My Arduino

A few days ago I bought myself an Arduino. When I say myself, it is because I like the idea of it being my personal toy. I don't really want to talk to other people about it. Well for now anyway. The reason for this is that for the lay person I could tell them "so today I wrote my first Arduino program on my own and I got an LED to flash on and off - one second on and one second off".

If you know a little about electronics and a little bit about programming you might say "well done!", but if you know nothing about the whole thing you simply might not find it interesting. So I have learnt after years and years, don't go blabbing on about things that I find interesting to other people that might not find it interesting. If you are interested then, get a cup and tea my friend and sit down and lets discuss some Arduino!

This is the very simply little program that turns on my LED and then one second later turns it off, and then one second later turns it on... and then... you know one second later turns it off. It is an infinite loop actually so this could go on for a while!

Arduino coding environment. Simple and clean.

and this is the result. Look at that little baby shine! :)

This is my little Arduino Uno board. 

What do I want?

Wow 4 words.

What do I want? I was listening to a motivational video today on youtube. One of the things that the totally positive voice asked was what I wanted.

"What do you want?" he said. And then I realized I do not know. What exactly do I want? My god. I actually do not know. Sure I want the rest of the things that everyone else wants. I want to be better looking, fitter, I want my kids to be healthy, my wife to be healthy and all of them to be happy. I want food on the table. I want to do well in my job. I want a better car. I want all my friends and family to be happy and healthy.

But then yeah. Of course I do! What am I going to want? A worse car? My friends to be less happy and healthy... of course not. So it is one of those things that I realize I simply say. But am I going to be happy with all this? I can only control the world so much and I can only control the fate of my friends and family so much. So the real question is... what do I want?

And then... Why am I not chasing what I want? Why am I not dreaming of what I want?

What am I going to do about all this? Where is my hard work? Where can I fail at so that I can learn from that thing? But this is the first step... I have realized this. I am standing still.

I am moving again.

Homemade soup recipe.

Today I made a soup and everyone liked it! What is even more surprising is that I made it in a blind panic because Sophie and Lucy were in the other room playing Minecraft and I wanted to join them as soon as possible.

This is our basil plant.. we named it Fawlty :)

So anyway, here are the ingredients of the soup:

• 1.7 litres of boiling water.
• 2 Knorr vegetable stock pot. 
• 7 large carrots
• 6 small potatoes
• 1 full courgette.
• 2 cloves of garlic (fried on the pan first)
• 2 peppers (bell peppers?). A green and red one for the record.
• 1/2 of one leak.

You will need also:

• Cream (or double cream).
• Basil (we grow our own! la de da!)

I had boiled the kettle before hand, so there was a full kettle in there, so thats like 1.5 litres right? I had put that in a big enough pot and turned on the heat to being it to the boil as quick as possible. I threw all of the ingredients into the pot. There was not order, no letting one thing go in before the other. I just want to get everything ready to blend.

When it had boiled to the point where everything was soft enough to easily cut a knife through everything I blended the whole lot.Because there was not too much water in it, the soup had a nice thick consistency.

We chopped up some basil leaves. Put in some cream and sprinkled the finely diced basil on top.

We all two bowls :) And all from a stone! 

Learning Guitar - Again...

Ouch Ouch Ouch Ouch Ouch

That is what the tips of my fingers on my left hand feel like. I spent a few moments cranking out Kenny Rogers' Lucille. What made me finish however was not the fact that I had the song perfect, but rather that my finger tips felt like I had held them over a candle flame too long and the instant searing pain has attacked and killed my will to do anything else with the strings. I used to be able to play a few songs on our guitar but I kinda stopped practicing all together for some reason. Why do people do that?

Ouch Ouch

So now with my thumb I rub my fingers... it feels as if I am touching someone else's fingers. I can barely get any sensation from them.

So what does all this tell me? Yep, I am doing it just about right. Roll on tomorrows lesson.

Ouch!