Vicarious Thoughts

I’ve been trying to do this kind of post “for quite some time now” (sorry, The Matrix is playing in the next room) and try and move away from my content-thin blogposts of late (and early).

So without further ado, I bring you my rss feed picks for today!

Craft

These Goodie Bags look quite simple to make (which is always an important factor for me. I can see they could have other purposes – she says looking at a number of plastic bags containing home education resources. (link via WhipUp.net)

There are plenty of tote patterns available if you go hunting around the innumerable craft blogs. I particularly like this one from Film in the Fridge because the directions are particularly clear, it looks easy to construct but at the same time has a nice pocket and a removable solid base. (link via WhipUp.net)

Home Education

The theme for next week’s Unplugged Project is Happy. I hope we can organise a project to fit with this theme. Perhaps something that induces happiness like blowing bubbles, or an activity involving emotions.

I’m including this link to this nicely laid out Lapbook on Racoons from Classical Homeschooling while Hawaiian Dreaming in this post to remind me that Lapbooking (or our own twist on it) might be a good way of combining and storing the work we’re doing each unit)

Misc

This weekend we’re definitely going to try making Mozarella, and possibly Ricotta. I’m going to admit to being quite plebian and say I don’t remember ever using Ricotta so this should be interesting. This recipe from Living Green is the one a couple of people I know have used and will probably be slightly more helpful being a New Zealand based tutorial.

After reading this post from WebWorkerDaily, I’m going to remove some of the things I receive via email and receive them via rss instead.

This post at Harvard Business is well worth reading. The three main points are: Choose three important tasks to complete each day, Turn off your email client, and Set up a weekly 20-minute meeting with yourself. I’m already doing the last one (though more like 3 hours), and can testify that it helps define the week and gives a time to reflect on the past week, how you did, and what to concentrate on in the coming week. I’m finding it also helps me to realise I’ve only got a certain amount of time til I will be sitting down and doing this reflection so there better be something decent done to reflect upon.
Limiting the distractions while getting work done and Choosing only 3 taks is something I need work on. I’ve been trialing using post-it notes to score what I need to do next – creating a small stack of 5 or 6 small tasks and then having the satisfaction of unveiling the next task and chucking the just-finished post-it. (via unclutterer)

My 101 in 1001 list has an entry that I’d like to give podcasting a whirl, so this post from Perfomancing was a useful read. I’m spending quite a bit of time doing stuff while listening to various podcasts especially while getting the dreaded housework done, and have been doing some recording of my voice whilst I verbally jot down some ideas, but I’m not sure about listening live as I don’t get to spend a great deal of time uninterrupted at my desk these days.

And lastly, I just had to link to this post from BoingBoing called Big Tent Atheism as it resonated with the antics of some people I come into contact with regularly. Certainly the sentiment can be applied to more than just political parties and atheists. I’m sure there are many people who can identify this behaviour in all sectors of society.

Lifehack had an interesting post today about Assuming Positive Intent. This is something I really struggle with, and combine my cynicism with my sarcasm and I can appear to be quite a negative person. Ironically, I would estimate I spend just as much time being cynical as I do amused at the vagaries of life and I laugh, at the very least, once a day.

Well, this leaves my rss finds for the day down to 4 programming posts which I need to read and digest more, and 1 post that really needs a post of it’s own if I get round to it this week. Yay! This has also taken at least 2 hours (the counter may be out of whack due to a browser restart).

I’m going to have to do some research into how legal it is to include photos from the blogposts I’ve mentioned as this is just a mass of text! I also need to consider breaking this up into several posts based on categories. I know very few visit this blog but I am interested in, if this becomes a regular thing for me, how to present it. One worry I have is that presenting each blogpost I come across as it’s own blogpost on my blog smacks of big blog wannabe.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Craft, General, Home Education, Kitchen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.