulsion and add the blackcurrants), dipped in chocolate and with drizzled coloured chocolate on top. Things I need: caramel rulers and a guitar cutter. The rulers are reasonably ok to get, but the guitar is a huge thing that I don't have space to store.

In recent weeks I've also done many things not on the list: attended BarCamp (brilliant, frankly), walked from Marsden to Cragg Vale (was supposed to be Hebden Bridge, but we had water and feet issues and needed a minor rescue), am getting involved in podcasting with a very nice chap called Daag (details will be forthcoming), and had T&C's birthday party. Enormous fun! I made a cake, which all went:

and we're hoping to have a repeat event later in the year.

I finish another thing tomorrow, next week I get to see my delightful lady wife's play on the stage (#82), and things continue apace!

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (90/365), #13, #26, #37 (2/<34), #60 (11/50), #68, #66 (40/250), #87, #88, #100 (3/>3)
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 7
Remaining: 94

Day 63, 070509

2009-05-07T04:40:00.000-07:00

Last night was Exposure Leeds #3 (task #85). I was doing the meeting people thing, signup sheets, please put 50p in the mug for hot drinks. Alex turned up, and we had a good chat about 101 things (and life in general, and Python *rolls eyes*) before we started the event rolling. We had a talk from a nice chap called Alan who is a pro photographer (on salary!) doing portraits for corporate magazines, which was very interesting and reiterated the whole "get the flash off the camera" thing. He talked about some shots and the thoughts that went into them, use of environment, scouting, showing what the people do in order to get into the magazine as part of the portrait, use of space and allowing for text and headlines and captioning... and also, how much luck is involved. "Adapt" was the message of the day, I think.

B&W slice of light
We also had a talk from Anne, which was a total break from the norm as it was only tangentally involved in photography. Except, it turns out that it's vitally important when taking portraits. It was about use of colour, on people. Or, in the early 90's style, "doing your colours". Anne had a pile of swatches that were everso slightly different from one another, and picked out volunteers with different skintones and hair colour and eye colour, and showed just how different one red was different from another. Portraiture is a lot to do with getting the subject comfortable and happy, and if you have the greatest shirt in the world, and it's slightly too blue for the subject's skintones then the subject will hate it, and not always know why, which is the reason getting the right colours for the right person can make or break a photo.

Not like that, just like that...
It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening, like all the ELs have been so far. I always come away from them feeling inspired to do... stuff. A fantastic resource, and one I'm proud to be a part of.

Completely ignoring all the advice I'd just been given

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (62/365), #13, #26, #37 (2/<34), #60 (11/50), #68, #66 (21/250), #85 (3/4), #87, #88, #100 (3/>3)
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 6
Remaining: 95

Day 61, 050509 (Misc)

2009-05-05T04:54:00.000-07:00

So, in addition to the books and bows, what else has been going on?

I've started on Task 100 (sponsor people doing things), by donating to a friend who ran the London Marathon, and sponsoring two people who are doing Race for Life. One of those people is my good friend Angela, who is recovering from abdominal surgery and is still planning on doing RFL; feel free to sponsor her too.
Astonishingly, it looks like #7 isn't over. I'm not sure how much I want to say about this just yet, but I've auditioned for a different show (at their request) and things are looking interesting.
visiting Roundhay Park (#22)has turned into a big event-type thing; the fine people of Tea and Cake are putting on a birthday party next week, which should be fun. Bring a flask of tea and a piece of cake! I will :)
not really one of the things, but training for walking up Pen-y-Ghent is underway; Mavis and myself walked from Shipley to Ilkley a couple of weeks ago and had a jolly nice time doing it. In a couple of weeks I hope to get Matt out (#97) as well, for a 20 mile romp across from Masham to Hebden Bridge, assuming I can work out the KML data...

So, I think that's me pretty much up to date now. Fun!
Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (60/365), #13, #26, #37 (2/<34), #60 (11/50), #68, #66 (19/250), #85 (2/4), #87, #88, #100 (3/>3)
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 6
Remaining: 95

Day 61, 050509 (Books)

2009-05-05T04:20:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend my delightful lady wife had a bit of a clearout of books, and after being reminded that it was also something I should do from time to time, I managed to make a slight start on task #60, give 50 books to charity shops. This is over and above stuff that I give to bookcrossing, so it's the sort of thing that requires careful thought.

In the end, after a quick glance at the bookshelves and then a second, harder glance where I needed to really think about the books I wanted shut of (I never want to get rid of books per se), I came up with eleven. Out of the many thousand books I have at first glance, I was able to find eleven to give to charity. This does not bode well for this task.

The books I packed in the box for giving away were:

The World According to Clarkson (picked up for pennies, and utter rubbish - if I want to get cross about columnists Lucy Mangan does a far better job)
Hotel Babylon (charity shop in Bracknell when I was bored to tears learning about SANs; ok book, just a rehash of the usual tales you hear about the hotel industry)
T.E.D. Klein's The Ceremonies (dreadful stuff. I have no idea why I kept it for so long, to be honest.)
Sparkle Hayter's Nice Girls Finish Last (I have no idea why I bought this. I remember reading it but not what it was about; did I have a trashy chick-lit phase in my fiction buying? I don't remember such a phase, but that means nothing.)
Don Kingsbury's Geta (bought second hand in Blackpool during my 16th summer, whilst working as a waiter in a hotel. Book was "meh" at best, and nothing like the cover blurb promised.)
The Subtle Knife (replacement from when I had a "I need to read this now" moment and couldn't find my original copy. The original had a nicer cover than this one, so that was that.)
Stephen King's Night Shift (I don't get on with short stories, and these are pretty rubbish. Another Blackpool purchase. I think I spent about 40% of my wages in that bookshop.)
Dean Koontz' Servants of Twilight (Koontz wrote four plots, and used them in many, many books. This was one I could cheerfully get rid of.)
Robin Cook (no, not that one)'s Coma and Fever (I think you need to be of a certain age to appreciate these books, and that age is fourteen.)
K.W. Jeter's Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human (Dear $deity, why did I pick this up?)

So, that's that. I cleared out 11 books, put them in the box and we headed off to Oxfam Books in Headingley. You now get a card and ID number when donating stuff to Oxfam, because they've worked out a scheme of collecting Gift Aid on the stuff you donate. No, I don't understand it either - they must have a very clever accountant thinking up this stuff. We then promptly replaced the donated books with more books. I ended up coming away with three Asterix books I didn't have, vol 1 of Phil Foglio's Girl Genius, a book about evolution, Amarillo Slim's autobiog (which I'm thoroughly enjoying) and a book about the hidden waterways of London. S came away with a lot more.

So, I gave away 11 books and came back with 7, which isn't bad.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (60/365), #13, #26, #37 (2/<34), #60 (11/50), #68, #66 (19/250), #85 (2/4), #87, #88
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 6
Remaining: 95

Day 61, 050509 (Archery)

2009-05-05T03:58:00.000-07:00

First up, the day 60 Wordle (ie, task #37):

I love these; they give an odd sense of what's been happening. Fun stuff. Anyway.

Last time I updated I had a few things to write about, which I failed to do!

I've started archery (#68) lessons, for starters. Two weeks in and I'm still thoroughly enjoying it. Friday is archery day, which means I'm not going to the boozer on Fridays for a couple of weeks. Last week I had a quick play with different types of bow, all of which are terrifying. I kept on thinking "this thing is going to snap" when using the square bow, and I'm glad to be proved wrong. There's not that much to say about my adventures in toxophily so far, but:

The range is nearly impossible to find if you've not been there before or don't have a natural curiosity as to where unmarked, barely more than a dirt track roads lead.
Because these are beginners classes there are kids. Two of them. They talk constantly and don't listen to instructions (such as "don't point arrows anywhere other than down the range"). There's also a kid who has been shooting arrows for ever, as his dad is in the club; he's great but also likes to talk. His was the square bow - tiny bow, astonishing draw.
There's also a couple of people in the class I'm sure I've met before. One of whom I'm almost convinced I went to school with. Now, that would be a trick, seeing as I went to school 90 miles away.
Because 90% of this is about breathing and concentration, it's a very relaxing way of spending an evening after a rubbish day at werk. There's something very therapeutic about watching an arrow leave the bow, and go exactly where you wanted it. At 10 yards I was getting consistent 30s, and at 20y I'm getting consistent 20s. I think we'll be spending a week or two at 20y before going to 30, but when we get to 30 I'll probably need a bow with a bigger draw than the club bow I'm using.
We're using bog standard recurve bows owned by the club, as simple as they come. Easy to hold, easy to string, easy to take apart, and battered to bits. If I take this up as a hobby I'll end up coughing for a new bow, I know I will. Already I can see the limitations in the club bows.
In week one the rugby club - on whose ground we shoot - were having a linedancing night. A lot of cowgirls and redskins walked across the range at one point, along with more than one fellow wearing little more than a stetson and some chaps. Somewhat surreal, and a couple of choice remarks about bows and arrows (and Brokeback Mountain) were playfully tossed about.
For fun and games someone stuck a picture of a squirrel on the targets last week. I'm still not sure how I feel about this. It reminded me that this is a survivalist skill, not an abstract activity.

For all this, I'm not going to tick this one off until I've completed the six-week course. If most of what I learn is muscle memory and how to assemble a bow then I'll be fine, but I'm already thinking about whether I want to have this as a proper hobby or not. Tending towards a yes, to be perfectly honest, which has surprised me. My original spreadsheet says this may have a commitment weighting, and without a doubt it does. The concentration and breathing alone is enough to lift weights from my branes, and I can see this being a thing that I do for quite a while.

Day 54, 280409

2009-04-28T01:36:00.000-07:00

(I have a couple of things to write up, but it'll be in separate entries; this one is a biggie.)

This week has all been about the chocolate. And commuting to Whitefield, but aside from saying that I've never been so road-ragey in my life, least said the better.

Task 8 is "learn how to make chocolates". I didn't really know what I wanted out of this, as I've made chocolates in the past but really wanted to learn how to make them properly; the week-long course I've just finished did this in spades.

Slattery's is a fab place. It's a choccy and cake shop, where they decorate cakes in the back room, have a cafe on the first floor and a school in the attic. A former pub, this place is a brilliant building and it's still too small for them; the shop is enormous and still they're short of space. People are in and out all the time, between two sites they employ 60 people and 14 saturday staff, they're seemingly unaffected by the current economic climate and make some pretty stunning stuff. They also sell ingredients in small batches, which is bloody brilliant from my point of view.

So, day one was making stuff in moulds; bears, boxes, truffle shells. We also made a quick ganache - simple truffle mix - and learned that you can temper chocolate by careful use of a microwave. And a huge chocolate lolly. We learned about presentation being important, too, so it was put together on a baseboard with choccy scribbles, and cellophaned.

Day two was more about truffle mix; flavourings, expiry dates (quick ganache needs eating in 6-10 days, the one we did today was good for 6 weeks), practicing filling moulds, more tempering, making circular boxes out of cooking rings, lids, and decorative techniques; hand-rolling, dusting, transfer sheets, how to make dominoes, the importance of cocoa butter and colourings (shiny!), and more presentation.

Day three was shoes and handbags; these things sell for astonishing amounts of money. This was more coloured cocoa butter, decorative techniques, piping, care and attention to detail and contrasts, all arty stuff you pick up over the years by osmosis. This was probably my least useful day, and I'm not terribly happy with one of the pieces (the handbags are rubbish), but still fun. Unfinished the shoes looked like this:

Finished, they looked like this:

We ended the day with a talk on packing and legislation that was fascinating and very useful.

Day four was cake decoration. Nearly everybody started with the idea of making a cake suitable for a wedding, so we ran out of white chocolate (seriously, 15 Kg of the stuff). We learned how to make chocolate paste (alternative to marzipan), pouring ganache, chocolate fans and ruffles, marbles, more (neater!) dominoes, curls, twists, pillars, and how drawing shapes on sugar can make some lovely effects. My cake ended up looking like this:

See the cigarettes on the right-hand side? I'm very proud of them; two-tone, they're not something you normally see on cakes or in shops.

Day 5 was insane; we had individual oval cakes, truffles, truffles, more truffles, more dipping, decorating, rolling and tempering, caramels, Q&A, more truffles, shells, gathering everything together and buying ingredients. As I have no need of 10x10kg sacks of chocolate I was happy to pay a bit extra to just buy the 2.5Kg ones. Just some of the stuff I made on Friday looked like this:

I loved this week. It was outstanding, the food was good, the students lovely, the tutor knowledgeable (a former patissier) and an excellent teacher, the staff incredibly helpful and willing to chat to us no matter what was going on. I'm stunned at how happy everybody there was, and it's all down to the management, who is a couple of people who have known the business since it was four people selling hand-rolled truffles. No kidding, if you're at a loose end for a week and have the money to do it, this is an outstanding course to attend. If you don't have the money or the time, do the 2-day chocolate excellence course instead. Really.

So, I'm looking into getting the kitchen up to the sort of standards an environmental health officer wouldn't have a problem with. This might take a bit of thinking about.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (53/365), #13, #26, #66 (19/250), #85 (2/4), #87, #88
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 6
Remaining: 95

Day 36, 100409

2009-04-10T06:43:00.000-07:00

I love bank holidays. Being off work is huge fun, especially when it's a weekday and you're (i) not ill and (ii) not using a day's leave.

So what can be better than updating my blog with what I've been up to? Let's see, now...

On day 34, April 8th, I popped into the Art Gallery on the Headrow in Leeds to get my "visit all the museums with a LS postcode" task (#57)started. After leaving werk I found myself in the not uncommon situation of going "oh, I've not taken a photo yet today. What shall I snap?" and found myself outside the art gallery. There's quite a well-known statue by Henry Moore outside the gallery, so I photographed that, and then popped in to see what they had on.

There was an exhibition called "Rank". All about social orders on a local and global scale, it contains works as diverse as the frontispiece of Hobbes' Leviathan, cartoons from publications in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, an edition of Polyopoly, some of the maps from those lovely people in Sheffield Uni's geography department blown up to enormous sizes, and print 18/20 of Chad McCail's Compulsory Education.

I've come across Chad McCail before; his work freaks me the hell out. A couple of years ago I saw Snake in the Baltic in Gatehead, which was complex social commentary reduced to a poster that wouldn't look out of place in a schoolroom, despite the context and imagery being utterly beyond kids. Compulsory Education is no exception to this; he's back to using robots again, very stylised based on those capable of taking orders, those who pass on orders, and those who make the orders in the first place. I like the juxtaposition (concept vs design), but at the same time it really does give me the wig. Not as much as Snake did, to be fair, but still. About a year after I first saw Snake I wrote:

"I'm not sure what I make of it, or even whether I like it or not. It's a disturbing piece of imagery and I need to ask myself... do I enjoy being disturbed?"

Five years later, I'm still not sure.

Anyway, if you get 10 minutes one lunchtime and you're in Leeds, go & see it. The exhibit finishes on April 26th, so there's not much time left.

Oh, and the picture?

I failed at looking at the Atkinson Grimshaws in the LCAG while I was there, but ran out of time. Another day.

Today I've been out for a run (although I'm not comfortable enough to say that I'm in training yet), and turned my handwriting into a font. Yes, I've finished another task, this time #71. I tried doing this last week and came up with something that approximated my handwriting, but was even less legible than usual, so I re-did the process and came up with something better.

The process: go to YourFonts.com, download a template, print off the template, fill out the template, scan the filled out template and upload the scanned, filled out template back into their website. Provided you've followed all the instructions on ink, scanning and how to stay inside the boxes, about 40 seconds later you'll end up with a TrueType Font (strictly speaking, it's an ODF with TTF wrappers) that looks like your handwriting, and Word is intelligent enough to bold and italicize it if you so wish. Seriously, this is everso cool and I can't thank Emmy enough for pointing me at it. Give it a try.

My handwriting looks like this, eventually:

Nifty!

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (36/365), #13, #26, #66 (15/250), #85 (2/4), #87, #88
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+), #57 (1/9+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 5
Remaining: 96

Day 32, 060409

2009-04-06T05:37:00.000-07:00

Tropical World (item 23) is fab, let's get this straight. Forget the parking, the location, the traffic, the insane number of people and the fact they had no ice cream. It was a total delight. I'd never been before, and was looking forwards to it after C* suggested a trip earlier in the week. After eventually finding a parking space we headed in (free for Leeds Card holders), where it got progressively warmer and warmer and warmer. The first room wasn't too bad; plenty of butterflies, some turtles, interesting plants, koi and ants. There were some vivaria in the next bit, then it got warmer again and more, well, tropical, where there were fish and a waterfall and ducks and birds and all sorts of stuff. We had a dark room with fruitbats (yay!) and other nocturnals, some degus, lizards, and snakes. They had golden lion tamarins! And meercats! A huge blue iguana, and a brilliant gecko with stunning red and blue colouring. It was warm in there, although with such a name it's hardly surprising.

There's a pile of photos on Flickr, but one I particularly wanted to share was this one:

So, that's another thing completed! I know 23 was supposed to be part of 22 (visit Roundhay park), but the park is so big I'm going to have to take more time to have a poke around in there.

It's day 32, so I need to Wordle the blog (item 37). Yes, I said I was going to do it every 30 days, but there's no difference between day 30 & day 32 in terms of content, so I'm safe :)

From Wordles

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (31/365), #13, #26, #66 (15/250), #85 (2/4), #87, #88
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 4
Remaining: 97

Day 28, 020409

2009-04-02T04:13:00.000-07:00

Updates!

I'm down to 98 (so that's three things done)! Seeing as, on average, the idea is to complete one task every ten days, I'm right on the money.

The completed task is #7, Appear on Telly, which I did last night on ITV's Taste the Nation (from time of writing you can still get it on their catchup viewer for the next 13 days).

Proof:

See?

Some people have read about this elsewhere; the filming (in London and Masham) was an experience and a half. What they showed in the final edit was, yes, reasonably close to what they filmed with all the "look, I'm vegetarian because I don't like meat very much, not for any moral reasons" edited out. Perhaps for brevity. The judge's comments on the show were much nicer than those said in the studio, thanks to careful edits - my food was described as looking like "a gorilla's paw" by one of them on the day, which (thankfully) failed to get into the programme. I had a great time doing it, and I'd do it again, and all things considered it was a really, really good thing to do. If passing through life is about grabbing it and doing stuff, then this ticks both those boxes.

I've now done two Exposure Leeds sessions (#85), and in this one I gave a talk on exposure, the balancing of shutter speed and aperture size. It was pretty well received by the 40-odd people who turned up, with one of the audience saying they'd wished I'd been their physics teacher, which I thought was a lovely thing to say. My slides, if you want to see them, are on Google Docs: here. I love getting up in front of people and talking about stuff I like, getting my enthusiasm for it out there, and getting people equally involved in it. Saying that, though, I've done quite a lot for Mr Eland in the past year :)

In addition to those things, I've also got a march on #17, "visit every library with an LS postcode" as I was able to gain access to The Leeds Library, a private subscriptions library that's been around since 1768, and some of its books havn't been taken out since then.

They have tea and coffee, comfy seats, a reading room, books you want to pick up and marvel at, a paper catalogue, and spiral staircases. What's not to love? They also have maps. I love maps. These are good maps.

So it's been a busy couple of days! I'm really pleased by progress so far, and I'm getting some fab experiences into the bargain.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (27/365), #13, #26, #66 (14/250), #85 (2/4), #87, #88
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18), #17 (1/54+)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 3
Remaining: 98

Day 26, 310309

2009-03-31T02:47:00.000-07:00

Quick things:

Task 7, (being on telly), is definitely happening tomorrow, like I knew it would. Ok, well, my episode - I say "my" episode, it's also Pat, Paresh, Marcia and Rosemary's episode too, as well as that bunch from Kent - of Taste The Nation is coming up for broadcast. It is, of course, episode 13, to be broadcast on April 1st.

First up, I'm not superstitious, but the thirteenth episode? Come on. Secondly, April 1st? Someone is just rubbing my nose in it now. It's not a joke, I genuinely am on telly on April Fool's Day, cooking stuff I would never normally consider doing (but, despite all that, has actually influenced my cooking style in noticable ways).

Thirdly, I'm not even going to be able to watch it live, because I'm giving a talk on f-stops and shutter speeds at Exposure Leeds that day. 6pm, Old Broadcasting House, come along and point out the flaws in my reasoning, or if you do watch the programme live you can come along and mock my pretentious performance. I have to go straight to OBH from Werk, so won't be able to catch it.

So: that's ITV1, 5pm-6pm, Wednesday 1st April. Set your magic recording-boxen.

Day 20, 250309

2009-03-25T02:32:00.000-07:00

Not updated for a while; bad me. So, what's going on?

A fortnight ago I started on #41 (grow tomatoes & chillies) and #52 (grow herbs), by getting a propagator and sorting through my seed packs to see just what stuff I had. I noticed the other morning that they'd mostly germinated:

Click for bigness
Unfortunately, because I got sidetracked writing out the labels I can't remember what was what. I know the tomatoes are at one end and the parsley at the other (chillies next to that) but I can't quite remember the order the oregano and basil went. I'll find out soon enough, I suspect.

My experiments in pasta making have gone well. Making beetroot pasta (#36) hasn't happened yet, but I've been making some lovely ravioli filled with interesting things. Pasta dough is really odd stuff, certainly the wierdest dough I've ever made, and adding beetroot to it might make it a bit more peculiar than I'd like. Still, all I can do is experiment.

The Telly Task (#7) is apparently happening next week, although I don't know what day. Knowing my luck it'll be on April 1st, but we'll see. Having watched some of the programmes so far in the series I'm a bit twitchy about the whole thing, not least because this week it was also picked up by Harry Hill. The programme is Taste The Nation, in case I'd not already mentioned that.

Exposure Leeds is also next week (#85). Yours Truly has been roped into doing a 45min session on exposure, as in shutter speeds and f-numbers. Come along, and mock. Bring a camera. Seriously, it should be fun, and I have a practical demo lined up for people to do. Well, sort-of. That's April 1st. No, this also isn't a joke.

So, current states:
Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (20/365), #13, #26, #66 (9/250), #85 (1/4), #87, #88
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 2
Remaining: 99

Day 12, 170309

2009-03-17T14:54:00.000-07:00

Tonight I ticked another thing off my list: number 86, "Whack a bucket of balls at a driving range."

There are so many people helping me with this, it's incredible. All sorts of people are popping up and saying "oh, so-and-so can help you with this, here, let me sort it out" and all of a sudden, I'm on a driving range with a couple of very nice chaps called Richard and Liam. Sam, of T&C fame, asked me at lunchtime via text if I wanted to go to a driving range with her partner while she was at dance class, so of course I said yes.

So, Richard, myself, and the partner of one of the other dance class attendees met up in Pudsey and headed off to The Manor, apparently some sort of hotel/conference centre with the word golf written in tiny letters on the sign outside. Both Liam and myself were newbies to this sort of thing, so we had no bats. Clubs. Thankfully Richard did, so after a bucket of balls (a whole £3.20!) was procured, and the loan of a stick from Richard, we found three consecutive hutches and looked out at a field containing nothing but a couple of flags, some nets, and a whole load of white blotches.

A few brief tips from Richard, and we were off. I started off hitting balls not too badly, but then I started slicing the ball, and topping it, and overthinking what I was doing. Making an effort to relax, I started getting - aha - into the swing of things, and wasn't doing too badly for the first time out. After half the bucket was gone I realised just how tiring this was getting, especially in the shoulders and wrists, and my hands were tingling with the repeated impact vibrations.

It was very therapeutic, though. There's definitely something to be said for hitting balls with sticks, and when we'd finished I did notice a distinct looseness in my shoulders that wasn't there before. A bucket is 80 balls, although I wasn't counting them in any way, and I reckon I'm going to feel every one of them tomorrow. Anyway, thank you Rich, Liam and Sam for being on board for this one; I reckon the occasional bucket o'balls might be whacked in the future.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (12/365), #13, #26, #66 (6/250), #85 (1/4), #87, #88
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 2
Remaining: 99

Day 8, 130309

2009-03-13T09:24:00.000-07:00

Today I knocked one of my one-offs off the list. It is done, dusted, and I never have to do it again. Except I will. Every 16 weeks I shall turn up at a certain address on the Headrow, and do some good.

But, it's a completed list item; #48, "Try to register for blood donation."

I met up with Daag at the National Blood Service centre on the Headrow at lunchtime. I signed in, filled out some paperwork and waited for a bit before a terribly nice "blood donor carer" (according to her name badge) called Tracey quickly rattled off a speil about "do you understand the form?" and "we just need to check the iron content of your blood" and so on, practically without drawing breath. "Do you have any questions?" she ended, "yes, is the red ball on your tongue stud for Red Nose Day?" I wanted to ask, but didn't (as the answer was somewhat predictable).

Daag, who had already had his iron test and was well on his way to filling his bag, was busily telling the nurses about my 101 hings, so they already knew what I was up to without my having to say anything. I'm not yet sure about whether to answer the question "so, what made you come here today?" with a short or complex answer... but today Daag had already done the groundwork, so I didn't really have to think about it. A terribly nice nurse called Karen tried to raise a vein, and then stuck a hole in me. I obviously don't have high blood pressure, as I was there pumping my fist around a cardboard tube for about twice as long as it took the bloke who came in after me (who'd just done his tenth donation). I'm allergic to sticking plaster (joy) and so after I'd filled my bag my arm was gauzed and wrapped in a bandage that's still on now.

They gave me a sticker :)

About an hour after I walked in, and a cup of tea later, I walked out with 500ml less blood than when I came in (470 for the bag, 3x10ml for various tests), and went to O'Neills for a quick pint of Guinness, because apparently it's the law, or something. It was a very nice pint of Guinness.

I'm not sure what I'm prouder of; having the list drop to 100 from 101, or doing some good. I'm pretty sure it is the latter, but the former is quite nice too.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (8/365), #13, #26, #66 (4/250), #85 (1/4), #87, #88
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 1
Remaining: 100

Day 7, 120309

2009-03-12T03:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (day 6) was quite productive; I attended meeting #1 of Exposure Leeds ([#85]), which was very interesting. A talk and demo on strobism was a bit of fun, although I would have liked a more practically-based session with a chance to try stuff out. There were cupcakes, too. All of my photos are far too noisy to use (iso1600 on the D70s is really harsh), but nonetheless, an interesting evening.

I started off [#99] by dropping about 600 sheets of multigrade B&W paper and a bucket full of developing tank spools with D, with whom I'm going to try giving blood ([#48]) on Friday. I reckon I've got one more boxload of photo stuff to give away, and that's done. I just have to stop myself from replacing it with much more photo stuff.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (7/365), #13, #26, #66 (4/250), #85 (1/4), #87, #88
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 0
Remaining: 101

Running

2009-03-10T09:39:00.000-07:00

With regards to #44, I was looking for 5K races in Leeds and discovered Parkrun, and their Saturday mornings running around Hyde Park (the one in Leeds, ob).

Excellent stuff. I think I shall start my training schedule sooner than originally thought. Finding this has given me enough of a shove to get my backside in gear about training. I don't expect to get sub 30 minutes for a while, but I'm keen to get trying.

Day 5, 100309

2009-03-10T04:14:00.000-07:00

Whilst not really part of the walking task, I did walk to werk yesterday, and most of the way home. If I spend a week walking to/from work I hit 35 miles. So yesterday was a decent way of working out what I have to do to get 30 miles. I'm not counting wandering about at lunchtime as part of the 30 unless I go out with the tracker as a deliberate "must get my milage up" thing.

I've been good about keeping up with #3, and I've kicked off #66, as well as #26, #87 and #88, all of which are to do with food; breakfasts, lunches, fruit and not buying coffee en route to werk. Three of these are not-that trackable without making stuff as dull as dishwater, so unless something spectacular happens I'll shut up about their details. Still, I'm thoroughly enjoying porridge-and-banana breakfasts.

Growing stuff has started, after a trip to buy a propagator and seeds. I've set some tomatoes and chillies going [#41] and some herbs (basil, oregano, parsley) [#52]. I'm not expecting too much from them for a week or so as they germinate, and I'll pot them out when the weather is suitable. The tomatoes are Costoluto Fiorentino, proper ones that'll require training and pruning; should be interesting.

Currently running habitual tasks: #3 (5/365), #13, #26, #66 (2/250), #87, #88
Currently running exploratory tasks: #38 (1/18)
Currently running growing tasks: #41, #52
Completed: 0
Remaining: 101

#101

2009-03-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

Task: Collate all of the material produced whilst carrying out the task list, and make it available in a reasonably easy-to-use format.

What my spreadsheet says: Hopefully I can do this on day 1001, but really it's an ongoing task that I should keep on top of during the process.

More Details: This is the wrap to #1, really. I can see me needing a 3-d database structure for a lot of this.

One off task? Nope.

Measurable? Yes, by finishing and wrapping it all up.

#100

2009-03-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

Task: Say yes to all of my friends collecting sponsorship money for charity, by doing things outside their comfort zones.

What my spreadsheet says: I do this for a lot of friends, but I don't think I've done it for all of them. People doing RFL, for example, will be sponsored. Tacheback and movember, too (but I want to do the before-and-after shots!). That sort of thing.

More Details: Basically, if you're a friend doing something out of the ordinary, I'll sponsor you. Just nudge me, if I've not said anything to you and you were expecting me.

One off task? Nooooooo.

Measurable? Yes, but in that quiet, understated way.

#99

2009-03-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

Task: Give away all the photographic stuff I don't need.

What my spreadsheet says: Freecycle or to people offline, I have a load of photo paper, spare film, contrast filters that could, admittedly, be turned into something else, dev spools and tanks that could all be gainfully emplyed elsewhere.

More Details: A fair old pile of stuff. Mostly paper, but there might be the odd gem of something useful in there.

One off task? Not really. You never know, though.

Measurable? Yes, by having a lovely void where it used to be.

#98

2009-03-09T11:03:00.000-07:00

Task: Declutter the spare room

What my spreadsheet says: This one is fairly involved, but it involes me throwing away, recycling or shredding a tonne of paper, sorting out boxes of bits, organising books and electrical things, and working out where to put stuff. This will be an ongoing task by its very nature and won't be easy.

More Details: Nuff said, really.

One off task? No.

Measurable? Yes, by having a nice tidy room at the end of it.

#97

2009-03-09T11:02:00.000-07:00

Task: Go walking with Matt at least eight times over the 1001 days.

What my spreadsheet says: This should be do-able. Co-ordinating timetables is always hilarious, but we should be able to manage eight trips out.

More Details: Matt is one of my oldest friends, and we don't see enough of each other. Going walking is one of the things we enjoy doing, so we should do it more.

One off task? Nope.

Measurable? Yes, by going and writing trip reports.

#96

2009-03-09T10:58:00.000-07:00

Task: Go up Pen-y-ghent

What my spreadsheet says: At the very least, go up this. What I want to do is all three, but that might be pushing it.

More Details: I'm supposed to be doing the Three Peaks on midsummer's day. Should be fun, but just in case I'm not up to all three I want to knock Pen-y-ghent off.

One off task? Yes, but I doubt it'll remain so.

Measurable? Yes, by doing, blogging, photographing and tracking it in Ascent.

#95

2009-03-09T10:55:00.000-07:00

Task: Enter the Charlie Cake competition

What my spreadsheet says: A corner of Armley has a park called Charlie Cake Park. A cake competition happens there every year, and I keep meaning to enter and see how well I do, and I have totally failed to do this so far.

More Details: Charlie Cake Park is such a lovely idea, and having a cake competition there called The Charming Armley Cake Competition is equally inspired. It was a bit too soggy last year, though, so I didn't enter.

One off task? Yes, probably.

Measurable? Yes, by doing, baking and blogging.

#94

2009-03-09T10:53:00.000-07:00

Task: Attend I Love West Leeds

What my spreadsheet says: It's a festival celebrating West Leeds! What's not to love?

More Details: I &heart; West Leeds is a cracking idea. It's just a day at the park with some whizzy fun stuff, and who can ask for anything more?

One off task? Yes, but it'll crop up three times during the process. I ought to be able to fit one in.

Measurable? Yes, by going and blogging.

#93

2009-03-09T10:52:00.000-07:00

Task: Attend a lunchtime recital at the Clothworkers

What my spreadsheet says: Clothworkers is part of the School of Music at the UofL. They have termtime Friday recitals of whatever they're practicing at the moment. Some of the stuff they do is not terribly interesting to me, but occasionally they have things I want to hear, and I never remember to go. Foolishness!

More Details: Must try harder.

One off task? Yes, but we'll see if I can squeeze in repeats.

Measurable? Yes, by going and blogging.

#92

2009-03-09T10:49:00.000-07:00

Task: Make a batch of boiled sweets

What my spreadsheet says: Boiling sugar syrup is FUN, and I've never made boiled sweets despite wanting to ever since I read the Time Life book on Confectionary.

More Details: I've made somewhat runny toffee, but that's about as far as I've gone. Boiled sweets have to be some of the easiest things to make, too. If I have spare fruit from the foraging task I'll try to make sweeties out of that.

One off task? Yes, but if it's really fun...

Measurable? Yes, by blogging the results and handing them out to people.

#91

2009-03-09T10:46:00.000-07:00

Task: Learn how to use fire poi.

What my spreadsheet says: Burnination! Attempts at learning poi in the past have not gone well, but I think that's because I have short arms and the ropes are too long. I need to pick up the tennis ball ones again, and when I'm comfortable with them move onto fireballs.

More Details: Apparently Gwil is the master of fire toys, so I'll be asking him for lessons later on in the year.

One off task? Maybe not. It depends on the degree of difficulty I want to take this to.

Measurable? Yes, by having some very, very cool photos, and hopefully avoiding the somewhat less-than cool burns.

#90

2009-03-09T10:45:00.000-07:00

Task: Make a calendar.

What my spreadsheet says: A photo per month, with amusing commentary. It could even be the much-discussed "Iain pointing at rocks" calendar.

More Details: I understand that some printing services actually do a calendar service, so I'll be checking that out soon enough.

One off task? Yes.

Measurable? Physical object, so yes.

#89

2009-03-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

Task: Build a camera.

What my spreadsheet says: Pinhole is fine, but I should try making one out of a big wooden box with a cannibalised Lubitel lens and ground-glass backplate.

More Details: I've been making pinholes for years, so it's time to kick it up a notch. A big box, knackered Lubitel that's fine to dismantle, and some method of loading film or paper (or home-made glass plates, even), and I think I can re-invent camera technology that's over 150 years old.

One off task? Yes, but with a time commitment.

Measurable? Yes, it's a physical object, and I'll blog the process.

#88

2009-03-09T10:40:00.000-07:00

Task: (as part of 87) Eat breakfast.

What my spreadsheet says: I really should eat some fruit for breakfast, or porridge, or something. Instead, I have this bad habit (#87) which needs stopping.

More Details: Or fruity porridge! Because I don't eat breakfast before leaving the house I can get a bit out of step with meals. Must try harder to eat. And while I'm making breakfast I might as well make lunch, too.

One off task? Nope, and this is a habit-forming exercise

Measurable? Well, yes, but it's a bit dull.

#87

2009-03-09T10:38:00.001-07:00

Task: Stop buying coffee on the way into work.

What my spreadsheet says: 15 quid a week on coffee and a muffin is expensive. Dropping that would be a big help.

More Details: This is my only "stop" thing on the list without a specific target. Also, whilst pastries are a nice treat eating them every day is really not good for the figure.

One off task? Nope, and it should be habit forming.

Measurable? Not really. I just have to get out of the old habit.

#86

2009-03-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

Task: Whack a bucket of balls at a driving range.

What my spreadsheet says: Golf is a complete mystery to me. It's a nice walk, spoiled by having to hit something and keep scores. But, I can see the point of a driving range as a method of removing one's frustrations. So, once, I'll go to a driving range, hire a driver and a bucket o' balls, and practice my swing.

More Details: Apparently someone can help me with this - I'm all for that! The last time I went a-golfing was at Hoylake Municipal, and I think I got round in 150 taking five hours, or something equally daft.

One off task? Yes.

Measurable? Yes, by doing and blogging.

#85

2009-03-09T10:33:00.000-07:00

Task: Attend at least four Exposure Leeds sessions

What my spreadsheet says: I hope to attend more, but we'll have to see how they pan out.

More Details: Exposure Leeds is a group holding monthly meetings to discuss photo technique and skills. I may end up presenting at one, too.

One off task? Nope, there's a minimum of 4.

Measurable? Yes, by going and writing trip reports.

#84

2009-03-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

Task: Make a lava lamp

What my spreadsheet says: I can see how to do it in my head. Now I want to make one.

More Details: I really can see how to make one, too, so I'm avoiding online tutorials on how to make them. A wine bottle, some candles, interestingly coloured ink, a lightbulb and fitting, and some cardboard and fimo, and I think that's that.

One off task? Yes, but there may be some testing.

Measurable? Yes, it's a physical object one ends up with.

#83

2009-03-09T10:27:00.001-07:00

Task: Do Something About It

What my spreadsheet says: Whenever DSAI contacts me, read the email and follow the instructions (within reason) instead of binning it automagically.

More Details: Do Something About It is a great idea. I don't automagically bin their stuff, I read and act upon it. However, if I receive an email saying "and now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party" with instructions on how to assassinate the president, I think I'll say no. Or would I?

One off task? Nope.

Measurable? Yes, by doing it (but not necessarily blogging it).

#82

2009-03-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

Task: Watch a play that's been written by someone I know.

What my spreadsheet says: "The Bee Charmer", by S.J. Wallis, June 12th 2009, Birmingham.

More Details: I keep on getting the date and theatre wrong. But, I'm absurdly happy about this one.

One off task? Yes, but I hope it won't remain so.

Measurable? yes, by going and writing a trip report.

#81

2009-03-09T10:22:00.000-07:00

Task: Take the bike out at least 250 times

What my spreadsheet says: If I can find a velo track somewhere, so much the better.

More Details: I don't go cycling enough, although if I carry out the walking and swimming tasks the cycling will take me well over the top for exercise quality. 250 times is once in four days, but I imagine it'll be more frequently in the summer, less so in winter.

One off task? Nope; this is one of the "habit forming" tasks.

Measurable? Yes, by doing it and logging it all in Ascent.

#80

2009-03-09T10:20:00.000-07:00

Task: Finish a business plan.

What my spreadsheet says: Proper, A-Z business plan. I probably won't carry it out anytime soon, but it has to have exit strategies, projected incomes & outgoings, and all the other things people want to see in BPs.

More Details: Apparently there are free workshops one can attend to provide more info, so I'm intrigued. This is a "what to do in the future" task, like the beekeeping and choccy making.

One off task? Yes, but it'll extend over a couple of days, I expect.

Measurable? Yes, by doing and blogging.

#79

2009-03-09T10:17:00.000-07:00

Task: Attend an auction.

What my spreadsheet says: The last auction I went to was back when a baby grand piano was up for grabs at Hoylake Auction Rooms, and it went for about six times what our upper limit was and instead Dad bought an old trunk full of junk for £2. Then he asked the person who bought the piano whether they wanted rid of the one they had, and they did, and we got the upright that lives in the front room to this day. Anyway, that's besides the point; I want to go to an auction of interesting things.

More Details: I did go to one of those ridiculous closed-door auctions where they try to whip you up into a frenzy to get you to spend overinflated sums of money on knockoff tat, but the level of cynisicm in the room was so high they finished it early and turfed everybody out.

One off task? Yes.

Measurable? Yes, by doing it and blogging about it.

#78

2009-03-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

Task: Ride a horse.

What my spreadsheet says: For years I lived in part of the country that had more horses per capita than anywhere else, or so my Dad told me. I still didn't go horse riding. I'm not scared of horses, or anything like that, it's just something I've never got round to.

More Details: There's bound to be a riding school that'll let me have a go for an afternoon. Just one lesson, to see if I like it. Plus, of course, the comedy "hang on, I'm the wrong way 'round!" moment.

One off task? Yes.

Measurable? Yes, by doing and blogging, complete with pictures.

#77

2009-03-09T10:13:00.000-07:00

Task: Vote in all the local elections.

What my spreadsheet says: As many as they send me forms for.

More Details: You know what, though: I reckon they don't send me all the ballot papers I'm supposed to get. I don't think I've seen a single ballot paper for EU elections since we've moved, for example. I could be wrong, of course. Still, I'll get to vote in a general election before too long, I'm sure.

One off task? Nope.

Measurable? Yes, by doing it and mentioning it here.

#76

2009-03-09T10:08:00.000-07:00

Task: Make a stop-motion animation

What my spreadsheet says: Claymation, I think. "Mr Nalsa goes to the park" or something.

More Details: Or, I might try that cracking form of stop-motion made with dSLRs and people. But a five-minute piece of claymation will take, what, three thousand images? At least? That's a good ten hours work, if I'm lucky and don't nudge the tripod the camera is attached to.

One off task? Technically, yes. It may be spread over a couple of wet weekends, though.

Measurable? Yes, by posting the results to YouTube (or Flickr, now that they accept video).

#75

2009-03-09T10:07:00.000-07:00

Task: Learn what all the different planning consent types are.

What my spreadsheet says: I see these things on signs; "A1/A3 consent". What the hell does it mean? Are there B and C categories too? It bugs me that I don't know these things.

More Details: Again, this folds into #80. Probably.

One off task? Yes, and probably one of the duller tasks on this list.

Measurable? Yes, by doing it and folding it into #80.

#74

2009-03-09T10:02:00.000-07:00

Task: Phone a commercial letting agency and find out just how much rent on a shop would be.

What my spreadsheet says: I keep on wondering this. It's part of #80, anyway.

More Details: I see things like "from £7.50/sqft" on advertising hoardings. Is that per month? Per year? Per day? Can I rent a square foot of space? Why are these things advertised in floor area anyway? Why not, "it's a shop, the whole thing costs this much"?

One off task? Yes, but it does link into #80.

Measurable? Yes, by doing it and folding the results into something else.

Day 3, 080309

2009-03-08T05:48:00.000-07:00

Still on track with #3 and #13, but I'm going to shut up about #13 now and take it as read that it's still on track. #3 is being posted on Flickr as my Project101 - task 3 set. There seems to be quite a few shots of snowdrops at the moment, but I'll mix that up a bit in a day or two.

#38 kicked off this morning with a dip at South Leeds. It highlighted how unfit I am, as I was only able to do 11 lengths of the 25m pool, but water is not really my medium. Even at the height of my swimming (five years ago, now) I was only able to get to 17 lengths. I have shocking technique, and expend a lot of energy going nowhere. The pool itself is ok; water not too overchlorinated, warm inside, busy but not hideously so. The building is a big brick bunker (yes, I have a set for photos relating to task 38 as well, go there to see it), but it's cleanish inside and the staff seem pretty decent guys. I just wish that kids wouldn't eat inside the changing rooms; when I got out of the shower I walked through some very damp and soggy Quavers that stuck to my feet like, well, something disgusting.

Currently running tasks: #3, #13, #38.
Completed: 0
Remaining: 101

#73

2009-03-08T01:22:00.000-08:00

Task: Visit every Farmer's Market within an hour's drive away.

What my spreadsheet says: There's only 38 FMs in Yorkshire according to LocalFoodAdvisor, but some of them are far too far away. An hour by Google Maps lets me have everything within a 40 mile radius of Leeds, and that's quite a lot, although I still need to work out which ones are appropriate.

More Details: I approve of the theory of Farmer's Markets, but they sometimes fail to live up to the hype. Leeds is especially guilty of this (which is why I feel no guilt about planning #12). Local Food Advisor (useful resource) tells me there are 38Fms in Yorkshire, but Cleethorpes and Middlesborough are a bit too far to go on a Sunday morning. A 40 mile radius lets me have Settle and Grassington, and we'll see about the other, more hidden ones as well.

One off task? No.

Measurable? Yes, by going and writing trip reports.

#72

2009-03-08T01:14:00.000-08:00

Task: Send something to postsecret.

What my spreadsheet says: I can't mention what I've sent, even if it shows up in the Observer Weekend.

More Details: Postsecret is an odd fish, but I approve of it as a community art thing - it just happens that the community is global. I have a somewhat strict ruling on secrets; if it's secret, nobody knows. If it's shared by two people, it's still not secret because you don't know if the other person will say anything, so it's a piece of information on a restricted distribution list, not a secret. Secrets happen inside your own head, nowhere else. But that's probably just me.

One off task? Yes.

Measurable? Yes, by doing it, but not blogging about it (other than to say "done").

#71

2009-03-08T01:11:00.000-08:00

Task: Turn my handwriting into a font.

What my spreadsheet says: A better, more legible one than the last time I tried this.

More Details: The last time I came up with something that looked ok-ish, if you post-hoc tweaked it and made it bold and made it bigger in Photoshop or a vector-graphics program. You certainly couldn't use it in a document. So, a better version. Then I can type letters that look handwritten, haha. </joke>

One off task? Yes.

Measurable? Yes, by doing it.

#70

2009-03-08T01:07:00.000-08:00

Task: Go to Classical Fantasia with a picnic.

What my spreadsheet says: With friends, for preference.

More Details: There is a problem with Classical Fantasia: traditionally, it's on the same day as Last Night of the Proms, so I'm not often able to get everybody along. Still, we'll see how it does.

One off task? Yes, with an option to repeat.

Measurable? Yes, by doing it and writing a trip report.

#69

2009-03-08T01:04:00.000-08:00

Task: Visit a gun club.

What my spreadsheet says: Trying hard not to be perjorative about this, so I should probably say "shooting range" instead of "gun club". If I can hit a few targets, so much the better.

More Details: One of the things I have no clue about is whether I'm any good at firing a gun and hitting what I'm pointing it at. Being a Brit I'm very much in favour of gun control, but just in case the zombie apocalypse hits I would quite like to know I have more options than the cricket bat. I'm not likely to follow this one up, unless it turns out that I'm an Olympic-level marksman.

One off task? Yes.

Measurable? Yes, by doing it and writing a trip report.

#68

2009-03-08T01:01:00.000-08:00

Task: Give archery a try.

What my spreadsheet says: I havn't held a bow and arrow since I was a kid with two bamboo canes and a piece of string.

More Details: Well, why not? I know we don't need to spend our Sundays practicing the longbow just in case those pesky French try to invade anymore, but this sort of thing is one of the "well, if I like it I may take it up as a hobby" things.

One off task? Yes, but possibly with a commitment weighting.

Measurable? Yes, by doing it and blogging about it.

#67

2009-03-08T00:57:00.000-08:00

Task: Write letters to friends and family instead of emailing them.

What my spreadsheet says: Sometimes email is more appropriate, but when it isn't absolutely necessary I should send a letter.

More Details: Well, I love getting letters, so I imagine other people do too. Ok, I know other people do, but these days all I really use the post for is sending cards to people, when really there's an art to correspondence that we're losing as a generation. Perhaps it'll become one of those "later life" things; once we hit 40 people will stop sending SMSs and emails, and go back to pen-and-paper. Now, there's a business plan - writing lessons for people who havn't used a pen since primary school.

One off task? Nope.

Measurable? Yes, by doing it.

#66

2009-03-08T00:53:00.000-08:00

Task: Take my own lunch to work at least 250 times over the course of the experiment.

What my spreadsheet says: Over 1001 days there's at least 630 working days (back-of-envelope calculations) and I should be able to make my lunch for 50% of those days rather than going out and buying a sandwich from somewhere.

More Details: 250 times is certainly do-able; I want this to become a habit-forming task, though, which will involve a lot more than that. At the end it won't be a "phew, I can go back and start propping up M&S again" thing.

One off task? No.

Measurable? Yes, by doing it and blogging about it, although probably not to the same extent as Lunch In a Box does. (I am very fond of LIAB, I should point out.)