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Water shortages in Dublin

Yesterday evening, Dublin City Council published on their webblog and sent a single tweet that they were implementing water restrictions in Dublin for the weekend, starting last night.

I didn’t find out about this until this morning and from what I can see, a significant number of people likewise only found out this morning. After the restrictions had started. There really was not a whole lot of notice, and not only that, the notice is unclear on what time the daily restrictions end. Either it is 7am or it is 9am, and you may have water, or you may not have water. Your water pressure may drop.

This is in response to an increase in demand thanks to an increased number of leaks.

I have some trouble with this. Water demand from users is probably not changing a whole pile. Water getting wasted by leaks is not water demand, it’s water wastage.

Being honest, I did wonder – given the city’s previous massive problems in the area of water supply post snow events 2 years ago – whether we would have any serious issues given the last couple of days. Being even more honest, I would have to say I don’t think it was that cold that sustained for that long so cannot see why we should have had similar problems. But we do and the restrictions went in place without a lot of people knowing about them.

I follow Dublin City Council on twitter but I am not on twitter 24-7 and I follow circa 2000 accounts on twitter. A single solitary tweet is likely to get lost; it’s as simple as that. For something like this, I really think that Dublin City Council needs to repeat that tweet every single hour until they are finished with water restrictions. Toyota have managed to tell me that Katie Taylor likes singing in her car several times lately and I don’t even follow Toyota.

609 people have email alerts from Dublin City Council. About 14,000 people follow them on twitter. I’ve signed up for the email alerts (service which I did not know was available) in the hope that in the future, I’ll know about these things sooner rather than later. That email alert might be way better than their twitter feed for timely information, or possibly their RSS feed.

If I were Dublin City Council, however, I would certainly look at how effective a single tweet is going to be in terms of getting a major announcement out, simply because twitter time lines are so time sensitive. It is not a big deal – or should not be a big deal – to re-announce these things every few hours.

2013 03 29 windsandbreezes annoying me since 1874 Comments (0) Permalink

So besides all these newish pens I have all these oldish pens too

Having access to the internet lets you know when you’re obsessed about something and when you’re not really obsessed about something. I know from the internet that although most people might look at my desk (4 bottles of ink and several boxes of cartridges to fit different pens in many different colours) (and even then they don’t see the four bottles of ink in storage upstairs) that I am rather nuts about pens. Have you seen my pencil case?

Maybe.

I have some really nice mechanical pencils as well. To be honest, I rather like nice stationery stuff. I like nice things full stop but still….

I work with computers all day long, so, for the most part, most of the writing I do consists of To Do lists and the occasional journal entry. Until I started studying maths and now I scribble figures as well. Anyway, back with the fountain pens.

In November, because I was 40, and because I am single and so no one would be flying me off to Prague for the weekend to celebrate, I had a long think about something I really wanted. In this day and age, identifying something like that is harder because I’m older and I tend to have most things I need.

But I eventually decided on a Caran D’Ache fountain pen because I had a number of Caran D’Ache Ecridor ballpoints which I love and linked to that, I find myself writing with the fountain pens again. And I have quite a few of them of which the birthday present is obviously the most expensive, some of which only cost a couple of euro, one of which was the result of a trade done when I was 15 with my sister. I had this really cheap pen which I bought with my pocket money for about three pounds in the local stationers.  In fact I had two, one new one and one not so new. My sister wanted the not so new one because it flowed so nicely. She gave me a Papermate one in return which came with a filler as well. I promptly put that in the other cheaper pen and now I can’t get it out. I know this because I still have both.

Most of my ballpoint pens are Caran d’Ache pens with two or three Cross pens and one Lamy. I put a new refill in the Lamy this mornings (having finally found it). Most of my fountain pens are Lamy Safari or AL-Star. I think there are 7 of those mainly with M nibs, one F and one B. I have one Friendship as well.

But in addition to them, I still have a couple of Stypens, the second of the piano pens which my sister didn’t want, the Papermate she give me, a wooden body pen which I bought in Finland and a couple of others which I don’t remember buying but all of which took international cartridges, which haven’t been touched in years. The ink in the Papermate had turned to glue. I still can’t get the filler out of the plastic piano pen and if you put an amber cartridge into either of the Stypens, they both still write pink. So right now, all the older pens are sitting in cold water healing themselves. It could take a few days.

And I got completely covered in thick ink pigment. I looked such a mess.

The oldest of the Lamy pens which I have is a white one which a friend in Germany gave to me when I was there at the age of 19. It is the one with a broad nib and it still writes beautifully. I’ve since given two others away, a red one and a transparent one. I’m inclined to replace the transparent one because I like the whole transparency thing. The three newest ones are yellow (bought yesterday), green (bought a few weeks ago) and aquamarine (bought about 4 months ago). There is one black matt one and one silver and one silver grey AL-Star. I can’t see what’s on the black matt pen – it’s probably about 15 years old and it looks like a F. The silver grey definitely has a F nib on it.

In addition to those pens, I also have a more recently bought Parker fountain pen, one of their really inexpensive ones, which I just don’t seem to use…it never fits to me and currently, its cartridge is empty.

Do I need all these pens? Probably not. It could be argued that one and one spare is adequate. But then I have different colours in most of them and they do different things for me depending on what I am using them for (yes, I have colour organised my to do list). I could justify them that way.

I just don’t. The point is, I love beautiful things and beautiful things do not have to be expensive. I’m fortunate enough to have found a way to make my handing writing neat when I was about 9 (it took a lot of hard work and fighting). Given a choice between the cheapest of my fountain pens and whatever is in the stationery store at work, I will always choose my fountain pen.

The only difference in the future is I will take better care of them, and I won’t be cleaning the older pens for days and days at a time to clean 15 years of ink pigment out of them.

2013 02 10 windsandbreezes beautiful things Comments (0) Permalink

Yarnaholic

I have a problem. I have a serious problem. I think it’s called the Shiny problem but it manifests itself in many different aspects of my life and occasionally, it causes operational problems. My current problem is Yarn.

I knit and I crochet but if I’m honest, not that much. There are people turning out 4 sweaters, 3 scarves and a couple of baby jackets in the time that I oh, start a doily, start and maybe finish a scarf, or may be not as the case may be. I have finished things, of course I have. I took three years to finish a thread skirt which, despite my weight changing several times in the meantime, is actually too big for me and anyway, I want to unpick the end of it and do another 4 inches because I don’t think it’s long enough either. I’ve finished one doily. I’ve finished 2 scarves and one shawl. I even wrote up a pattern for the shawl (it wasn’t very hard). I’ve crocheted two cardigans and one waist wrap around thing.

It’s not a whole lot to be honest. Yes, I know I am busy but still….I have friends who are turning out significantly more. So I can only assume I’m not really a knitter or not really a crochet; they are two hobbies I have but neither of which take over my life. What has taken over my life though, is buying yarn.

It’s fine, I suppose, to have conversations with you friends about your yarn stash if, for example, you’re doing several pairs of socks a month, cardigans for all your friend’s babies, hats to finish off that one ball you had left over from the sweater you did about 4 years ago. You can justify adding to the stash because in fairness, you’re making some inroads into it. I’m not. I’m not making any inroads to my stash in terms of turning it from balls of yarn into some sort of finished object. When I started knitting, I turned into a yarnaholic. It’s really only recently I could walk past This is Knit without going in and buying yarn I didn’t need and didn’t have a project for. And frankly, I’ve been swearing at myself for years not to buy yarn unless I had a project for it. Sometimes I got around buying yarn by buying pattern books instead. I have a phenomenal collection of pattern books, all bought because there was something in it that I might make when I had finished the other nine thousand objects I had designated Works in Progress. I cheat on my projects with other projects.

So currently sitting on my coffee table is a new Rowan book, a Louisa Harding book I picked up in a sale and yet another lot of pineapples. Pineapples mark me out as a crocheter. Not only that, I have rather a lot of magazines in both French and English with patterns as well. Many of them are beautiful. Many of them I want to do. But not quite enough and a lot of them involve yarn I don’t already have, or at least, can’t raid from the stash.

Most of my knitting friends deal with stash embarrassments by knitting them down. I’m now so overwhelmed by mine that I don’t think this is an option. I have not managed knitting particularly well which is annoying since before I looked at knitting patterns I was probably managing the crochet side of things a bit better. My life would, however, be a lot easier to organise, if I had less yarn, sooner, rather than the 9 months at least it will take me to turn it into finished objects.

I’m currently knitting a scarf with some yarn which was a present. It will be beautiful when I finish it; it is laceweight so it will be a while. After that, I have another two balls of yarn which are beautiful and which were presents, one of which will be a hat and the other of which will be either a shawl or a scarf. These are the only new projects I can countenance starting with new yarn that I didn’t own on 1 December last year.

But beyond those, there is currently a tank top under production in 4 ply cotton. There is a stash of 4 ply cotton to do a second tank top when that one is finished,. They are both Rowan patterns, they are both beautiful and they will both take me a while because they are both knitting. I have a lace shawl under production which involves 72 rosettes and a million half Rosettes, somewhere. Don’t ask me where it is at the moment, it’s in the amorphous blob called “one of the yarn boxes”. I have a pink doily under production which is about 1 third done although half the rows are done. It’s circular so the more rows you do, the bigger the rows you have left to do. There’s a crochet free form scarf under production somewhere. These are the ones I can actually remember and assuming I’ve forgotten nothing, besides that there are 4 big boxes of yarn, some of which were bought for projects which I will never do now because I’m like 4 years older than I was when I bought the yarn and the pattern and frankly, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea.

The only stuff I really want to keep is the crochet thread which serves double purpose for crochet and may also see life with lace bobbins. All the stuff which is more knittable than crochetable, I am seriously considering ditching. I don’t need the stress of having yarn I really will never have time to work up.

I’m considering having a destash coffee/tea/hot chocolate evening and inviting friends to come and raid. Or I’m prepared to donate suitable bits of it to a school or activity centre that teaches kids to knit. Suggestions welcome on that front because I don’t have children myself and I don’t know any possible targets. And failing that, I will probably acquire a big black bag and Be Strong and get rid of the yarn I neither need nor want. I know I can do this. You’re talking to someone who has actually thrown out three balls of Noro that were just not working up either crochet or knitted. This may be hard because as you ditch these things, you are ditching a small part of what you used to be.

And when that is done, and all that’s left is in a clearly organised and labelled box and I know exactly what I have, it is entirely possible that the two boxes of houselinen, the towels and sheets, will fit on a shelf somewhere that they don’t at the moment because the boxes of yarn are in the way. And I will be able to go back to tapestry.

2013 02 10 windsandbreezes knitting Comments (0) Permalink

Designing a Filofax that (might) work

I confess, I own 3 Filofaxes, a personal one which is at my parents, and two A5s. I spent a lot of December trying to work out an attractive way to organise my life, read 1 million organising, journal and lifehacking articles, spent hours talking about this with friends and eventually decided that the reasons that the filofax stuff didn’t work for me was because the Filofax system wasn’t personalised enough to me. So I decided to empty out the junk from the two Filofaxes, dive head first into the world of printables, say feck that, fire up Photobox and not have time to watch any television for about a week. Well two days anyway.

I like beautiful things, so I designed a beautiful Filofax for me. It’s not finished yet – there are holding pages in some places, and my printer needs new cartridges so full on designs in some places were delayed. But I thought a lot about what I wanted from a journal and I basically want it to be very customisable, and beautiful, and inspiring, and likely to be used. I cheated on one small thing – I bought Week on 2 page calendars and some vertical and horizontal year planners mainly because a) I didn’t have time to lay them out myself and b) if I did, they’d cost a lot more to print than buying the Filofax ones. I may change this during the year if it again is obvious the Filofax layouts aren’t working for me.

So this is the front page.

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It’s got my name and contact details, and has a binary brush design on it. I printed it on Tesco cotton paper which is more expensive than their cheap white paper but is cream and pretty and will be used for a lot of dividers.

Some of what follows was done in Photoshop, some in Word, depending on what purpose I was trying to fulfill.

I wanted my organiser to have a place to go when I need a break, a little inspiration, a little reminder that life has many beautiful things in it. So the first section is an Inspiration section.

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I don’t really use tabs all that much – just wider dividers. This is about a cm wider than normal A5.

It includes a bunch of photographs I took myself, a verse of The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, the first page of the second movement of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto.

Inside the section is a page devoted to XKCD which is one of my favourite things on the web

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some poems printed on parchment

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a few photographs I took myself

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a couple of pieces of travel writing of places I love (in this case Brittany but I’m going to add to it)

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and in a plastic pouch some cards by other photographers I like, like Philip Plisson and Lyn Tait.

Then there’s the Personal Development section:

which looks like this:

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The two quotes are key to the idea of doing rather than talking about doing and it’s got a review of last year in it as well.

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In fact, this theme is prevalent because it covers the actual time planning as well:

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I did a number of month based dividers as well – January, February and March are done. I wanted them to have a little beauty, and they were printed on the cotton paper again – and each of them has a poem.

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I’ll use songs as well if I find ones I like for the other months, or quotes out of books.

I’ve got lots of projects which is why I need an organiser.

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and I have lots of things people have said about organising projects.

and just to prove I do use little post-it type thingies as well:

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this will organise the inside of projects as lots of small projects really can’t demand a whole pile of graphic design every time. I will do dividers to sort projects into blog thingies, data thingies, sports thingies and the like….

I’m currently studying maths at the Open University plus a bunch of other things via coursera, MIT OCW and Udacity.

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so that needs to be organised as well.

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There’s a travel section as well:

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and a finance section:

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and lastly, a wishlist organiser.

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so that I spend a lot less money on impulse buys and can sanity check more of them. The one thing I do need is an A5 metal punch for my Filofax – couldn’t get one in Dublin and the plastic one struggles with photographic card and anything thicker.

In terms of what I used, there are Photoshop textures and brushes which I have accumulated over the years. Most of the textures came from Metal Militia. A lot of the brushes came via Brusheezy and Deviantart. The font is a paid for font, Academy Engraved I think, which I love although the front page one is a script like font which either came with Photoshop or I picked up from dafont.com. I use Tesco Finest cotton paper, HP Brilliant or Eco white, some parchment which I bought in Easons years and years ago, a HP printer and an AWFUL lot of time.

2013 01 01 windsandbreezes journals and stuff Comments (3) Permalink

Drawn journals

While I was wandering around pinterest the other day, I came across journals where people just drew one picture per day and laid them out in the shape of a box calendar, you know one where you’ve all the boxes to write appointments into and stuff. I liked the idea, and thinking about it yesterday, I decided to do something similar.

I’ve never done a 365 photographically but that’s because I have been known to post 1000 photographs a day during kite competitions. But I wondered about the discipline involved in drawing a single picture every day to depict something of the day for posterity, something that makes me smile (usually) or something which makes me sad. Something that touches the day. I resolve to find something.

I’m not very good at drawing, mind so this could be entertaining.

I own a couple of beautiful notepads, including a couple that I picked up in Paperchase in Arnotts under the heading of “I’ll definitely find some use for these:

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Let’s face it, I do like pens.

This morning’s sketch – I know the day is barely half done – but nothing, I suspect is going to top this. When I woke this morning, and looked out the window, the eastern sky was a beautiful orange glow. The western sky was lit by a waning but almost full moon. Despite my view being rooves and other people’s gardens, it truly was a gorgeous way to start a new year.

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This is it.

Happy New Year.

2013 01 01 windsandbreezes journals and stuff Comments (0) Permalink

Best thing I bought (from a use point of view) in 2012

Laptop stand in IKEA. It cost about 5 euro and had the impact of raising my keyboard but especially my screen and suddenly using the thing is a whole lot more comfortable. Recommended.

2013 01 01 windsandbreezes introspective braindumping. Comments (0) Permalink

On needing to be organised.

So 2013 is fast approaching and I have realised that in the way most people have to budget money – I am amongst these most people – I also seriously have to budget time.

I used to be very organised. I used to have a lot less to do with my time. In 2011, I started studying maths and statistics with the Open University. I have a deep desire to add a bunch of skills as well in the way of Python and various data analytics related items. I have a bunch of private projects to look at. I have a desperate tendency not to get enough sleep, not to be able to keep a lid on the filing, not to make time to go swimming. I also have to work a full time job.

So I have been taking time out to read a lot of stuff on getting organised. Personal organisation. Time management. In the way of Rule 34, you have just no idea how much stuff there is on organisation out there.

I’ve typically worked off my Google calenders synched out to my phone and iPad. I have lacked a decent overview of what is actually happening in my life at any given time so I have decided to build a life planner. To do this, initially I was going to use an A4 folder, then I remembered I owned one, not two filofaxes. So currently, I am giving time to sorting out the filofaxes in a way that works for me. I want Pretty because I like Pretty.

I have failed with Filofaxes before (obviously seeing as I have two of them). I just couldn’t get their bits of organisational stuff to work for me. However, I have realised that I own a decent printer, Photoshop, Word 2010. I don’t have much time but theoretically, if I work things right on the organisational front, I’ll get the time back manyfold. Well I won’t because the time I didn’t have to go swimming I will now spend swimming.

One of the things I have not had any time at all to do lately is creative stuff. So when I lined up to start designing dividers for my usefully A5 sized Filofax (the general organiser), I couldn’t actually remember the last time I did any graphic design at all. I could not find any of my Photoshop tools. So I spent time dragging them back from external drives. I had two Photoshop tools drives one of which is missing. I thought it was in my camera bag (but it’s not).

Things like this never used to be normal. I’m not saying they are normal now – I rarely if ever lose things. That being said I was able to drag down the tools from another back up (and I’m pretty sure they are on even another back up after this).

The truth is, I have, in general, managed to reasonably keep a lid on the many plates I’m spinning but even though I can do this, I can’t tell you how many plates I have spinning. There are a lot of things I want to do so I really need to do a better job on budgeting time for them. I need to do a better job on budgeting time for stuff I don’t have time for any more. The more I do this, I reckon, the more I’ll get done.

Like getting blog entries written. All of my blogs are suffering at the moment. Yes, I have five. No, they are all getting somewhat neglected.

In the meantime, as a bona fide more organised person, I have discovered labelmaking machines. I am in the process of labelling all my plugs. This gives me an extraordinary feeling of achievement sometimes.

I leave you with the words of Calvin Coolidge:

We can’t do everything all at once. But we can do something at once.

Of course, that could be misinterpreted but I read it as “get stuck in because every little bit you achieve takes you closer to the goal”.

Happy New Year.

2012 12 28 windsandbreezes Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

the Rosie Tank and how knitting is going

So I have a ball of Malabrigo lace yarn that was bought for a wave flavoured scarf and two attempts at knitting it have revealed that the yarn and the pattern do not go together. As a result, I have 450m of not very cheap yarn, lace weight which needs a project. I’m thinking of crocheting a doily with it at this stage; it’s light enough and unusually coloured for a doily.

But none of that will happen until the Rosie Tank is finished. I’m not all that sure when I started it although “ages ago” qualifies, but I’ve been on a run with it and the back is done; I’m 5cm into the front and am hopeful of not running out of yarn. I’m doing it in a pretty similar colour to Amy Butler’s original design and I really like it, but not unlike a certain crocheted lace skirt I fear it may be too big.

It is also involving a hell of a lot of stocking stitch and while this has the benefit of going quite quickly, it’s also boring given that a certain translucent Jura Mountain wrap was 100% stocking stitch too. I’m getting bored of it and have decided that although this is lined up and even has yarn assigned to it, I won’t be knitting it for a while. It’s taking ages and at some stage close to the start of the year I stopped working on several projects at a time and limited myself pretty much to two. This means a lot of WIPS left around the place (countless works in progress) but it does also mean more progress on whatever the primary project is. This is how, for example, the lace skirt got completed, and how the Jura mountain wrap got completed and how this Rosie tank top will get finished.

The secondary project is a crochet project and I am most anxious to get a hook back in my hands. I saw a really nice hoodie in Bloomingdales – someone must have posted a link to twitter but I’ve no idea anymore who that might have been – and I liked the stitch. It transpired that one of my precious Harmony Guides had instructions for the stitch in it so I am going to use that as a basis to create some sort of a sweater. It is not going to be the sort of sweater that keeps you warm much because like crochet, it’s got a lot of holes in it but it will be something built from scratch by me and I am looking forward to it. After that I will have to review what I have in the way of yarn and decide what to do after that. That being said, between this tanktop and that sweater, I should be busy enough for the next few months.

In the background I have a pink doily on the go which I would like to finish so that might make its way into acceptable to work on WIPs. I think that should be plenty. There is a crochet shawl under production which I am hoping will float to the top of the priority list after I’ve completed the tank top and the sweater but…it’s not my most urgent.

2012 06 30 windsandbreezes crochet Comments (0) Permalink

Charlie, Maria and Isabelle

Some time ago I signed up to the Turing sunflower project and part of this will involve making videos of them from time to time.

I did this for a couple of reasons – one of which was getting involved in a project like this in the first place – and secondly because I’m not a good gardener.

Yes, I know I successfully grow strawberries but that happens more by luck than anything else. I kill mint plants (and have admitted to this in the video above) for no reason that I can discern. If I could, I would bottle it because apparently mint grows wild for most other people.

Anyway, this week’s question from the organisers involved introducing your sunflowers so in between the fairly horrendous rain showers over Dublin today, I went and shot this video. I am surprised by how high quality the imagery is – I don’t usually shoot video, this was on my phone and frankly it’s pretty decent altogether. It’s giving me ideas. Lots of ideas.

In other completely unrelated news I apparently have more Dropbox space. Thanks Dropbox.

2012 06 16 windsandbreezes Turing Sunflowers Comments (0) Permalink

windsandbreezes is rebuilding atm

It’s three years since I abandoned windsandbreezes following a lot of problems from hackers. However, I held onto the domain on the grounds that it was the first domain I registered; my email is linked to it and I figured I might rebuild the site at some point in the future. There is now a wordpress install there and I will slowly start blogging over there again.

There are a couple of completely illogical reasons for this – firstly, I found it easier to write on a site called windsandbreezes rather than a site called thingsthatstrikeme for some bizarre reason. I never really liked that domain name but was devoid of inspiration at the time (I had to build a photoblog at the time and I think that all my creativity went on livingforlight rather than thingsthatstrikeme) and I seem – more often – to handle things more trivially here.

I do still have a blog at treasalynch.com/blog which handles other stuff (mainly related to business/tech/work and education) and all told, I’m wondering if running 4 different blogs is really a good idea (I have more than that of course).

Anyway, this is really just for info because I know a few people who read here were with me from early days with windsandbreezes and I figured I should at least tell you the site is coming back to life as a blog.

2012 06 16 windsandbreezes making me happy... Comments (1) Permalink