There have been a lot of projects I’ve been involved in and this blog has fallen by the way side.

There are three blogs I am now involved in, other than this one.

Effective Children’s Ministry – where my colleague and friend Catherine and I are uploading our children’s ministry original resources.

First! Again – which is a digest of past articles from the Christian magazine I edit for The Faith Mission.

Slices of My Life – a brand new personal blog.

Eventually this one will be closed down, but I hope you will enjoy reading posts in the other blogs.

Now, after several friends have told me how wonderful the BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit is, I have taken the plunge into the Dickens waters!

As a subscriber to Audible downloadable audio books, I was able to grab a real bargain – the full unabridged Little Dorrit, read by one of my favourite actors and voice talents, Anton Lesser. Over 35 hours of audio, for one monthly credit with Audible. It was so big a file that it took four separate downloads to grab it all!

So far I have listened to three chapters of the most wonderful description of places and people, got inside their heads, smiles at Dickens’ humour, wit and irony and am thoroughly looking forward to another chapter tonight! The reviews on Audible are right. Anton Lesser brings the very best out of this work, and makes the world of Dickens understandible to us.

Solution? Easy-peasy-lemon-squeazy…when you know how! Simply shorten the name of the video loop file. I suppose I could have copied the whole shebang onto my desktop and relinked the videos from there.

So now, job done! Everything plays nicely when it should It even works in PowerPoint Viewer, when packaged for CD. All that is left is to get the background music syncing with the voiceover and we’ll be done.

What a fascinating subject! This certainly is new for me!

They are a shoot that grows from mature garlic, though I have never seen it in mine. Perhaps the weather in Edinburgh isn’t hot enough, or maybe the scapes are more common on autumn planted garlic (mine usually goes in the ground in February or even March).

You can learn about garlic scapes here.

How about making scape pesto? Sounds delicious!

And if you want links to more scape recipes and stuff go here.

I love garlic, so will look forward to trying out some of these recipes.  This year I may try to get the garlic in the ground in the autumn and look for the tasty scapes next year.

Here is Cilla’s recipe for Slug Deterrant.
Take two heads of garlic. Peel and crush them.
Boil for 4 or 5 minutes in 2 pints of water.
Strain, and make up the liquid to 2pints
Leave the liquid to cool and bottle.
To use, take 1 tablespoon of the garlic water and add to 1 gallon of water in a watering can.
Water over your plants and leave to dry. Apparently this works best on a dry day, as the bitter liquid dries on the leaves. The slugs must not like the taste as Cilla’s dahlias are the best they have been for ages!

 This I will be trying on the allotment. We are over-ridden with the wee slimy beasties!

The Root blog has a fascinating page on this very subject of slug control, copper and garlic here .  We can learn so much from each other.

There are several sources, but the one I found for Cranford is here.  Librivox has many of the out of print books already  available, and more are being prepared all the time.

The Gutenberg project gives links to other sites which I may explore later.

I have begun listening to Cranford and am enjoying it. Mrs Gaskell’s writing is more appealing to me since I have watched the excellent BBC adaptation of Cranford. It is intriguing to see how, from a few sentences in the original, the BBC adaptors have built rounded characters, and the actresses have added reality, flesh and heart to them.

Regarding the audio version, it is of note that the readers seem to be mainly American.  That does not detract too much from the enjoyment but I did at first find it a little surprising to hear such English literature read with a Trans-Atlantic accent!  But these downloads are free, and that bargain is not to be sniffed at!

This, coupled with the fact that she crushes any eggs she finds, has depleted their numbers. But the cabbages and other baby seedlings will prove a big temptation form the remaining ”slimies”. So we are going to plant some tender things like pak choi, lettuce and chard in containers – maybe some strawberry plants, too.

We like to use as few chemicals as possible, so were delighted to learn about a method of slug control to suit the organic gardener. The containers will be stood on “Shocka mat”.  This is  a barrier fabric treated with copper. Apparently it gives the beasties a wee shock if they go on it, so we shall see what happens.

You could put it on the ground and plant through it (strawberries, maybe). But it is also ideal for cutting into mats for pots and other containers.

After looking around for the best deal, we found it on an economical roll at http://www.greengardener.co.uk/slugextra.htm.

Keep scrolling and you will find it, as well as other methods of slug control.

Heres some piccies from their site – used by permission.

I tried all sorts of things, but every time I drew a rectangle it filled with colour, instead of being an empty frame for the picture to sit in.

Then I found a great tutorial - clear and well illustrated. In there are instructions for setting up a border layer.

The word I found hardest to use was avatar [ the little picture that accompanies a post and is a logo representing the poster] .  I had known this term before, but its only meaning to me was the Hindu concept of a higher god-like being. So it kind of jarred with me. This is because I am a Christian and didn’t want to call any representation of myself an avatar. My belief is that there is only one God, supreme, unique.

Now, of course, I realize that in addition to the original use avatar means something else.  I use the words mouse and wallpaper without even thinking of the original meanings, so now use avatar in an equally untroubled way.

All this has come to the front of my mind as I’m setting up this blog and tweaking a few things. I would like to use the option given here at WordPress to upload an avatar. That’s another design challenge for another day!

I had tried a few times a couple of weeks ago – but got no joy. I don’t know what I was doing wrong. But the process is simple enough.

When you see a video you want to embed (rather than merely give a link in your post so that the reader can leave you to go and view it … and get distracted and spend the next hours viewing YouTube instead of reading your great posts!!) look to the right of ther YouTube page.
There you may see a box marked “Embed”. In the box is some code.
Click inside the box and the text inside it will be highlighted.  This is what you must copy. The keyboard shortcut for that action is Ctrl+C on a PC.

Now go into your post and hit the tab that transfers you to HTML view. In the place in your post where you want the video to show, click and paste in the copied coding (Ctrl+V).
Save your post and view it to see if all is working well.

When I’m previewing a web page I’ve made or, in this case, a post with a new trick in it, I imagine I feel a bit like fishermen do when they are waiting to see what is on the end of the line or in the net they are hauling. It’s a good expectation. And even if I’ve failed to do what I wanted, there’s usually a reason, and finding it is the next challenge.

Learning about blogging makes me want to visit other blogs and learn from them how things might be done. Having found Technorati, and visited a few blogs today, I realized the value of subscribing to an RSS feed. Now, at last, I can get my head round it a wee bit.

If you watch the video which I am going to try to embed in this post you will see a great teacher and communicator in action!

I see that many blogs have a little orange feed icon. The theme I am using (Pressrow by Chris Pearson) has only a text link to the feeds. But if you’re like me, you’ll hardly know what to do with them! I aim to find out.

The upgrade from CS2 has been well worth while and I am discovering new benefits every day. So far the best thing for me has been the new tool panels (or are they palettes? I always get mixed up because I think the different programs in the suite call them different things). They dock perfectly, the icons are easily recognized, they fly out and slide back very elegantly. And the new effects pallet/panel is great. Applying effects so quickly to fill, stroke, text or objects – the versatility and usability is far better than CS2.

There is still heaps to learn about InDesign, but I get great help from the podcast done by David Blatner and Ann-Marie Concepcion. They speak so personally to us listeners; as a noobie I get a lot from it, and yet don’t feel they speak down to me, or over my head. They are not only very knowledgeable and informative, but also personable and humorous. Their podcast (InDesign Secrets) is the highlight of my week-eek-eek-eek (You have got to hear an episode to get that reference!!)