News From the Hill

Archive for the ‘Sustainability’ Category

Happy Bridget’s Day

I have been happily hibernating since Solstice, very much enjoying the “cut wood, carry water” lifestyle of the old days, although it is more like carry turf-briquettes, collect water in my neck of the woods. The really severe weather which started before Christmas got us into a routine of doing basic chores and cutting back on energy expenditure, really hibernating.

The important jobs were cleaning out and relighting the stove, filling our water containers each day because our water pipes were frozen, carrying in the day’s fuel for the fire from our outside store, feeding the birds and making sure the cats had fresh water to drink a few times a day because the water in their bowl would freeze quickly and so on.

We learnt a new way to manage the fire in our stove so as to keep some heat all night long and to be able to clean the stove without removing the live embers and so relight it with the remains of the night fire. Keeping a large pot of water on the stove at night was also important as that meant that we had warm water in the morning to defrost the gas cylinder so as to cook breakfast and we also had some nice warm water for a morning wash – ah, what luxury!

Keeping the fire going

We didn’t go down to town often because we had stocked up with food to avoid unnecessary journeys. The few times that we did venture out on the road we often met the postman and collected our mail and that of our neighbours and then we would deliver it to the neighbours on the way home. The postman was unable to travel on our road because of the snow and the constant freezing conditions. It was nice for us to have that contact with our neighbours which we might not have had otherwise.

Delivering the post

We walked every day and were enthralled by the tracks of the wild animals in our area. Each day we could see the new tracks and were surprised by how much one local fox travels across our land and also delighted to see mountain hare tracks. It’s like being let in on a secret world. These animals all exist here along side us all the time and we rarely see glimpses of them. We felt quite honoured to have been made privy to their comings and goings, thanks to the snowy and freezing weather.

So now the cold weather is well and truly gone and I find myself slowly and reluctantly trying to re-enter the world of schedules, grocery shopping, cyber world and forthcoming elections…..

Lá Fhéile Bhríde shona dhuit

Today was Winter Solstice and what a beautiful day it was. I watched the moon rise yesterday evening and observed her journey across the evening sky, knowing there would be a full lunar eclipse this morning.

I thought that it was quite something to have a full moon for Solstice, then to have a lunar eclipse happening too is particularly special. The sunset last evening was really beautiful, we don’t get to see the sun setting from where we live, however we do see the colours of the sunset as they are reflected in the evening sky.

The last week has been amazing. The snow came on Thursday, just a light dusting here, no more than an inch with real snow on Friday. Because the moon has been filling all week the nights have incredible, the bright moonlight reflecting off the snow and the stars sparkling up above.

Solstice Week

It’s really beautiful here this week during the sunny bright snowy days however it is even more beautiful here at night and anytime I have put my nose outside the door at night I just have to go for a little walk.

Tree Walk

And so the longest night has passed and now the days lengthen. Christmas is at the end of the week and all pressures are relieved for us because of the weather. There is nowhere we have to go and nothing we have to do, just feed the fire, feed the cats, feed ourselves, walk and enjoy the snowy quiet of the hills in mid-winter.

Happy Solstice to you all, may the returning light bring strength and inspiration into your life.

Although the weather has been extremely cold for the past two weeks no snow had fallen on our hill. We had freezing easterly winds with both day and night time temperatures below zero Celsius.

Frozen tree moss

Ash tree with moss

We have been lucky with above average sunshine everyday and beautiful clear starry nights.

The east of the country has been blanketed in snow for the last fortnight and schools have closed. On our hill the snow from two weeks ago lay frozen all around until this morning when fresh snow fell, starting after sunrise and falling lightly and steadily ’til afternoon.

The snow has changed the quality of sound here, as it tends to wherever it falls. We are used to quiet up here on the hill, although for the last few months there has been the faint daytime sounds of forestry workers further over on the hill.

Still, the quiet that we are used to has changed, become even softer. The wee song birds seem louder and thankfully the whitethorn bushes are still laden with red winter berries for them.

Whispers in the wind

I saw a male blackbird today attracted by the peanuts which we put out and we never saw one up here before. I was used to the sweet sounds of blackbirds  where I grew up and missed their tunefulness so I am delighted to see one here and will be sure to keep a steady supply of peanuts over the winter.

Winter Woodland

Plugin Menu

Welcome to Geeky Wednesday. Today I am going to talk about adding plugins to a wordpress blog.

Naturally this topic is only relevant to those who blog using WordPress, I am not familiar with the inner workings of Blogger so I don’t know how to do anything similar in blogger.

Plugins add verstility to your blog and different plugins perform different tasks. WordPress does of course have lots of information about using plugins here.

Currently there are over 12,000 different plugins available for WordPress.

You will often find lots of plugins that apprear to do the same thing when you do a search for a plugin to do a particlar job and it can be very difficult to figure out which plugin you want to use or indeed which plugin will perform the best.

In order to do a search go to your dashboard and click on Plugins. A new page will open showing you all the plugins that you are currently using, or perhaps none if you are just starting off.

Plugins Page

Click on “add new” to search for a new plugin. For this purpose I typed the words “fixed social buttons” into the search box  because I know that this is the name of the plugin.

As you can see in the picture below when the search results come back there is a star rating, this rating is a very good way to guage the quality of the plugin. If it is possible then I would advise that you use plugins wiht a high rating.

Searching for a plugin

And just to show that sometimes things are not as straighforward as they should be I could not find the plugin that I wanted for this post, even though I am using the plugin and know both the name of the plugin and the name of the author.

If you can find the plugin that you want then click on “Install Now” and if you are lucky enough to have a god server it will upload quickly and all you will have to do is click on Activate.

Previously to this green hosted server that my blog is hosted on now I was on a server which made uploading plugins very slow and laborious, even though I followed the instructions as told on screen. However sometimes it took  ages and I would start to wonder if everything was going according to plan. It looked as though worpress was having trouble however it was the server at fault and the pugins never uploaded. If you are having this problem then the fault may lie with your server, not with wordpress or the plugin.

Fixed Social Buttons

This is the website of the Fixed Social Buttons that I am using on my blog. You can see the buttons on the home page of the blog on the right hand side and the very cute buttons float as the page moves up and down.

If you wish to use this plugin wander down the page until you see the Download section and then click on the most recent version, in this case V2.4.4.4, which is the current version of the software.

Download the software and you will most likely be asked whether to unzip or save.

Save it to your downloads folder, do not unzip the file.

Go back to your Plugins page and click on “upload”, you should then see the page pictured below.

Click on Choose File and look for the zip file that you saved to your Downloads folder and click on it. Then click Install Now and the magic should happen by itself.

Installing a wordpress plugin

Once the file is installed go to Settings in the menu on the left, when it expands look down the list for Fixed Social Buttons and click on it. This is where you get to play with the plugin and decide how it should look on your lovely blog.

You choose which buttons to use, such as Follow me on Twitter, Digg it, StumbleUpon etc. Decide which style of button to use and how large it should be, then where on your blog page you want to see the buttons.

If you are using buttons such as twitter or facebook then enter your social media profile details and you should be set to go.

I hope this was helpful and if you decide to go ahead and try the plugin please let know. I am not connected in any way to the design team who developed Fixed Social Buttons, I just like how they look and when a twitter friend asked how set the buttons up I thought that it would be a good subject for a Geeky Wednesday post.

Remember if you have any geeky questions that you think I may be able to help with then I would love to hear from you, next Geeky Wednesday post will be at the beginning of next year!

This is where I was today….

Snowy Road

This is where I would have liked to have been…

Irish Protest Nov 2010

This is why I would like to have been in Dublin today…

Irish Economic Crisis Explained (short wee you-tube piece, well worth watching!)