On Sunday my eldest daughter and I took advantage of a very kind offer from Go Canoeing and went down to the fantastic Salford Watersports centre for an introduction to Canoeing.

I’m actually going to spend a day canoeing as part of this year’s big walk down the Wye Valley (wherever that is – Dave’s organising it this year), so the event couldn’t have been timed better.

A canoe, as you are no doubt aware, is open and you use a single bladed paddle (as opposed to a kayak where your legs tend to be enclosed (although not always) and you use a double bladed paddle.

I’ve never really been a fan of getting taught physical skills. I tend to feel very self conscious and incompetent, and would much rather just be left to my own devices to work things out on my own. However the instructor was very nice indeed, and managed to put me at my ease very quickly.

Unfortunately he wasn’t actually able to instil in me any kind of competence, but the fault for that lies with myself rather than him (and to be fair we were only out an hour or so). I’m pretty confident however that now i know the basics i’ll be able to pick it up relatively quickly with a bit of experimentation.

My daughter had an absolute whale of a time, and was even driven to write her own review of the experience:

Canoeing is a great sport, take it from me. You had to sit in a long paddle boat (a canoe) and you had a paddle. You had to put the paddle deep into the water, push backwards, and do it again.

it was an amazing experience. I would rate it 10/10. I kept thinking the boat would tip over! I screamed a few times as well! I would go again.

In fact we’ve actually started looking into going again sometime soon. Perhaps even as some sort of formal course.

This coming weekend sees the start of National go canoeing week . There are loads of events for people of all ages and abilities right up and down the country, and I highly recommend finding an an event near you and having a go. It’s an awful lot of fun and never know, you may pick up a new hobby.

As you may have heard by now Google is retiring Google Reader on July 1st of this year.

To us in the blogging world this is pretty significant stuff. I’d estimate a good 80% of my readers use Google Reader to keep up with this site. Of course that 80% actually equates to only 4 people, but the point still stands.

Google say they are retiring the service because of declining usage. While I strongly suspect their decision is based on more sinister reasons than this (“hey, if we close Google Reader down maybe all the users will somehow magically migrate to Google+. Somehow. For some reason. Maybe”), I wonder if it also says something about the state of blogging these days.

I sometimes bore even myself with my constant crys of “blogging is dying!!”, but its hard to see this as anything but another nail in the coffin.

When a big geeky/internet story like this breaks I often take to twitter in order to get a feeling for the thoughts of the hivemind. On there I found a lot of people suggesting that twitter and Facebook will be the new aggregators of blog posts.

God I hope not, because as a very wise chap called @jetscott points out:

Google reader is to Twitter as a well-labeled filing cabinet is to a bag of insane cats.

All this serves as a reminder of one of the strengths of blogging. Because as fun and social as it is contributing to Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, Goodreads, etc etc you are always going to be beholden to the whims and fancies of the owners of those sites. With one board meeting they can bring the whole thing crashing down – and all those followers and retweets and karma points you spent so many hours carefully cultivating will have disappeared into thin air.

It’s like the difference between making home improvements to a house you own and one you rent. It doesn’t matter how nice you make it look, the landlord can still throw you out.

One glance at my house would tell you we are not minimalists. I’m not sure any family with children can be. I personally think there is nothing more tragic than those sterile white houses you see in magazines. You know the kind – all sharp edges and blank walls. Often these photos have one lonely wooden toy artfully placed on the floor, which to me holds almost the same poignancy as the ragged doll sticking out of the rubble in a photojournalism from war torn countries. An emblem of a lost childhood – but in a battle for aesthetics rather than territory.

Saying that however, I really wish we didn’t have as much crap in our house.

I read a quote the other day that I really liked

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents. – Schopenhauer

I’ve written before on the blog-that-shall-not-be-named about how I’ve moved past my desire to own things – especially media. I fully embrace the digitisation of our entertainment sources, and far prefer to rent from the cloud rather than put things on my shelves. Netflix, Spotify, and my Kindle have removed any desire on my part to own physical copies of things I enjoy. The box just isn’t that important to me anymore

But that philosophy shift hasn’t really solved any of our problems. Because I’m guilty of adding to our houses’ crap mountain in a multitude of other ways. This week alone I’ve ordered four bulky board games from Amazon, a speaker to go under my pillow (it’s the way of the future I tell you) , and three hurricane lanterns for my summerhouse.

Stay tuned for news of my summerhouse burning down in the near future.

We absolutely have nowhere to store any of this stuff.

I’d say we need a bigger house, but I suspect that even if we lived in a mansion we’d end up filling it to the brim with wool, plastic toys, and the detritus of my constant churning of obsessions.

The biggest issue at the moment however is my daughters room. it’s always been messy, but recently we decided that our nagging her to tidy it up was causing a disproportionate amount of frustration, passive aggression, and general ill feeling on both sides. As an experiment we’re letting her live as messily as she wants to as long as she doesn’t take food in there. As a pay off for this she is under strict instructions that she is responsible for all her own belongings, and if she can’t find anything then she’s going to have to look for it herself.

I’m not sure it’s going to work.

After three weeks the room is now in a state where you literally can no longer see the floor. I’ve always had a high tolerance for mess, but every time I go in there my left eye begins to involuntarily twitch and I feel like the walls are collapsing in on me. I’ve asked her how she can stand it and she claims she feels it’s “cozy”, but I suspect it’s starting to get to her too.

But here’s the thing. It’s now at a state where there is no way we can reasonably expect her to tidy it on her own. The job’s too big and she’s too distractible and focused on short term laziness as opposed to long term comfort. Yes it’s a life lesson that needs to be learnt, but in the meantime it’s going to get messier and messier and messier and….

Maybe we should just move.

When I was little i never really saw the point of reading until someone gave me a joke book and a copy of the Beano.

This evening I’ve left Evan in bed giggling uproariously to himself as he slowly spells out the words in my Calvin and Hobbes compendium. I can think of no finer springboard.