Pragmatism is the candid audio diary of Pete Cooper. Stellar stuff, don’t you know. No ads. No swearies. No music.

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There’s a hole in the roof and water’s coming in. Yuck.

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Or, listen to this show episode at Mevio.

Pragmatism is the candid audio diary of Pete Cooper. Stellar stuff, don’t you know. No ads. No swearies. No music.

Download the mp3 or click the play button to listen.

Time to start over. Again.

I am beyond frazzled, and so I’m having this week off. I’m not going anywhere, I’m having a staycation. It probably won’t look much different from where you’re sitting, either, as I will still be able to access the internet and answer my emails. There’s even a little bit of work that I have to do – deadlines that won’t wait until I’m ‘back’.

But the weather has been gorgeous for the past few days, and I’m hoping that it will continue and the garden and I can spend some quality time together. And there’s some DIY that ought to be done before the bad weather comes and there are books to be read and new recipes to try out.

The kids have gone back to school, so life is quieter in the street until hometime. Pete will be here to answer the phone and get the door. The chickens are usually less annoying when there’s someone outside in the garden with them – especially if they get to wander round outside their run as well.

It may sound tame, but I won’t have to learn a new language, spend hours on a plane or wonder where I can get a decent cup of tea from. There’s no place like home ;)

A fortnight ago, our neighbour came round with a tub of Herman. Herman is the starter for a Friendship Cake – you feed him and look after him according to the instructions (which arrive with Herman) and he grows. After 10 days or so you split Herman into quarters, keep one, pass two on and make one into Herman cake.

(I don’t have the recipe for the starter, only the instructions for how to keep it alive, but there’s one here along with different Herman recipes).

The recipe we have for Herman cake involves dried fruit and cinnamon, and we used 3 eggs from our chickens. Although we own a cake tin, I’d never used it, and Herman was the first proper cake I’ve made (I have made cupcakes) so I wasn’t entirely sure how he would turn out.

As it happens, Herman is lovely. Just the right amount of crumbly, with a nice crispy crust. Not too sweet, and very tasty. I don’t even like fruit cake, but Herman is very tasty. We had the ceremonial cake cutting live on air, but you can listen to the recording if you missed it :)

If you’re under 18, please ask your mum whether you’re allowed to read this ;) apparently it’s horribly political and controversial.

Porn is not a dirty word in this house. It’s something we joke about, not something that gets stuffed under the mattress or builds up in the back of the wardrobe. Pete and I both tend to agree with the sentiment expressed by Dr Cox in Scrubs when he said something along the lines that if all the porn was removed from the internet then there would only be one website left – and all it would say was ‘bring back the porn’. Beyond that it’s not something that crosses my mind very often.

But I’ve just come across an opinion piece in the Guardian (entitled ‘A limp response to women’s erotica‘!) about a new print magazine I hadn’t heard of before – Filament.

The ideology behind Filament is that it’s a women’s magazine with a difference. It doesn’t run any features on fashion and cosmetics, diets or celebrity gossip. There’s nothing in there that attempts to make you feel bad about how you look, and what there is instead is pictures of beautiful men.

The people behind Filament have done some research and have come to the conclusion that what their readers would really like to see is pictures of aroused men (some of them time, anyway!), but they’ve run into a bit of a problem – although the law will allow it (gay porn does it all the time), the printers they can afford to use won’t print it, for fear of running into problems.

In a country where equality is the name of the game, or at least something we should be working towards, this doesn’t strike me as entirely fair. Pictures of women (aroused, or at least feigning arousal) are everywhere, and practically inescapable. If a woman wants to look at pictures of an aroused man, why shouldn’t she? If she wants to spend her money on women’s erotica then surely that’s her choice.

Filament need to sell 328 copies of Issue 1 to raise enough money to make history and print (they’re pretty sure) the first explicit male pictorial in a British women’s magazine. To support the cause of equality order Issue 1 or subscribe.

And yes, this is a little off the beaten track of what I usually witter on about. And no, I am not condoning the exploitation of women, men or any other life forms. If all of this has got you all hot under the collar, then take a break and go look at some pretty flowers instead.

By the time we got back from the cruise I was feeling a bit under the weather, like I had a permanent cold. After a few weeks at home nothing had changed, and so I decided to try giving up cow’s milk as catarrah can be a symptom of lactose intolerance. This is a big deal for me – if there are three foods I would be hard pressed to live without it would be milk, butter and tea.

So we went to the supermarket to look into alternatives and I came home with soy milk, oat milk and rice milk (long life cartons) and fresh goat milk. The goat milk turned out to be the easiest to convert to – although it has a stronger flavour than cow’s milk, I have no problem with it and goat’s milk works everywhere I want to use it.

Soy milk is quite nice to drink on its own (and strawberry soy milk shakes are very nice), but it makes horrible tea. I suspect rice milk is the same – in tea it tastes like it came out of a vending machine, very nasty – but I haven’t steeled myself to drink any yet. Oat milk I have had before – it’s OK to drink and would be OK on porridge, but again it’s unpleasant in tea.

I can drink my tea black – especially something posh like Darjeeling – but prefer not to for everyday tea.

So I’m quite happily settling down to goat’s milk (and I’ve found UHT cartons to keep in store for supply emergencies), and a couple of little health niggles have improved as a result, so I am more than happy to continue avoiding cow’s milk.

However, this situation is not without its issues. Most cheese is off the menu, as is yoghurt. In fact, most desserts seem to have cow’s milk in them. There was one which even had added milk sugar, which is just rude. I was looking at the bars of chocolate in Tesco yesterday and even their fair trade plain chocolate said “Plain chocolate may contain milk” on it*. I understand it’s just a disclaimer, and trace amounts aren’t likely to be a problem, but it exemplifies a problem with processed foods in general – most of them contain cow’s milk and are now off the menu. Pete and I are moving towards eating less processed food anyway, but we’re not very organised and there are still plenty of days when it would just be nice to go into a shop and buy something to eat.

It’s all still new and uncomfortable, but no doubt we will get used to it soon. In the meantime, Pete has the job of eating his way through the small mountain of cow’s cheese in the fridge by himself. It may take him a while.

*There are vegan chocolate suppliers, I will have to seek them out. It’s not that I eat a lot of chocolate, just that I don’t want to give it up entirely.

Sometimes it seems that me being a fan of a particular tv show means that it’s on its last legs. Kyle XY is gone, and Primeval got canned by ITV earlier this year although there is talk about a film version. Torchwood finally found its feet in its third season, but came to such an apocalyptic end that it’s hard to see how they can carry on (although they keep saying they will).

(If you haven’t seen Children of Earth yet, but intend to, don’t read any further for fear of spoilers.)

And they killed off yet another character – Ianto Jones – leaving only two members of the Torchwood team alive. Ianto didn’t have much to do in the first season, except make the coffee. He tackled a pterodactyl in the second, and gradually matured into a real member of the team. That he was a well-loved character is obvious from the fact that his demise has spurred a Save Ianto Jones web campaign. From their website you can get involved in sending coffee too BBC Wales, donating cash to BBC Children in Need on Ianto’s behalf (a worthy cause if you’ve got some spare Paypal cash lying around, or you’re one of those people who hasn’t maxed out the credit cards yet) and connect with the campaign via all sorts of social media networks.

In sci fi, characters that die don’t always stay dead. If Torchwood fans want Ianto back, and make enough noise about it, perhaps he will be resurrected somehow. And then maybe Torchwood will make it after all.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered myself a couple of t-shirts from Eko Noiz, because their Grow Your Own design is very suitable for an alternative kitchen gardener, as are their fabrics – you can choose from organic cotton, bamboo, hemp and recycled plastic bottle. And many of their prices include a £2 donation to an ethical charity – the Grow Your Own shirts support the Permaculture Association.

I went for one of the white bamboo shirts and a black recycled bottle shirt with fluorescent green ink. They arrived this morning, and are in the wash to get rid of the ‘new’ smell. The black one is lovely; the white one is a little too see-through for everyday wear and will no doubt be something I wear over my long-sleeved shirts when the weather is cooler.

They included the stickers shown above in the package – Pete has snaffled ‘Recycle or die’ already for his laptop. I will need to find an Earth Mom to give a good home to the second! Also impressive are their labels:

They’re hand-painted on the back of cardboard from cereal boxes. So all very green, although it appears that someone in the office is a fan of Coco Pops…. :D

This house isn’t big enough for the both of us, at least not in the capacity of living and working in the same place. Quite how we’ve managed this long without going postal at each other is sometimes beyond me.

We moved in back in mid-2001, having previously rented a small flat elsewhere in the town. Back when we moved in, in 2001, we were working at a local software company and spent most of the daytimes at work. Having pooled together our money, we got a house that we could live in without too much effort. The space we had available was OK – we had room for sleeping, eating, laundry, storing piles of stuff and things – we did alright, thankyouverymuch. We bought back before the last big housing boom/bust kicked off, so we got it for a reasonable price. Back then, in 2001, we were fixed up proper.

When the employment situation changed (I quit, she was pushed), we spent far more time at home and – ultimately – run our business from here. The room that was the living room is an office, the adjoining dining room is an extension to the office, the second bedroom is where the telly lives (though we still haven’t wired the antenna in, so it only plays discs and silly Wii stuff) and the myriad books that don’t live in the office. The third bedroom, formerly my tech hellpit office is a stuff storage area. More business stuff that doesn’t live in the office, 12” vinyl and things like that. The kitchen is still the kitchen, though sometimes I do wonder.

Fast-forward to 2009 and we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to find somewhere else. As the nerdy pair that we are, we’ve called the place we currently live House One. The next gaff will be House Two, and the one after House Three, and so on. I don’t know how many of you reading are likely to have version control on your domiciles, but I suspect it’s very few.

The next house we’re looking at (henceforth House Two) is set for about three or so years away. Plans this far ahead are both exciting and scary, I much prefer to work in timescales of weeks or months at a push. I’ve set myself a target of being mortgage-free by the time I’m 34, which will be during 2012. Without going into gory details of how much we owe on the mortgage, I am confident we can clear it out completely in that time.

House Two is likely to be an already-built house with more room for the office and us living there. It’s likely to be in the UK, though that’s not a given (especially with the current administration and their inability to do anything right). Beyond that, I don’t know what it will involve. Oh, fat broadband. That’s a requirement. Once you get 18mbps down and 2mbps up, you never go back.

I haven’t measured the floor space in this house, suffice it to say that it’s an end terrace house on a former council-run estate in jolly old Abingdon. We’re less enamored with Oxford and the surrounding area every time we venture out. The neighbors and locals, with a few exceptions, aren’t really the kind of people we gel with, and so it’s time to move on. Somewhere more progressive would be nice.

House Three, however, will be a custom- or self-build to our own design. It’ll be fabulous, and will more than likely have a fireman’s pole and secret underground lair. Seriously.

The reason for this post is two-fold. One, I’ve got a great software package called Home Design Studio Pro from Punch. The name gives the game away, really – it’s a great package for throwing ideas into without the architects fees. It’s fun to play with, can be used seriously and is great for building huuuuuge staircases at wonky angles. Expect images of House Three designs soon, creativity permitting.

The other thing I wanted to mention is the Emma and Pete Mortgage-O-Meter™. Seeing as Neil and Jen are doing it on their moving to Spain site, I figured I might pinch the idea. So I did, and it’s in the sidebar. When that meter hits 100%, we have the money to clear the mortgage and get out of Dodge. And by Dodge, I mean Abingdon.