Morning Tea on a rainy summer day

Melt together, mix, then cool a little:  125g butter, 1 tablespoon of golden syrup, 1 cup of sugar.

Add:  1 beaten egg, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 3 teaspoons of ground ginger, 2 1/2 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda, you can add some chopped chrystalised ginger if you like a stronger ginger taste.

Roll into balls, do not flatten.  Bake at 180 degrees for about 20 – 25 minutes until golden.

This would make a great desert with yoghurt to cut through the sweetness or even some rhubarb.  We however ate it as the consolation prize for a very disappointing first course most of which ended up in the bin!  This saved the day!

Melt these together gently: 100g butter, 1/2 cup of white chocolate buttons.

Whisk in: 2 eggs, grated rind of a lime and it’s juice and 1 tsp of vanilla.

Stir in: 1 cup of sugar, 3/4 cup flour.

Pour into: a tin lined with baking paper.

Bake at: 180 degrees C for 25 minutes.

I’ve had my iPad2 for a few months now and have deleted all my half written musings on it.  I’ve come to realise they were written far too soon after it’s acquisition.  Now, a couple of months on I have become a better iPad user and have learnt some tricks and found the pure joy that an iPad can bring.  I am that woman who will play Pyramid HD for days on end.  In fact I have even discovered the joy and pain when a game gives you ‘iPad finger’ from stabbing those little Egpytians to get them to move faster to build their pyramid in a bid to get a golden scarab, I know it’s sad but there it is!  iPad finger can occur when you are playing Find It games, time management games or enjoying the coolness of Zinio or Fliboard.  The reason I bought the iPad was for reading.  I wanted a piece of the reading action on an e-device which also did all kinds of other stuff.  I already had a dedicated e-reader (a Kobo) which I’d had great reading experiences on, but I wanted all the rest of the functionality, a laptop without having to drag a laptop around, to be able to read on the plane but also to search the web, answer my email, listen to my music and use to take notes in meetings.  The iPad does all that and plenty more.  So, here is what I think so far.

The Pros

It is lovely to hold, it isn’t uncomfortable to read on in bed at night.  Slightly more awkward than the Kobo just because it is bigger and heavier, but the reading experience itself is great.  I use the Kobo app or the Kindle app both are pretty much the same.  I can share my library with my partner, we can both read the same books and each buy books on my account (well, actually it is me buying the books on there but that’s fine.)  I like the night reading setting for when the light is out and you want to read in the dark.

Great for games.  In our place the games are all about finding stuff, building stuff, and Bejewelled and matching games of that type.  We are not hard core games.  But last week I clocked a solve the mystery game in two days, just because it was so easy to play it on the iPad wherever I was – on the couch, at the table, in bed.  Terrible.

Flipboard, this is just wonderful, tailored to your interests you get fed articles you are interested from all over the internet.  For me that is stuff on reading, libraries, books, education and publishing.  But you could be interested in anything from bumbebees to surfing and tailor it to your interests.  Zinio, Zite, Pulse, all these will be your news and magazine friends.

Games, try em, buy em and become an addict.  I’m hopeful this addiction problem will wear off but that is part of the reason that posts on this blog have been infrequent!  Majong Towers, Pyramid HD, anything from Big Fish Games,

There are so many great apps, tools and Bridget’s little helpers online, with new ones coming along every day that a girl could be forgiven for getting lost for long periods of time just in the App Store!

The speaker is decent.  Not awesome, but decent.  I use my iPad all the time at work to listen to TED talks while I’m covering books, to listen to conference presentations, podcasts (Nancy Pearl and BBC Books) and it works really well.

Cons

It is hard to share a book you’ve loved when you only have an electronic copy of it sitting on your Amazon or Kobo account.  We don’t have access to iBooks here in NZ!

It is not always 100% reliable at hooking up with the work wifi, not sure why but it doesn’t really matter because I am mostly using it offline at work, it is a slight pain though.

Um Um.  Trying to think of cons.  My fingers are too big to type on the tablet keyboard…. it isn’t much is it?

Therefore

There you go.  Some not very coherent musings and really just an advertisement for my lovely iPads cool factor.  It is the toy which is a tool but which still feels like a tool.  I belong to the iPad group at school, and remain unconvinced that learning happens any quicker, better or deeper with an iPad, but I do think that they are user friendly and a nice way to integrate really fast technology into school if you can afford to buy em and sort out the management of them in your school in a way that works for everyone.  As a personal tool they are just awesome and I’ve only just begun to dip my toe into these deep rippling waters!  What lies beneath?

She headed out to work at the age of 15, and it’s been a whirlwind since then.  She worked in the coolest job someone like I could have imagined when I was a kid, working for a music magazine.  She had a miserable relationship with a bloke and came out the otherside thinking hard about her girly bits and how easily abused they are and became a kind of feminist.  But don’t read this book if you are looking for the new feminist treatise, read this book as a kind of British Tina Fey, witty, funny, and full of good ideas, with stuff to say on modern culture and our obsessions and written in a really accesible and amusing way.  This is basically a look back a her diary over the years, lots of juicy bits, and a bit of a fright from time to time.

She writes hilariously about getting her first period. Her need for a bra.  Her discovering that the love of her life was sitting right behind her every day at work.  She is also very very good on the culture of celebrity, I just adored her comments on Rhianna.  Her outing with Lady Gaga was hilarious.  Her comments on how we are simultaneously titivated by and yet horrified by the invasion into the personal lives of women celebrities, who have allowed us into their world but by doing that have made their lives miserable and us so judging of them I found resonated with me.

Other chapters deal with abortion, the terror of being a parent and marriage were great.  This is a laugh of a book, not all the way, but huge chunks of it.  I’m sorely tempted to buy a copy for each of my girls.  Read it for her interesting views on modern women, read it because it is a hell of a fun ride, and read it because Caitlin Moran has written a book for women right now.

But, there are the fashion rules – I loved her shoe advice.  What you need in your handbag, given I have finally purchased one.  On fashion, Leopardskin is a neutral, You can get away with nearly anything if you wear the thing with black opaque tights and boots.  3.  Contrary to popular opinion a belt is often not a good friend to a lady … 4. Bright red is a neutral.  ….  There are more but these ones particularly work for me!  Thanks Caitlin, you’ve confirmed what I thought.

Want to read a great interview with her?  Diana Wichtel wrote this for the Listener.  And this one is Kim Hill talking to her on Radio New Zealand.