1. I forgot to take my annual birthday photo. Whoops. So 8 days later here’s an extra special pic for my 31st.

2. A friend told me this great joke which involves hand gestures. I’m not very good at telling jokes, but I want to get good at telling this joke. Request it next time you see me.

3. I got a great job and neglected to say more publicly ‘yay!’ about it. In case you didn’t know I’m now working with the Mozilla Foundation and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) coordinating the School of Webcraft. It’s an awesome project which lets people learn web development skills for free in a peer based environment.

You really should get involved. Offer to lead a course, or participate and learn web skills alongside other lovely people.

4. 2 months ago (today) I got engaged to the man previously known as The Contender or the Bearded Maths Captain. You could now call him The Intended, or TiBo.

The Romantic Story: We got engaged on a dike in the Netherlands after a week of sailing. TiBo said “What do you reckon we get married?” and gave me a ring made out of aluminium pipe and LEDs. I almost fell over with happiness.

If anyone tells you that being engaged doesn’t feel any different to normal life, they are possibly not doing it correctly. Being engaged to TiBo feels amazing and sparkly and even better than the way life was before. I’m so happy that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with him.

about a year and a half ago I posted a list of 100 Things I Want To Learn (More) About…. I wrote the list when I was in a more active phase of my DIY Masters, a very slowly ongoing project which I can say has led to many good things in my life even if I haven’t yet earnt and given myself a DIY degree. Anyway, the list had a lot of random skills and activities which ranged from learning how to cook family recipes to more advanced work skills.

A couple of friends started to write their own lists and a couple even made it up to 100. Recently Pete Hindle, returned to his list of 50 things and updated it with comments as to what had been achieved and his current thoughts on his list. Pete almost died and so has a) a really good excuse for not finishing things on his list b) his life has changed drastically which definitely changed his opinion about some of his learning items. It will be interesting to see if the life changes I’ve gone through (finally meeting a good man, getting a job, getting another job, travelling away from Berlin a lot) have affected how I feel about items on my list.

100 Things I Want To Learn (More) About… Updated!

1. Botany
   Hmmm. I haven’t yet learnt to identify plants using a taxonomy. So. No.
2. A musical instrument: guitar or cello
   Let’s just say that 360 days ago I was given a beautiful guitar and can barely play 3 chords. So this learning task is active, but moving slowly. Actually taking lessons might be the next step.
3. Haircutting
   I can cut boys’ hair if they have some curl to hide the mistakes. The mistakes aren’t as often or severe as they used to be. But I haven’t learnt any fancy techniques (yet).
4. How to make a sponge cake
   Really, why would I make a sponge when there are so many other amazing cakes to bake out there? Not Yet.
5. How to maintain my bicycle
   In general I’m better at working with bikes thanks to a couple of sessions at Regenbogen Fabrik’s bike workshop. But my bike in Berlin is not currently maintained – sadly the type of maintenance I know won’t make it better, it will just keep it existing for longer.
6. How to make bagels
   Nope. One day, when I’m making brunch for people. I do finally have a recipe I want to use.
7. Throat Singing
   Hah. I find the idea of throat singing fascinating, but I don’t want to learn it that much. Let’s just say I may have still wanted to impress my ex at this point.
8. Bookbinding
   Not yet. I don’t have anything I want to bind at the moment, and it’s pretty easy to get amazing notebooks in Berlin.
9. Basic Arabic
   Nada. But my amazing new flatmate is doing Islamic studies and she can write essays in Arabic.  I know who I’m going to ask for help.
10. How to make better Karelian pies
    I’ve not made a Karelian pie for ages. I think that visiting friends in Finland and buying Karelian pies has to be higher priority than making my own… I’m getting really good at making Spinach pancakes, one of my other Finnish food desires.

    Read the rest of this entry »

Cycling around Kreuzberg can be so distracting – often unwanted (and sometimes usable) objects are left by the side of the road.

I found this clock on the way to work this morning. The plastic’s kind of sticky – I imagine it was in someone’s kitchen – but the font is so cute! I think that with a new battery and a wipe down this is going to be as good as new.

Sunny warm days have been hard to find around Berlin (and apparently most of Europe) lately. In fact, when I went to meet with friends at the Turkish Market this afternoon, I felt like I could have comfortably been wearing gloves. In addition to my long sleeved woolen shirt, tunic dress, jeans, sweater and wool blend coat. On June 1st. At least everyone in Berlin’s got a topic of complaint and conversation.

And quite reasonable we are to complain too. After putting up with Berlin’s winter darkness we’ve been left with even more cool and gray weather.  I’d managed to slog my way through winter thinking – “oh, in Spring it will be sunny and warmer and…” only to finally get to Spring and have the skies feel dark and foreboding.

The cool weather has been affecting my water consumption, which in turn has been affecting my mood even more, so I’ve been looking for ways to encourage me to consume at least 1.5 litres a day and keep hydrated and happy. For some reason I was thinking “pink lemonade” and then I saw this post from Stephanie of 3191 Miles Apart. Well, it’s not exactly lemonade, but it was pink, pretty, drinkable and i had some rhubarb ready to be used in my kitchen – so I made rhubarb syrup.

I’ve been told that the weather is all the fault of Bjork and other Icelandic peoples and volcanoes, but I chose to not spread my blame to Múm, who despite being Icelandic popped up on my iPod with an aptly themed song “Rhuubarbidoo”. And it’s such things that make you forget that the sky is gray.

I think the syrup is very sweet and only lightly flavoured – as such it could have been modified to include some ginger, or some extra citrus flavour beside a little bit of lemon rind.  But oh! The bottled syrup turned out a lovely pink and beautiful like a jewel! So the bottle deserved a label.

, originally uploaded by .

I’m not sure what cheered me up the most, drinking some more water, listening to lovely music, making the syrup or painting the label!

Tim gave me some beautiful woodworking tools for my Christmas present and I finally needed the hacksaw today, not for anything big, but just to cut some timber to make a window box support. I’m already getting really excited about the plants that will grow on my window sill, but I’m also pretty excited to be using the tools.

I’ve been tardy in documenting the little boat that Tim and I built over the beginning of this year. It was an act of love and learning and freezing to build a boat in the middle of an Austrian winter. One of the things that I learnt from the experience is that I love working with wood.

The boat that we built is an 8 foot punt and she’s mainly waterproofed building plywood and cheap spruce and pine framing timbers. But still, even a boat made out of wood reinforced plastic is officially a wooden boat and I learnt many things when I was building her: How to use a jigsaw, an industrial belt sander, how to use every clamping device in a work shop, how to loft boat designs from a tiny sketch onto full sized timbers and most importantly how not to panic when something goes wrong. I already knew how important tea drinking was, but I’m even more sold on tea as both a warming and meditative device to help you approach a difficult design challenge. It wasn’t until I was almost finished with the project that I realised I was most of the way to ticking item 23 off my list of 100 things to learn.

A couple of weeks ago Stubby visited Berlin and while we were out with his friend Lars I saw a dilapidated dining table on the street. There’s a lot of curbside furniture in Kreuzberg, but mostly it’s chipboard furniture that has seen better days. This table however, had also seen better days, but underneath the cracks and poorly applied paint, the sad old table was solid wood and a lovely shape.

As a result of working on the punt, I felt confident enough to assess the work involved in the repairing the table. There’s some glueing and screwing to be done and I have to repair the crack across the top of the table before it can bear the label of eating or work “surface”. And that’s before getting to the prettifying stage of sanding and sealing. Still, the table showed promise so I made Stubby and Lars help carry the table at least a couple of kilometres back to my flat.

I’ve got a lot of work to do on the table, but what I’ve done so far just reminded me of the Time’s Up workshop and boat building with Tim, of my Dad and the projects he’s worked on. Most of all it started me thinking about all the wooden projects I’ll work on in the future too. Tables, yurts, at least one more boat – really, it’s so exciting!

You know that feeling when you haven’t really done enough study and you’ve got assignments due, and then your mother and stepfather announce that they’re arriving in Berlin 3 weeks earlier than expected (yes, tonight!) and your flatmate hasn’t been around to help clean the flat and it’s May Day tomorrow so all the stores are closed and you woke up with a tight back and headache as a result of the anxiety and almost threw up from the pain?

Well, maybe you don’t know that exact feeling, but I’m going to place great faith in your ability to feel for me in this situation. So once I’d had returned to sleep away the headache, and then made a token cleaning of my flat it was time to head to the Turkish Market to buy ingredients for dinner tomorrow (quiche and salad).

So I bought food and fabric and wandered back via the Glogauer Str bridge area to look in a junk shop which is conveniently sited opposite my favourite icecream store.

Fraulein Frost have some really amazing icecream flavours – including a great Cucumber, Mint and Lemon ice (Gu-Zi-Mi) that is perfect for really hot days. It was pleasantly warm today, not hot and I’ve already had Gu-Zi-Mi on several visits – so I took the chance to try the Buttermilch-Orange eis.

I mentioned in my last icecream post about quark and ricotta based icecreams – the inclusion of non-traditional dairy usually changes the texture and adds a certain acidity to the mix. I like sweet things, but I prefer the tang or bite that comes with bittersweet chocolate, fruit-based cakes and tart apples.

So buttermilch-orange had to be tried. The orange flavour was restrained and very natural, the buttermilk gave a lovely tang and slightly changed the texture away from being creamy or crystallised, but was more smooth.

And luckily, the walk and the icecream have helped ease the crazy of the day. Thank goodness – now I’m more capable of making pastry and heading off to collect the parentals.

It’s spring in Berlin.

That means a return to amazing icecream, beautiful green budding on the trees, sunshine streaming into my bedroom every morning, early waking as a result of all that sunshine and a feeling of achievement from waking up early.

So feeling energetic and inspired this morning I made rhubarb cake, because spring also means rhubarb. It was an easy, Finnish-style rhubarb cake based on a recipe from Nami-nami. It’s good to note that the cake is egg free, not for any diet related reasons, but so often I feel like baking after the shops are closed and am foiled in my plans by a lack of eggs in the flat. So, as long as I have rhubarb, or some other juicy fruit (berries, pears, plums and peaches come to mind) I can imagine that my evening and Sunday baking urges are going to be fulfilled.

But it was so sunny and lovely and the proper first day of tshirt weather that just making a cake wasn’t enough fun. I had to get outside and so I met up with Sabrina of Food And Footage to get some healthy walking and talking done. Then as we walked past the Brazilian/French hairsalon/patisserie on Gorlitzer Str I mentioned that they’re rumoured to have the best pastries in the neighbourhood. And we walked past another cafe and another which we’d never seen before (cafes seem to sprout like spring crocus in Berlin) and eventually all this walking and talking past cafes got to me. We needed to eat ice cream, or else we’d eat cake.

I have a theory that as long as you walk to get icecream, and walk while you’re eating your waffle cone containing only one scoop of icecream, you’re mostly healthy. And considering that good icecream goes for about 90c a scoop in my Kiez (hood), compared to cake and coffee and sitting down, it’s by far the healthier and cheaper choice.

Oh and the choice of icecream! There are some really weird sounding icecream flavours out there, and usually they taste amazing. I’m betting that the cucumber and mint ice I had last summer is going to be hard to beat, and I once had some amazing mung bean icecream in China.

So anyway, we’re walking and we know that Gemelli is nearby. And we detour because by detouring to get icecream we are actually walking away from our intended path and therefore getting more exercise.

I’d eaten my first ice of the season while in Vienna from one of the eissalon on Schwedenplatz, and only the day before had eaten my first Berlin ice of 2010 from Isabel over by the Admiralstr Bridge (Sesame with honey and toffee krokante pieces). I probably could have missed out on more icecream, but Gemelli’s is one of my favourite icecream cafes in Berlin and they usually do some type of quark based icecream that I love. Instead they had a ricotta plum flavour that I willingly chose and Sabrina went for a rosepetal dairy free ice.

Delicious. The ricotta kept the icecream really creamy and the plum provided a tart taste with a backdrop of plum brandy. Sabrina’s rose petal was delicate and clear and is what I imagine fairies eating. So yes, early waking, sunshine, walking, friends, icecream and talking.

Thank goodness it’s Spring in Berlin.

Over the next 6 weeks there’s a whole lot of visitors coming to see me in Berlin. I figured I’d make them little welcome/survival kits of German things.

Sauerkraut does not fit well in a backpack, so I’m sticking with Ritter chocolate, tiny Elmex and Aronal toothpastes, Nivea cream and Tempo tissues.

A couple of months ago I mentioned that I’d been accepted into a graduate program to learn more about adult learning.  To try and keep my thoughts straight I’ve setup a separate blog about in+formal learning and teaching over at http://learninglearning.wordpress.com/

I’ve got used to using a handmade laptop stand back in Berlin. While I’m visiting Linz, I missed the enhanced ergonomic experience that comes with recycled cardboard. So I figured I’d make a new stand for myself, one for the MathsCaptain and one for his colleague’s birthday.