Pink sky at four o'clock: last night's frost still glitters on the roofs of houses.

I found another interesting web-based project recently, which seems very appropriate for my daily post of goodness. Booooooom! and Design for Mankind have joined forces to create Free encouragement, a project which is absolutely all about positivity and nice things. The idea behind the project is to counteract the negativity that we find “all around us these days... infesting the internet... taking over the big screen... showing up on your bank statement”.

The first part of the project, led by Booooooom!, has been the creation of an online 'gallery of encouragement' - anyone can submit their own personal encouraging messages to the project: “You can use this gallery to encourage a close friend or someone you just happened to pass by on the street. You can encourage a relative who may be ill or the girl who handed you your coffee this morning. You could even use this place to encourage yourself!” You can see the gallery here, which makes very entertaining reading. The images here are some of my personal favourites from the gallery.































The second half of the project, led by Design for Mankind, has not yet been announced - it's veiled in mystery until it kicks off this Friday. I'm intrigued to see what will happen next, but there's no doubt that it will certainly be cheerful.















I went back to work today. It was quite challenging, but I survived the day and made it home, despite the freezing cold, and nearly falling over on the ice about a hundred times on the short walk from the train station back to my house. Here are some other cheerful and lovely things from my day:

• Frosty hedgerows and sunshine in the morning
• Steak and kidney pudding, chips, gravy and peas for lunch (which really should have been on my ‘100 favourite things list I think) - greedy but good
• This monkey
• A forecast for 8 inches of snow tonight!

.... a lovely frosty morning, a very slow stroll through glittering hedgerows, birdsong and a blue sky. Cocoa and homemade date and walnut cake... my velvet slippers have holes in them.

I was quite interested to read this article by Jon Henley in the Guardian the other day about Slow Blogging. Slow Bloggers, apparently, are those who "take the time to think, study and reflect before they post; who do not feel the need to slap the first thing that comes out of their head straight onto the web." The Slow Blogging movement has also recently attracted the attention of the NY Times where the practice is compared to that of meditation, whilst fast, news-driven blogging is "the equivalent of fast-food restaurants". In some ways though, I can't help thinking that Slow Blogging seems almost like anti-blogging: it is described as “a rejection of immediacy … an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly”, an act of “speaking like it matters, like the pixels that give your words form are precious and rare”.

I don't think I would be very good at being a Slow Blogger. I think I am probably a Fast and Sloppy Blogger, but I can't help thinking that maybe that's half the fun.

Sometimes, though, I do think it is good to be slow. Right now, I am moving very slowly. I am being a cat cushion. I am knitting, one row at a time. I am having a cup of tea, and then maybe a bit later, another one. I am watching a blackbird eating orange berries off a bush in the garden, and noticing the clouds move slowly across the sky. I am meandering, dawdling.

I like this example of really, really slow blogging.

I feel like a sloth.

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I have a little something up on a handful of stones today. You can find it here.