technonaturalist

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Walking distance down the road from my place is Pioneer Park.

It’s marked “A” on the map. JJ and the kids went there to pick figs. I decided to take the dogs (and the toddler, who had to come with me as JJ was taking his car) for a bush walk.

Just so I don’t drive myself completely insane again.

It’s a fairly standard theming problem, you have your Drupal comment form rendering thusly:

Your site is set to not allow posting by anonymous users, rendering the “Your name” field superfluous and you think the subject line looks ugly, is unnecessary or you just don’t want users giving their comments subjects for whatever reason.

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Yesterday was an awesome day. To counter, I had a rather average day. Compared to yesterday it was bad, but seriously in the grand scheme of things, it could have been a lot worse.

Good day

I went to bed at a reasonable time the night before. Slept in a little bit, woke up chirpy, had breakfast and did the usual morning computery stuff. The kids woke up all in a good mood, breastfed the two small ones, gave everyone breakfast, and had plenty of time to hang out the laundry and get lunch ready for homeschool group. We got there not quite as late as we usually do and I was feeling glad that I had opted to go instead of staying home to do the laundry as I had originally planned as EVERYONE was there.

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Okay, maybe not quite on my doorstep. But it was a big fire. And it was possibly deliberately lit. First I noticed of it was the smoke. Not really that unusual, it’s Australia in summer. It happens.

Then JJ and the kids got home from City Farmers. The kids were terribly excited, rushing in yelling that we have to wake up the baby and get going. JJ came in and asked if I’d noticed the fire. I said I smelled the smoke but otherwise hadn’t been concerned about it, there’s occasionally fires up in the hills.

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What’s been happening at Wannabe Farmstead? Feels like a lot. I was out with the dogs at the oval when it occurred to me:

• I can sort out and adjust training “schedules” in my head fast from observing the dogs while working with them
• I can work out learning styles and interests of the kids from observation and interaction and work out where to go and things to do that they might find interesting
• I can work around family stuff with minimal dramas
• I can do things for clients on time (provided they get me what I need when I say I need it by)
• I cannot organise my own way out of a paper bag

I should probably do something about that last point.

1. when you have autonomous big kids who can set themselves up, poke head in every so often
2. make sure they know that the glass jar the brushes stand in is the paintbrush rinsing jar and that they shouldn’t use drinking glasses
3. ditto palettes, so they don’t substitute food bowls
4. choose non-toxic paints in case the above happens
5. never leave toddlers unattended. Ever.

All post clean-up. The projects are stuck fast to the table due to having been quite wet. The toddler had spread paint all over the table and was happily gooping it around. Was contemplating getting a photo but opted to not have him tracking paint around the house as we were heading out.

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The conclusion to the sorry chicken saga.

Where to begin. Can’t begin at the beginning, that’s already been done. See above. So, let’s find a point in the middle to start. Firstly, after Tempest’s last two chicks (the yellow one she’d hatched and the small Australorp she adopted) died, we worked out it was those bloody fleas. The adults weren’t so badly affected by all appearances, though the eggs were fewer and further between, so maybe they were affected. We seem to have bathed the heads of the other chicks in olive oil in time to prevent an outbreak of chick killing proportions. JJ also put some concrete slabs under the roost, as apparently this helps break their life cycle or something. We like to go with naturalish preventative measures and remedies as much as possible for everything, saving The Big Chemical Guns for when there is a situation that warrants it. This was one of those situations.

Came across a problem someone else on Drupal dubbed “ghost field” in one of the issue queues. My issue with ghost fields came about while setting up Profile2 to use in my profile (strangely), but the problem happens in other modules as well.

The problem

1. create a profile type (or modify the main one)
2. add a field
3. delete the field (I don’t recall seeing any difference between saving data in the field or not)
4. try to add a new field with the same name, get an error saying the field name is already in use, but it doesn’t appear in the “Add existing field” list

The solution

1. manually edit the database. I use phpmyadmin. Whatever works
2. find the tables field_config and field_config_instance, browse them and delete all incidences of the “ghost fields”
3. fields can now be recreated

After deleting the ghost field instances the php fatal error and associated debug messages I’d been having trouble tracking the source of (Entity was getting blamed) disappeared, quite conveniently.

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There was much excitement and trepidation at Wannabe when Chess, our bossy little evil Pekin bantam went broody, and amusement when the more demure Tempest decided that she, too, would also like to hatch some eggs.

We were pretty thrilled to have broodies, as one of our long term plans was to increase our flock naturally, including letting the broodies raise their chicklets, and bring in new blood every so often to prevent too much inbreeding. This idea has since expanded to JJ planning on developing his own chicken breed.

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It’s the hottest driest summer ever in Australia (except in Queensland and northern WA where they’re experiencing floods, and meanwhile in Europe where they’re having longest coldest winters with craziest snowfall). Here in Perth most of our rain happens in winter with drips and drabs here and there in late autumn and early spring. We don’t usually get rain in summer. The last few days I’ve felt quite at home while a large number of my friends have been complaining of the oppressive, stifling, terrible humidity.