Home!

We're back! I had a great time after all, despite being totally deaf in one ear. It made understanding the French rather more interesting!

Good points:

• Lovely clean flat with a view over the heated swimming pool
• Right near shops, restaurants and a pretty beach
• Wonderful food including chocolate mousse to die for. Holiday calories don't count.
• The abbey at Le Mont Saint-Michel was fun to explore and gave me ideas for children's stories
• The Isle Des Moines was picturesque and we walked for miles. (Yes, this is a good thing!)
• Colourful streets in Vannes and a wonderful museum with a roomful of medieval pictures. I'm a sucker for medieval art; I love the way they paint a close-up scene and then in the background there's a whole other story going on.
• To be continued...

Less good points:

• Rain
• More rain
• Raining again

It's a damned good job we came prepared with raincoats and umbrellas. 

Eventually the sun came out and left us with only one bad point: no internet. Ye gods how I missed all of you! What have you been up to while I've been gone?

Nano is coming!

Image by Mike Licht

It's not long now till I start the very reasonable and sensible challenge that is NaNoWriMo. Oi, no sniggering you lot!

I've planned my "novel" up to a point and got stuck. I've looked for a laptop to take to write-ins and got stuck. I've tried to update my touch typing skills and guess what?

Now I'm in a sort of limbo waiting for it to happen.

With any luck I'll be well enough to make the London meetup this Saturday. I'm looking forward to meeting old friends and making new ones - although "old" is a comparative term here. I think I'll be the oldest person there!

If I normally comment on your blog, you may find me missing for a month. (Can you find me if I'm missing? Who knows!) Although last year I found that the more I wrote on my NaNo, the more I wrote everywhere else.

I've won most years that I've done it but not all. I have no idea if I can make it this time so I'll just have to wait and see.

Rabbit hole day January 27th

Last year several of us celebrated Rabbit Hole Day (Lewis Carroll's birthday) by writing strange and unusual posts. More so than usual, I mean.

I think I may have gone overboard; certainly my post Star Struck left many readers slightly bemused. 

I'm not sure how many other bloggers are going to be doing it this year, although it is in the Geeklet calendar, but we don't have to wait for anyone else to join in to have fun.

Let's all fall down the Rabbit Hole for 24 hours and see what's there. It will be beautiful.

So, are you in? If you are, let us know in the comments here and we'll visit you on the 27th. We have only four days to prepare a post because I forgot to post this earlier but I'm sure we can all come up with something.

No comment

I'm having trouble with commenting on some blogger blogs, so if you'd expect me to comment but I haven't then that's why.

In particular, I wanted to sympathise with Sarah over her poo problem. I hope it gets better soon.

Font poll results

Georgia (serif) 1 vote
Verdana (sans serif) 4 votes
Courier (serif, fixed width) 1 vote

The discussion was inconclusive but the impression I took away was that older monitors and machines do not render serif fonts well and that is why sans serif fonts have been recommended in the past for use online, although this is becoming less of an issue with newer computers. Serif fonts are probably easier on the eye for most people when they are properly rendered but as I have no idea of the age of your systems I will stick with Verdana.

Thank you eveyone who voted or joined in the discussion.

A Poll

Natalie has an interesting post on what makes blogs easy to read: not the content but how it is presented. I thought her points were very good but I was surprised to see that she favours serif fonts since I was under the impression that sans serif are easier to read online. So I thought I'd ask you what you think.

Which of the following paragraphs do you find physically easier to read (remember, we're not talking content here):

a) Gregory walked slowly past Miss Avernes' house hoping to see her but the windows stared back at him blankly. He didn't know what to do. He'd always had a soft spot for her and now he'd heard that she was moving away. Should he say something to her or should he do as he'd always done and simply smile and pass on?

b) He raised himself onto his toes to look over the garden fence as he continued to walk past. It gave him a strange bouncing gait and he hoped no one was watching. What he really wanted to do was to put his eye to a knot hole in the fence but that would look really odd if he was caught. Bouncing along, peering into her garden, he almost crashed into her.

c)"Mr Gordon, you nearly knocked me over!" Miss Avernes was laughing as she spoke and Gregory felt his face warming.

"Miss Avernes-" His voice squeaked so he coughed and tried again. "So nice to see you, Miss Avernes, and isn't it a lovely day again today?"

Or is there another font d) that you prefer? If so, could you say so in the comments.

The poll is in the sidebar and will be there until 19th June. I hope you'll vote on it and let me know in the comments what your reading preferences are.