Projects – Life, the Universe and Everything

Over the years, between finishing university and getting old (about 35), I had almost endless energy and enthusiasm for a great many things I found interesting. Generally my great ideas make interesting conversations and daydreams, occasionally I try following through with one. Quite often these projects start with a flurry of activity and then die a sad death sometime afterwards, due to there just not physically being enough hours in a day.

I use this page to help me remember the things that could have been, if only there was an extra 7 days in every week. If you hover over the ‘Projects’ button above you’ll see all my current stuff.

[Edit: It turns out that non-mouse equipped devices don’t really like ‘hover’ buttons. So, links to current stuff for any non-hover-mouse viewers are now added to the top of this page.]

(note: when I say ‘old’ I mean the time I finally admitted to myself that I could no-longer survive quite happily on about 4 hours of sleep a night; the candle of my youth was at one point burnt at both ends, the middle, and the bits in between. The candle of not-quite-middle-age is burnt very slowly and replenished daily.)

Little Gifts

A site dedicated to helping you find all those great local individuals who create and sell their awesomeness online.

This site started in 2013 as a way for me to remember and browse all my friends’ products when it comes to birthdays and other gifting events, and then started to go as other people recommend additions.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to really get to grips with the beast that is the WordPress engine (over the 4 years I was trying to keep it going), so it dragged on and certain things didn’t get completed which meant I was never happy with it. In the end, by the time it was useful there were more professional and better maintained versions online. The final outcome became what is now my Favourite Links page.

Elements of Flow
Enhance your awareness – Free your creativity.

In 2010 ‘Elements of Flow’ was going to be a three day workshop event aimed at exploring the concepts of energy flow and shared philosophies between the fields of martial arts, dance, circus skills and meditation. Taking place at Rougham Airfield in Bury St. Edmunds, we would offer a variety of activities with workshops during the day, performances in the evening and camping available on site.

Guy and I spent quite a while throwing this idea around, to be then joined by Krystyna and Ken. We managed to get a great line up of live bands for each of the three nights, a plethora of teachers of many different arts, and a fabulous venue. We had a sound tech company, food traders, T-shirts … just not enough buying tickets.

In the end we fell back on Plan B: a one day event with an evening gig. It was great fun, and a fabulous experience. I just feel sad that because of our inexperience it never got to reach its full potential.

We reached for the stars and missed.

Tea Ramblings

‘Tea Ramblings’ was created in 2014 when Frodo and Col (a pair of friends who love to drink tea) realised that where one of them had a memory like a database, the other had a sieve with extra holes.

The main aim of this site was to make it easy for us to review new teas, find teas we’ve already drunk to remind us what we thought of them, and then to add more reviews when we try them again. Life, like tea and people, is full of variations, and there’s no ‘correct’ way to brew tea ‘properly’ that fits everyone.

This got off the starting line quite spritely, but then only managed to limp along for two years due to Frodo having two beautiful daughters and me getting into kayaking and climbing; although tea was integral to those parts of our life, as someone else said “It’s hard to blog while trying not to fall off a climbing wall or cleaning up another poo explosion.”

The end result is now a far smaller project found on my Tea Ramblings page.

Ramblings of a Crazy Man

The beginning of this blog, back in December 2010, over on Blogger. In the end there were far too many glitches with the free system for me to enjoy using it. In February 2016 I moved here to WordPress. My first blog post:

“After jumpin in my car last night armed with my faithful satnav, I started the engine and pointed the nose cone south. Managed to spend an hour driving along a motorway that didn’t exist (radar showed a blue arrow amid a screen of plain, lonely black). It was cold in the deep of space, and no-one could hear me scream when the car in front of me did an emergency stop, followed by a 7 point turn, then shot off back up the non-existent motorway. Reminded me of Planes Trains and Automobiles “You’re going the wrong way!!”

Welcome to my world 🙂