Continue reading »]]> I mentioned already, didn’t I, that it’s a good year for blogging conferences? And I did seriously consider writing a single, multi-purpose “meet and greet” post so that anyone I may meet up with at any of the conferences this year would know a little about me. But then I reconsidered, and decided that each conference is going to be a big enough event in its own right that each one should have its own meet and greet. (I reserve the right to use the same photo though…)

Cybher is being held in London on the 12th May, and its organisers are describing it as the first all inclusive female blogger event of its kind in the UK. I’m looking forward to it because the combination of focus on blogging and geek-stuff will be perfect for me I think! So if you’re going along I hope I’ll get the chance to say “hi”, and here’s a little about me so you can get to know me before the event:

the geek family

Name: Ruth Arnold

Blog: geekmummy

Twitter IDs:@R2UK and @geekmummy

Height: about 5’6″ I think

Hair: shoulder length, ginger and curly. The colour and curl are both natural by the way, although I harbour a secret desire to try enhancing the colour with henna at some point…

Five things you should know about me:

1. I met my husband online, in the days before the Internet existed as we know it today. We “chatted” for hours over the University network system before meeting in person.
2. I didn’t want kids until I was in my thirties.
3. I was a Microsoft Certified System Engineer in the days of Windows NT4
4. I appeared (briefly) in an episode of “Songs of Praise” when I was little. It was a special edition that featured my Dad’s jazz band, and the film crew filmed him driving me to school. This was wrong because (a) he never took me to school and (b) I lived within walking distance of school! So for the benefit of the cameras we just drove the car around the block instead!
5. I’ve eaten a meal with the late, great Humphrey Lyttleton. I talked about this in one of my recent audio blogs – you can hear it here.

Are you going to CybHer? Please say hi, and head on over to Sian’s blog to see all the other lovely people who are going.

Continue reading »]]> Have you played with Pinterest at all yet? It’s a graphical bookmarking site. You bookmark images by “pinning” them, and you can organise those images into “boards”. And of course it has a social element, so you can see whatever your friends have “pinned” as well. All great fun. I quite enjoy it, but I’ve not been using it as much as I could do because most of my web browsing is done via my iPad or iPhone, and there is no easy way to “pin” items from those devices. Or so I thought…

A little bit of Googling today, and I found an entry on the Pinterest blog which details how to create your own “Pin it” button in Safari on the iPad or iPhone. It’s written in a not very detailed kind of way, so having got it working for myself today I thought I would create a more “step by step” guide to help others wanting to do the same thing.

First of all, before you start following the steps below, you need to do one thing. On your iPhone or iPad highlight the code snippet below and choose the “Copy” option. Make sure you highlight accurately – you need all the text, but no extra bits!

javascript:void((function(){var%20e=document.createElement('script');
e.setAttribute('type','text/javascript');
e.setAttribute('charset','UTF-8');
e.setAttribute('src','http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinmarklet.js?
r='+Math.random()*99999999);document.body.appendChild(e)})());

OK, now you’re ready. Follow these step by step instructions:

	In the “Settings” app of your device, go into the Safari section, and ensure that “Javascript” is set to “on” (near the bottom of the page)
	In Safari on your iPhone or iPad, head over to pinterest.com and ensure you are looking at the full version of the site, not the mobile version.You can tell if you are on the mobile version because the address showing in the address bar of your browser will be m.pinterest.com as shown here.The revert to the full version of the site, press the little arrow next to your picture in the top right corner of the site, and choose the “full site” option.
	In Safari on your iPhone or iPad, press the “Add bookmark” button. You can do this on any page, it doesn’t matter at all.
	In the “Add bookmark” dialogue that opens change the text to read something meaningful (like “Pin It”) rather than the name of the page you’ve bookmarked, and then press the “save” button.
	Now go into your bookmarks menu (by pressing the little “open book” icon), and press the “Edit” button at the top of the list that opens
	Find your “Pin it” bookmark in the list, and click on it to edit it (note click on the text that says “Pin It”, not the little red “delete” icon or the three lines on the right hand side!)
	Delete all the text that’s in the “address” section, and then past in the code that you copied previously.Then press the “Bookmarks” button to return to the bookmarks list, and then “Done” at the top of the list to save your changes.

And that’s it. Now as you browse the web from your iPhone or iPad if you come across something you want to pin you just need to go into your bookmarks menu and choose your “Pin It” bookmark.

To make life even easier on your iPad you can add the “Pin It” bookmark to your bookmark bar, and then it’s visible on your browser at all times, removing the need to open a menu to “pin” something. Note that if you haven’t done so already you’ll probably want to go into the “Settings” app on your iPad and select “Always show bookmarks bar” in the Safari settings. (Note this option is not available on the iPhone).

Continue reading »]]> I must confess to being somewhat confused by an envelope than came home with the geekdaughter from nursery yesterday. It seems she is getting involved with a major charity’s fundraising activity where she will plant bulbs and grow them, and also paint a decoration for her plant pot. I actually have no problem with this – it’s a charity I’m happy to support – but I am slightly confused by the fact she’s come home with a sponsorship form. How exactly does one sponsor a pot plant?!

I’m familiar with the concept of sponsorship. Usually in the context of a walk, run or other measurable achievement. Although the tendancy these days seems to be for the sponsors to just offer a total amount for completing the activity, rather than the slightly more interesting way it was done when I was a kid when I was sponsored per mile/lap/whatever. You see that makes perfect sense to me. But a plant pot? Would I sponsor her for how tall the plant goes? How much she paints before she gets bored? How does this work?!

It seems that the charity concerned are also somewhat confused about the whole idea as well, because on the front of the envelope we’ve been sent it’s clearly marked as a “donation envelope”, whereas on the back it explains that the idea is for each child to gain sponsorship!

I’ve decided that it’s probably more appropriate to explain to the geekdaughter that we’re collecting donations for charity, rather than to make any mention of sponsorship. Because if I do I’m sure there are some members of my family who will come up with all sorts of silly ideas of what to sponsor, and it’s easier to just not go there.

So, what would you sponsor, if you were sponsoring a pot plant?

Image credit: happykanppy / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Continue reading »]]> I am so looking forward to this week. You see, after a really hectic time at work things have calmed down enough that I can finally have some time off. So I am only working Monday, and will then be on annual leave from work for the rest of the week. And this will include two days when both kids are in nursery. Yay! Some serious “me” time at last” I’m planning to get a load of sorting out and tidying up done, and hopefully a little bit of cooking for the freezer as well. I can’t wait. I’ve been feeling quite run down recently, and the state of the house and lack of free time have not been helping here. So here’s to a chance to redress the balance a little…

As far as meal planning goes, I’m going for quick and easy for my evening meals with the geekdaddy – again I think the general feeling of tiredness is getting to me a little. I’ve only planned for three meals for us instead of our usual four because I’m taking the kids out for a day at Trentham Gardens with my Mum on Tuesday whilst the geekdaddy is working on a customer site, so we’ll probably fend for ourselves that day.

So here’s our meal plan for the week:

Meals for the geekdaddy and me (Monday – Thursday):

• Fish pie (bought ready made) and vegetables
• Chicken fajita dinner kit (will do two nights)

Meals for the family (Friday – Sunday):

• Baked risotto (a la “My Daddy Cooks”)
• Slow cooked stew (if I get myself organised I’ll make this on one of the days when I’m not working and the kids are in nursery)
• Rich pork ragu with pasta

You can find more Meal Planning Monday posts over at At Home with Mrs M - why not head over there and see what other people are eating this week?

Continue reading »]]> It’s Friday again, and that means it’s time for me to review the apps that we’ve been playing with this week. Read on to discover which app I’ve picked as my app of the week, and what else we’ve been looking at…

I’ve said before that one of the things I love about the app store is how individuals can produce and release their own app, and compete on a pretty level playing field with some of the big development houses. My app of the week this week is one such app. I was contacted a couple of months ago by a developer who wanted to tell me about an app he recently developed for his three year old daughter –  * Puzzle Words HD. I downloaded it, and it has fast become a firm favourite with the geekson, which surprised me as I thought he might be too young for it. It’s a jigsaw puzzle app that also introduces the letters of the alphabet and the concept of spelling. Your child can choose from a selection of puzzles, each of which has six pieces, plus all the letters that make up the name of the object. As each letter is placed in the correct place the letter name is spoken, and when the puzzle is completed the letters are spelled out and then the word is spoken. The developer of the app is, I believe, Swedish, and so the letters and words are spoken with a slight Swedish accent. The only downside I have found in this app is that it doesn’t offer an option to have the letter phonics spoken, rather than the letter names, but on the whole I find this a great app, and it’s definitely become a firm favourite in this house.

Here’s the geekson in action with the app:

So that’s my app of the week – * Puzzle Words HD – Westfell Interactive (iPad only – £2.49). Yes there are cheaper puzzle apps out there, but the amount of play time the geekson has already got out of this one make it worth the money in my book.

Here’s a round-up of the other apps we’ve been checking out this week:

* Measurement HD – Emantras Inc (iPad only – £1.49). This app offers a selection of 5 different eduction games all geared towards teaching children different units of measurement – telling the time, weight, volume, length and time duration. It’s a nicely made app. although I think the geekdaughter is probably a little on the young side to understand the concepts, and due to that she hasn’t really played much with this app. The developer does say that it is best suited for ages 5-6. All narration is done with a US accent.

* Word Wall HD – Emantras Inc (iPad only – £1.49). This app is for young readers, designed to introduce letters, phonics, spelling and simple words. There’s a lot of content in this app, and again it’s a beautifully produced app with good quality animation. Again the geekdaughter is too young for this app, but I think in a year or so it will really come into its own. Again the developer suggests an age of 5-6 for the app and all narration is done with a US accent.

BigLittleBrother – Minnesota Historical Society Press (iPad only – £2.99). An interactive storybook about sibling rivalry turning in to brotherly love. This app uses fairly standard controls to navigate the story – swipe to turn the page, and poke to interact with the items. I must say I find the controls a little over-sensitive, and sometimes end up advancing the page when I was trying to tap. I’ve seen the geekdaughter have problems advancing the page as well. The app has a lot of different navigation options – I’ve so far found three different ways to see a list of the book pages and jump directly to one! It’s probably a good app if you want to talk about sibling rivalry, or about being a big brother with your kids, but I must say it’s another one that my kids have on the whole ignored. All narration is with a US accent.

* Ten Giggly Gorillas – Wasabi Productions (iPad only – £2.49). I have previously reviewed Lazy Larry Lizard, a lovely interactive book from a Australian developer, and this is his follow-up effort. It’s a variation on “ten green bottles”, where you are presented with a series of scenes of gorillas sitting in the tree, and each one jumps off one at a time when poked until finally none are left. Gorgeous animations mean that this is an app which has really entertained both the geekson and the geekdaughter, which is a pretty good age range I think. As well as the interactive story there is also a pairs matching game included, which plays nicely, although it doesn’t seem to cope well with the iPad being turned into landscape mode and you lose the bottom row of cards off the bottom of the screen.

Disclosure: An asterisk (*) denotes an app I for which I received a promo code and thus did not purchase myself. The links above incorporate my iTunes affiliate ID. If you make a purchase after clicking on a link it doesn’t cost you any more money, but you contribute a few pennies towards the upkeep of this site. All prices were correct at the time of writing.

Continue reading »]]>
I don’t know why, but the Listography theme for this week has really caught my interest. Kate is asking us all to show her our mugs! And after initially thinking that I didn’t have any interesting mugs I had a little delve through our mug cupboard, and I managed to dig out a couple of gems that I’d forgotten all about. And I promise you it has nothing at all to do with the fact that Kate is offering prizes this week! To be honest our mug cupboard is now so full that if I get any new ones I need to get rid of an existing one to make space, which I find really difficult to do. So let me share with you my five favourite mugs…

	This is the mug I use almost every day. It’s bone china, so not too heavy, and it fits perfectly under the nozzle of my coffee machine. Perfect! It does actually have a matching saucer, but I never use that.
This mug was a Christmas present from one of my friends, and I love the bright colours and the lovely words on it. I can’t help but smile when I look at this mug.
	This one is a much-loved (and much-faded – it isn’t really dishwasher-proof :\) blast from my past. A number of years ago now I played an online game called EverQuest, and I was part of an online forum called EQWomen, for women who played that game. We all had little avatars that appeared below our names when we posted in the forum, and one of the members arranged for some mugs to be made with all our avatars on. This was my avatar – she is on the other side of the mug to that in the photo. I was frequently referred to as “flame girl” because of this avatar.
This mug was bought for me by the geekdaddy not long after we started dating. Which makes it approximately 21 years old *gulp*, and also one of the first presents he ever gave me. I am a very “huggy” person, and he recognised that early on in our relationship. This mug is a little the worse for wear – the bear’s nose is chipped, and I’ve had to superglue one of his arms back on, so these days it’s mostly relegated to the back of the cupboard. Having dug it out to take this photo I may start using it again though…
	This is another prized and elderly mug in my collection. In the 1980s Terry Wogan had his own live chat show on television. My parents got some tickets for one of the shows close to my birthday, and they took my best friend and me up to London to watch it. We were a little disappointed that the guests for that particular show did not include anyone we’d actually heard of, but I did get this nice souvenir mug to remember a special trip

So there you go – 5 of my favourite mugs. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about them as much as I’ve enjoyed digging them out of the cupboard and sharing them with you.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve said it before, and I’ll no doubt say it again – it’s a great year for blogging conferences this year. There’s more selection, variety and choice than in any previous year, and I for one am really looking forward to it! Seeing as how I hate to be left out of anything I’m planning to attend as many as possible, and the first one  I signed up for was BritMums Live in June (and not least because they’ve asked me to be a speaker – eeek!).

So that we all have a chance to get to know each other a little before the event, the lovely Carly over at Stepford Wifey is hosting a “meet and greet“. Hopefully this means there’ll be at least a few familiar faces when we all descend on The Brewery in London in June! So here is a little bit about met:

Name: Ruth Arnold

the geek family

Blog: geekmummy.com

TwitterID: @R2UK (everything) and @geekmummy (blog-related stuff)

Height: About 5’6″ I think

Hair: Shoulder length, ginger and curly. All natural, and it took me a long time to learn to love it!

Eyes: Blue and very short-sighted. I usually wear contact lenses, but can sometimes be spotted in my glasses too.

Likes: my iPad, my iPhone, technology and gadgets in general, spending time with family and friends, cake, sitting inside a nice warm house on cold, windy, rainy days, singing loudly along to showtunes in my car, Glee, warm sunny days, roller coasters, rock music

Dislikes: office (and playground!) politics, eggs, not being able to find things, treading on Lego, John Humphreys-style of interviewing, having my photo taken (hence I’m re-using last year’s picture – I haven’t changed that much, although the kids have!)

I’ll be running the “video blogging basics” session on the Saturday of BritMums Live. I hope I’ll see a few of you there! Be gentle, please

Continue reading »]]> I feel like I have been struggling with my weight for an extremely long time indeed. In my head I’m still a svelte size 10/12, but in reality I haven’t seen that size for most of my adult life. This results in constant disappointment every time I look at myself in a mirror, which probably explains why we have very few mirrors in our house. At my largest (just before I got pregnant with the geekson) I was a size 20, at the moment I’m a 16/18.

Over the years I have tried most diets. Only two have ever worked for me – Atkins and Slimming World. I managed to successfully lose several stone on Atkins before we started trying for kids, but I could only lose weight by sticking to eating induction levels of carbohydrates (this isn’t very much!), and that didn’t seem a healthy way to eat going in to pregnancy. I lost almost 2 stone on Slimming World after having the geekson, but unfortunately since going back to work last May it has been impossible to stick to, and the weight has all crept back.

The common difficulty with both of these diets is that they limit your carbohydrate intake to a greater or lesser extent. And the world doesn’t appear to be geared up for you to limit your carbohydrate intake. You need to grab lunch on the run? Have a sandwich. Easy breakfast before you dash out to work? Have a bowl of cereal. Ready meal when you can’t be bothered to cook in the evening? Pizza? Takeaway? It’s all carbs, carbs, carbs. None of this fits with either diet, and eventually I just slip back to my old habits.

This is the fundamental problem with “diets”. You change your eating habits, you hopefully lose weight, then you reach goal weight, relax a bit, go back to eating the way you did before, and WHAM! All the weight comes back (with bonus extra pounds as well). So I resolved at the start of this year to “resolve my weight issues”. This is most certainly not the same as “losing weight”. This means I want to spend time understanding why I eat the way I do, making small and sustainable adjustments to my diet, and changing my eating habits for life, not just for losing weight.

I believe I need to lose weight for health reasons. There is a lot of type 2 diabetes in my family – my father, both his parents and other members of his family have all developed it, and it was a bit of a wake-up call to me when the diabetes was listed as a secondary cause of death on my Grandma’s death certificate. I remember reading something somewhere that said if you had a tendency to gain weight around your stomach that can indicate a propensity towards diabetes, and my stomach is certainly where all my excess weight gathers. Even more so after having had two big babies! So I definitely consider myself “high risk” for developing diabetes. And I know that it is possible to control diabetes by changing my eating habits, and that’s something I can do right now. What I don’t know (yet) is how to change those habits.

Traditional attitudes to weight loss focus solely on calories. If you eat less calories than you burn, we are told, you will lose weight. With a side order of “eat less fat”. Well, I’ve tried that. And do you know what happens when I eat fewer calories? I get hungry, my willpower fails, and I have a huge chocolate blowout. One of the reasons I think that Atkins and Slimming World both worked for me was that there was a large selection of food I could eat “as much as I liked” of, and that meant when I did get the nibbles I could eat something “safe” and not fall off the rails.

Why not just go back to Atkins or Slimming World I hear you ask? Because in both cases, despite successfully losing weight, I have ended up putting it all back on again. Which tells me that I can’t sustain either diet as a “permanent eating plan”, which is the only way I’ll keep the weight off long term.

So at the moment I’m attempting to make small but permanent changes to my eating, hopefully making more and more changes until the weight loss is a side effect of the way I eat, not the main goal. Just before Christmas I purchased the MuTu System (which seems good, but I still have to figure out where I can shoehorn exercise into my life – one step at a time eh?!), and I’ve also been keenly reading the Mummy Whisperer’s series of blog posts on healthy eating for rubbish cooks. I really like what both of these ladies say about diet, and I can see that if I can eat the way they recommend then I will be eating far more healthily. In addition I am also reading about the Low GI diet which I have heard mentioned as good for diabetics.

Here’s what I have achieved since the start of the year:

1. Eliminated fizzy drinks from my diet (apart from the odd one if I’m socialising) – previously I was consuming these on a daily basis
2. Increased my daily water intake – I’ve actually started drinking hot water now as well, as an alternative to a hot drink
3. (Mostly) managed to make my daily Latte on working days small rather than large.
4. Vastly increased the amount of cooking from scratch that I am doing.
5. Switched the entire family onto wholemeal bread instead of white, and have started experimenting with the bread machine again to find a decent spelt loaf.
6. Switched the entire family onto wholewheat pasta
7. Started taking fruit with me to work to snack on, rather than buying chocolate from the machine.
8. Mostly eliminated “low fat” versions of foods from my diet (I’m still not sure where skimmed milk fits in with this)
9. Started producing a proper meal plan for each week to avoid resorting to fast food and takeaways too often.

I have deliberately not weighed myself, as I don’t want this to be just about my weight. I know I’m still gaining weight at the moment, as my clothes are getting tighter, and I’ve had to switch to my “big” wedding ring, but I hope this is all temporary.

There are still challenges ahead. I still have to cut a lot of convenience food out of my diet, I am still unsure what my best choices are for breakfasts and for eating out, and I still have major self control failures when all I can do is pinch the kids’ chocolate. But I’m confident that the changes I’ve made so far are sustainable, and I can build on them.

Continue reading »]]> I am noticing a pattern with my meal plans. We seem to start off well, and stick with them in the early part of the week, but then as we get towards the end of the week everything goes to pot a little. There’s always a good reason for this, and in fact last week I had the fantastic reason of my Mum inviting us to Sunday lunch, which I’ll abandon my meal plan for every time!

I’m trying to make my meal plans as balanced and healthy as possible, with a good variety of different meats, but I feel like I have very little rhyme or reason for choosing the dishes that I do. I still feel like my repertoire is quite small and limited, so I’m trying to introduce at least one new recipe per week. I have a large selection of recipe books, but I’m much better at buying them than I am at reading them! I’m happy to take it slow and steady though, and work through my books one at a time.

I hadn’t realised until I was in Waitrose last week that it’s Valentines Day tomorrow. The geekdaddy and I don’t celebrate Valentines Day very much – it’s usually just a card and maybe a small token present – we think our wedding anniversary and the anniversary of our first “date” are more significant romantic dates for us. However I did like the look of the Waitrose “Valentines meal for two” deal which allowed me to get a starter, main course, two side dishes, dessert and a bottle of wine for £20, so we’re going to have a quiet night in with a nice meal as our concession to the day.

So here’s our meal plan for the week:

Meals for the geekdaddy and me (Monday – Thursday):

• Gammon steak with vegetables
• Wensleydale and cranberry cheesecakes, followed by steak and ale pie with cheddar mash and over-roasted vegetables, followed by passion fruit soufflé (that’s our Valentine’s day meal for two!)
• Chicken and spinach curry (my new recipe for this week – from My Daddy Cooks again)
• Soy-glazed tuna steaks

Meals for the family (Friday – Sunday):

• Another one of those “what veg needs using up?” spaghetti bologneses (which I was planning for last week but never made)
• Sausages, mash and beans

On Friday we have some friends visiting, which justifies a takeaway meal in the evening for the adults, so I’ll probably do fish fingers for the kids for lunch – this one can be flexible.

You can find more Meal Planning Monday posts over at At Home with Mrs M - why not head over there and see what other people are eating this week?