I’ve really slacked off on blogging lately, mostly because I’ve been really busy and a bit ill. Here’s what I’ve been up to over the past couple of weeks…
Last Saturday I went to my first ever hackathon, Hack 24. I’m planning to write a proper blog post about it later on this week, but the short version is I had a fantastic time and made 170 cupcakes to raise money for charity.
Plague
As soon as the hack was over on Sunday, I immediately came down with some kind of really bad cold. I was run down anyway, so it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise given I was exposed to so many people at once across the weekend, but I’m so rarely ill that I’m not great at dealing with it when I am.
Gaming and social geeking
I’ve been playing a lot of Hyrule Warriors over the past few months, so I jumped at the chance to get Hyrule Warriors Legends which was released over Easter. I’ve also been playing Mario Kart and catching up on Smash Bros content.
On Saturday night we went to see a play at a local theatre, The Glass Menagerie. I studied A Streetcar Named Desire in college so I was keen to see another play by Tennessee Williams and it didn’t disappoint. The characters were all human and flawed in a realistic way, and it was great thought-provoking entertainment.
We wrapped up Monday evening by watching part of Avengers Assemble and playing Elder Sign with a bunch of friends. We won surprisingly easily, which apparently never happens!
Website stuff
I’ve been working on behind-the-scenes stuff recently, mostly focused around site speed. It’s improved a hell of a lot, and things don’t time out any more so my favicon and post images can actually be seen in RSS readers now and social media counts don’t time out before they get registered.
I’ve also started tidying up all 600+ blog posts. The old ones I’m just adding a generic header image too and fixing spacing, broken images and special characters, but it’s hilarious going through and reading them. My website was mostly focused around content rather than blogging until I started university, so there’s a lot of stuff that’s no longer around unfortunately (fortunately?).
My full list of spring site goals is here (along with tips for setting your own): Making spring blogging goals. I’ll also be doing a write-up on how I improved my site speed because there are a lot of different aspects to it and it’s taken a ton of work from multiple people to get the load time down…and we’re still working on it!
This is pretty special. pic.twitter.com/Cl9noUrQi7
— Jenni (@madebyjenni) March 22, 2016
Easter eggs
Our Easter tradition is to buy each other cheap eggs and then go proper egg shopping in the Easter Monday sales. This year Joe’s egg from me was an R2D2, and I bought some half price Hotel Chocolat:
Adulting
Easter Weekend saw a lot of adulting. Probably more adulting than I’m comfortable with, to be honest. I cleared some shelf space in the conservatory so there was finally space to store the rest of my baking stuff in there (rather than in a box in the way on the kitchen floor). We regrouted and resealed the bathroom tiles so they’re now white and not mouldy. I reorganised and sorted all the bathroom drawers and cabinet so everything now fits. I replanted the hanging basket and add some rosemary to the window box. And I started a huge clearout of my bedroom, and in the process found a ton of awesome things I thought I’d lost for ever, like these:
I’m still not totally finished with my complete house clearout, but the end is definitely in sight. I love ‘stuff’ in general – and I have a lot of it – but it was getting to the stage where we couldn’t find anything and it felt a bit too claustrophobic to be comfortable (I’m not a crazy hoarder or anything, but I’d love to have a more minimalist space one day). It’s now pretty much hyperorganised, and I’m going to write up some stuff I learned about being better organised and keeping on top of things at some point.
Summer prep
The UK didn’t change to daylight savings until a week after the US, and I was so impatient waiting for it to happen! I’m so ready for the long days of summer picnics and drinks by the canal; I’ve already bought flip flops in anticipation! Summer is always full of good things and I wish I could hibernate through the winter to get to them faster.
This post has been kind of whistle-stop tour of what’s been going on lately, but I’ll get some proper things written soon! In the mean time, how have you been lately? What have you been up to?
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