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Snow in Marton

Strudel — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 03:45:16 +0000

View down the driveway

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Random Stuff for the last few days

Strudel — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 08:05:05 +0000

The title pretty much explains this blogpost; a selection of random links I’ve viewed in the past few days.

This is a really beautiful animation of Auckland’s Public Transport Network operating over a day, created by Chris McDowall (I’ve linked to his Vimeo profile because he’s done other great data visualisations!). If you’re interested in all the details as to how the video was created (from a data perspective) then it’s well worth your while clicking through to the Vimeo video page but I’ve embedded it anyway in case you’re just after a taster.

Inflatable Wind Turbines – Looks like a really interesting idea, though I question how durable they’d be under New Zealand’s wind conditions. They’ve got two consumer options and are working on a commercial version which is pretty impressive. Anyway, here’s a graphic simulation of the commercial version in operation. (via Treehugger.com)

Hochstetters Frog taken by G Shirley

This article about a trip to check on the condition of the habitat of the vulnerable Hochsetters Frog, had a sad finding and what I felt was a rather sinister sidestory. Definitely worth a quick read though. And to read more about these unique native frogs here but if you can’t wait a few cool things about them:

They have no visible ear – unlike most species of frogs in the world.

They have round eyes (and look so much cuter for it in my opinion!).

They have no vocal sac and so don’t call or croak, although they’ll squeak when upset.

They’re really small with adults being about 5cm long.

And most amazingly, they hatch from the eggs as froglets with tails and some parents carry them around on their backs.

Welcome to the Members of the Homeschooling Bloggers Haven

Strudel — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 02:39:54 +0000

Hi all!

Thanks for dropping by!

As you can see there’s precious little about our homeschooling endeavours at the moment and I haven’t even put up an update blogpost updating our recent forays into budgeting and meal-planning!

Please do leave a comment and say Hi! I love to converse with people and especially love answering questions and queries and of course I also make the effort to visit your website and return the favour.

Have fun having a poke around and hopefully you will find something of interest :)

Our own mini-financial crisis

Strudel — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 11:20:48 +0000

We’re going through a change in circumstances and so we’ve been busy brainstorming ways to reduce our expenses. So I thought I’d share a run down of most of them with you.

Investigate and make a decision on what to do with my credit card and store card

The store card is a no-brainer really, there’s no real benefit to my having one especially with the outrageous interest rate and really I need to get the balance transferred or paid off and closed.

The credit card is a slightly different story in that, having the ability to purchase online is important to me and our lifestyle. On the other hand, the interest rate isn’t the best and a debit card might be a doable alternative (my concern is the card being invalid with some online businesses though I don’t know how realistic this concern is). I have a spreadsheet in the works comparing my current card and all the alternatives and what the total cost of paying off the debt is.

Create a budget based on our past expenses trimming where we can

Luckily we’ve been keeping track of our expenses in GnuCash however I haven’t been a bit slack at times and it doesn’t show the complete picture at the moment and in creating the budget weI realised the way we were breaking expenses down wasn’t the most effective. So I have revamped the chart of accounts and now I need to get the accounts up to date so we have a clear past picture and keep it up to date so we can have an accurate comparison between the budget and our actuals.

Drastically reduce our food expenses
One of the areas we identified that could be majorly improved upon was our food purchases which are mainly groceries.

Working from a meal plan and getting me back in the kitchen. My husband enjoys cooking, however there are a number of downsides to this. For a start, he hates mealplans and meal sizes/portion sizes have been on the large side meaning food wastage or leftovers that go on for days, or conversely lots of large snacks by my husband. Working from a meal plan means we can eat from our freezer/fridge/pantry more and hopefully reduce both the amount of money we’re spending and the amount of food wastage and the “oh I forgot I bought that” factor. It would also be nice to have appropriately sized servings and smaller amounts of leftovers.

Related to this, I need to do a full inventory of our fridge, freezer, deep freeze, laundry and bathroom in order to identify what we have on hand and what we need to purchase or come up with alternatives for. On the upside, we have done this in the past and so we won’t be starting from scratch, especially for the deep freeze (hopefully).

For some our luxury items we need to come up with alternatives to save money. FOr instance, My ideal breakfast is a bowl of Vogel’s Luxury Cafe-style Muesli and while I’ve said I will compromise and eat porridge as a cheap alternative , it would be nice to start the day in my usual way. Also I have all the gear to make our own cleaning products and bathroom supplies and I could get back into this and save money in this way.

We’ve also identified that we drink a lot of milk and go through a lot of eggs (especially when baking) and bread.

We can bake bread and part of my job for today is price up and test out refridgerated bagged milk.

For eggs, we’d been contemplating getting chickens or rather hens for some time and quite a few houses on our block have coops so we wouldn’t be bothering the neighbours with this addition. I did create a coop/chicken tractor a while back but that was using pvc piping and we’ve decided to go with a standard timber frame instead which offers an opportunity to create a better design. The initial pricing up of the total cost of the eggs is looking fairly good but I still need to design the coop and price up the construction costs and factor that into the total operating costs. It would be great if in the long run we’re able to offset these costs by selling extra eggs.

Some other ways to save money on the grocery bills is to check out alternative options to purchasing from our local grocery stores, like doing a shop at a cheaper supermarket out of town when already needing to be there, purchasing from bulk alternative stores, and buying produce from market gardens and what meat we don’t source from homekill at butchers.

Also, I’d like to be doing more baking, food processing (such as preserves and dehydrating) and maybe even stretching ourselves and attempting a $21 Challenge every now and again.

Another area in which we can save some money is in the garden, with more sustained effort we can get more produce from our garden throughout the year and on the upside we’ve been improving our skills albeit slowly with each growing season we’ve participated in. I’d also like to get into more vegetable swapping with locals when we do have an overabundance of produce. We’ve also made a start of purchasing fruiting trees and vines but now we need to get them in the ground so we can in the long term get some fruit from them!
Ideally to make the most from the garden we need to get the garden shed tidied (it’s currently an absolute shambles) and get the rest of the garden tidy (we have piles of wood and junk lying around). I’ve read that winter is the time to rejuvenate and repair your garden tools and ours could definitely do with this also.

One of the other things I’d like to do is have the inventories computerised along with the meal planning and entering the itemised grocery bills. I can’t help thinking that this would lead to an optimised system in the long run but that fact that there’s no obvious application leads me to suspcet this is a pipe dream. In the meantime I’ve started entering in the recipes I use into Gourmet which has a shopping list ability which is at least one step in the right direction.

Other Stuff

We’re also going to run a mileage log for the vehicle to work out how our fuel is being used and apportioned. We also need to sell our other vehicle and put that money against our debts. It will also mean we’ll be saving on insurance and warrant/registration costs which definitely add up.

One other way to increase our income, is to finally get all the stuff we have cluttering up the house that has been earmarked for putting on trademe or sella actually up on trademe or sella! The benefit of this would be a bit of extra cash to pay off debt and a less cluttered home.

In a way, when we decided to look at our expenses in some areas there is nothing we can do to save money as we already practise good habits. For instance with our utilities (power, phones and internet) we already keep our fingers on the pulse and periodically check to see that we’re on the right plan or provider for our needs. The only extra thing we could do in this area is to drastically change the way we run our lives and that doesn’t make sense as these changes would impact on our ability to bring in income. False economy is not the way to tackle the problem.

All in all this looks like a lot of work and I’d like to summarise the tasks I’ve outlined:

Kill store card by transferring balance or paying in full.
Investigate alternatives to current credit card including, debit card or balance transfer.
Get the accounts up to date in Gnucash.
Keep accounts up to date in Gnucash.
Create mealplans and shop and work from them.
Me making the meals and planning/doing the shopping.
Do a full inventory of our fridge, freezer, deep freeze, laundry and bathroom.
Come up with alternatives to luxury items.
Investigate feasibility of making our own cleaning products and bathroom supplies.
Bake bread.
Price up and test out refridgerated bagged milk and look into other options.
Design coop/chicken tractor plan and price up the construction costs and factor that into the total operating costs.
Compare prices from our local grocery stores to out of town cheaper supermarkets, bulk alternative stores, market gardens and butchers.
Do more baking.
Investigate and do some food processing (such as preserves and dehydrating).
Attempt a $21 Challenge.
Get vegetable garden productive.
Plant fruiting trees and vines and prune grape vine.
Get the garden shed tidied.
Get the rest of the garden tidy (we have piles of wood and junk lying around).
Rejuvenate and repair our garden tools.
Look for software for entering itemised grocery bills, inventories and shopping lists.
Enter in the recipes I use into Gourmet.
Purchase a mileage log and start using.
We also need to sell other vehicle, put that money against our debts and cancel insurance.
Sell stuff already earmarked on trademe or sella.

Image from http://www.sxc.hu/photo/826187

Raffle Tickets

Strudel — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 11:36:06 +0000

These took an age to make but I am so very impressed with myself over the result. And luckily, if I ever want to setup raffle tickets in the future it won’t as time consuming.

Because I use Ubuntu, I wanted to use the tools I had on hand. I used Inkscape to do the design minus the serial numbers, duplicating the one ticket onto an A4 page to make 4 tickets on one page. Then I used the Export Bitmap menu item to save it as a png file.
Then I moved to OpenOffice, using the Word Processor. I added the png to the background of the page and put a 5×5 table over the top. Then I resized the table to fit the shape of the ticket number boxes and inserted into those cells fields (you want the Set Variable field that’s found in the Other menu-option) that calculated the ticket number (one variable name for the stub, and one for the ticket itself). The formula is easy stub=stub+1 and ticket=ticket+1. Then once one A4 page/4 tickets was complete, I copied and pasted this so I ended up with a document of 100 tickets number sequentially from 0001 to 0100. Then I added 2 hidden fields (one for the stub and the other for the ticket) which had the number to start from (so 0 for the first document, 100 for the next, and so forth), using the same kind of field but this time simply stub=0 and ticket=0. With the variable fields, I chose Other Format for the format so I could add leading zeros to get that serial number look.

The problem I found with OpenOffice was that the background keep trying to jump above the fields on the page and that took some time to a) figure out and b) double check all the ticket numbers would print. I kept pushing the png image behind the other objects and eventually I won!

Then came the tedious part, scoring 1000 tickets. Luckily, I remembered my guillotine had a perforation blade and by perforating 3-4 A4 sheets at a time it wasn’t long til this part was done.
After that was cutting the A4 sheets into individual tickets. This took about the same time and before long I had 4 piles of tickets laid face down on my desk ready to flip over and compile into booklets of 10 tickets. This definitely took a bit of time but it was quite satisfying realising we were on the home stretch. To protect the ticket stubs and thinking about the possibilty of people wanting to make notes on their ticket book I added at the last minute an A5 sheet folded almost in half longways. This meant when I stapled the booklet and back-half of the coverpage together, the front of the coverpage laid flat and completely covered the front of the tickets.

And voila, two evenings later I had 1000 tickets compiled into 100 books sitting on my desk!
This process has been simplified because I did take a lot of detours while trying to work out the optimum approach :) I skipped all the teeth knashing and the “But WHY will this not do what I want?!”

By the way, if you’re thinking of running a Raffle in New Zealand, the Internal Affairs website has all the information you need to run one legally – and that’s not as scary as it sounds :)

It’s Almost Eeeeeaster

Strudel — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:37:04 +0000

Daughter is really getting into the whole Easter thing this year though I discovered it has snuck up on me this year. I suspect it has something to do with my considering the 25th to be sacred due to ANZAC Day, since I don’t have the same attachment to Easter.

So I was going through my RSS feed looking at the Easter blogposts I’d starred and thought I’d share.

Firstly, I saw these Easter Egg Hunt Bags from Perl Bee (via The Crafty Crow and they instantly put a smile on my face because they reminded me of one of my favourite parts of ballet, the Character Skirts which were trimmed along the bottom part of the full skirt in much the same way as these bags. Ahhh. I think we’ll be using some of our vast collection of wicker baskets though.

Then I saw this neat idea from Parent Hacks suggesting alternatives to chocolate and sweets, like Lego, for Easter Egg Hunts. Read their comments for some other ideas :)

Parent Hacks had this other brilliant idea for using a muffin tray for dying eggs one colour (although I wonder what the dyes look like after the last egg has been done!)

Similar to the Egg stitchwork that I blogged about earlier in the month, Craftzine uncovered these sweet embroidery designs at The Split Stitch that are downloadable. I love what she’s achieved so far.

And finally, Chasing Cheerios blogged about an idea I hadn’t heard of before, drawing on hot boiled eggs with crayons so they melt!

Random Open Tabs

Strudel — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:39:28 +0000

I love to have many browser tabs open. My computer … doesn’t; but it copes.

I thought I’d randomly (well, relatively randomly) share some of the tabs I have open at the moment.

Sheppard Software
I haven’t spent a great deal of time exploring the site but I’ve liked what I’ve seen so far. There’s a wide variety of games, quizzes and drills for learning various subjects.
I spent a good 1/2 hour procrastinating … err I mean working on my 101 in 1001 task of Learning the locations of countries. Well, actually I got hooked on learning the locations of capital cities in Oceania and I got quite good at it.
So you see some activities are age-less. Do you know all your capital cities in Oceania and where they are?

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
This is the home of the contest where contestants battle for the honour of having written the worst first sentence of a book.
Some of the entries are not safe for work (NSFW) but there are some beautifully cringeworthy entries truely worthy of winning the title, like this one:

As the fading light of a dying day filtered through the window blinds, Roger stood over his victim with a smoking .45, surprised at the serenity that filled him after pumping six slugs into the bloodless tyrant that mocked him day after day, and then he shuffled out of the office with one last look back at the shattered computer terminal lying there like a silicon armadillo left to rot on the information superhighway.
Larry Brill, Austin, Texas (1994 Winner)

and

Financial Literacy Month
Well thought out site, with a sequential approach that can be jumped into and out of at any point. Some interesting tips in there as well as useful forms to utilise. Definitely worth a look if you’re not 100% in control of your finances – and who is, right?

Monarch and Red Admiral Friends

Strudel — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 11:57:01 +0000

This was the best of a batch of terrible photos but I really wanted to have visual evidence of a Monarch Butterfly and a Red Admiral Butterfly sharing the same space.
I was at the Bason Botanic Gardens today (which is quite gorgeous and bigger than I thought), and saw a Monarch Butterfly being chased by a Red Admiral Butterfly. It went on for some time with the Monarch trying to land on a gum tree and the Red Admiral seemed to be bothering it. Eventually the Monarch seemed to give up and accept their new friend and I saw them move from one part of the tree to the other.
Now for the terrible photo explanation. I had my two camera’s with me. I’d grabbed them on the way out the door knowing that one needed a battery recharge and the other was okay. Now the Canon, despite my owning it for some time now, I still haven’t got the knack of it much to my disappointment. When trying to take a decent photo of the butterflies, I thought I’d give it a go with the flash. Could I work out how to do this? Nope, pressing buttons and twisting dials trying to locate the flash options didn’t work. Well, what it did was switch it to delay mode, so now when I clicked I had to wait 10 seconds before the photo was taken. Brilliant.
By the time I decided to resort to the manual and finally get the perfect shot, my phone rang and I had to leave for the day.
I got home this evening and one of the first things I did was get out that jolly manual and find out how to a) turn off the delay, and b) operate the flash. And how do I do the latter? Well there’s a button clearly labelled all on it’s own near the flash unit. I keep forgetting it’s there!

I must be getting old.

Miscellany

Strudel — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 11:54:59 +0000

Another dud night from me sorry. But I do have these rather random blogposts I’d like to share with you.

Firstly, this brilliantly humorous post from Vaughn Davis entitled 10 Uses for an Unwanted Skyhawk. If there’s any left over, sign me up please. If nothing else, it should be a decent deterrent for all the drivers that speed down our street!

I’ll admit I’ve been fascinated with the idea of Red Velvet Cake since I first heard of it, but thanks to Craftzine, this photo has me salivating at the idea of Red Velvet Crepes!

And finally, these bunnies look incredibly cute, (despite the one of the right looks a tad malicious)
and the Spring Bunnies come with instructions and even diagrams care of Craftzine and their creator, Stephanie from All About Ami.

No Blogpost Tonight

Strudel — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 11:27:39 +0000

(Did you see what I did there)