The last couple of days have been very cold. Yesterday morning was -4C when I went to work, dropping to -6C on the way. This morning was -6C dipping to -7C for part of the journey.
Tonight, we are forecast to get snow across most of the country.
Kestral in garden
We had a surprise visitor in the garden this afternoon.
I was watching the birds on the food that we had put out, when a couple of blackbirds landed on the fence. One chased the other off as expected and I thought nothing of it. A few seconds later, one flew across the garden sounding its alarm call and I thought that there was a cat in the garden, then everything else started flying off in alarm. Seconds later at high speed a bird came flying in towards the Christmas tree and slowed at the last moment, but missed the small bird in the tree. It landed, turned round and flew off. At this point, I realised it was a kestral, the first time I have ever seen one in town before. Needless to say the garden was rather quiet for a few hours afterwards.
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Comments on Blog
Quite a while ago, I tried to integrate Blogkomm commenting with this blog and didn’t really succeed. I was looking on the Thingamablog forums a few days ago and saw a post that pointed me to the Notes from James blog. The author has written his own simple commenting system that he has integrated with Thingamablog.
It looked really good, so I tried it out on a test blog earlier today. It worked really well and I was able to adjust the style sheet to blend it in with the rest of the blog. I have only added comments on the entry pages with links to the comments from all other pages.
Flush with my success at getting this to work, I thought that I would revisit Blogkomm. The new version is really good with captchas (text /numbers in image) to stop spam bots from wrecking the comments. I installed this on the test blog and was able to get this working as well. However after playing around with it for a while, I concluded that I liked the simple comment system much better.
I have modified the add comments page so that it more closely matches the rest of my site and added it to the main blog.
Census E-Petition update
I have just checked on the census petition that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago [link] and it is now up to nearly 13000 signatures. It is currently the 4 largest petition on the site. The deadline for signatures is on 8th March, so I shall have to look out for the result and the government response.
Snow
We had snow this morning when we woke up. It was only about an inch and it has gone now, but we may get some more tonight. The forecast has been for cold days since the beginning of the week. Other than our road, the roads were just wet by the time I went to work this morning.
Washing Machine 3
The washing machine arrived this morning earlier than expected, which was good. It took them less than 5 minutes to deliver the new one and take away the old one. It was wrapped in bubble wrap, which kept the kids occupied for hours popping the bubbles.
I had disconnected the old machine last night and capped off the un-needed hot water feed. There was an in-line valve, but I decided not to rely solely on it long term. I didn’t want it to start dripping sometime in the future as I had already experianced that with the cold feed last year. Several weeks after laying the laminate floor in the kitchen last year, I found that the cold feed to the washing machine was dripping. I found this out when the water was squelching up between the boards in front of the old washing machine. This meant that about 3/4 of the floor had to be lifted and many of the boards replaced, not what I was expecting when I got a call at work.
The new machine is all fitted and working, its going to be a bit of a learning curve as the controls are different from the old one. It is extremely quiet compared to the old one, but then after 12 years it should be. It is also much more efficient than the old one and indeed many of the modern ones. This is good with the rising costs of electricity. It is a faster spin (1400rpm) than the old one which means that the clothes are drier when they come oout, reducing the drying time if we have to use the tumble dryer.
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