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Just popping in briefly. I have found it tricky to have the energy for super regular updates here when I'm working because my job takes up so much of my screen time energy that by the time I have free time I usually want to spend it on other things.

However, I recently checked my guestbook and realized it's full of new comments with all kinds of lovely messages. It really makes me happy to see people enjoying the site and I wanted to say thank you for your kind words.

Quick life update for those who find those things interesting: My birthday is coming up very soon, I just got back from a family vacation to Mexico - our first time ever taking the kids out of the country! - and I'm about to return to work after a few lovely weeks off. Here is to a wonderful 2026!

Did this remodel for my child's room recently and was proud of it so thought I'd share the final result below!

This inspired by this post by Ava on lost connections because it resonates.

I made a ton of "friends" online when I was younger. There were also a lot of people who I followed as a fan but who probably never knew who I was.

Some are dead. Heather Armstrong being the one that comes to mind; a huge shock to me at the time, although I had not followed her in years, and she never even knew who I was (I was a teenager following a massively famous 20-something blogger)

Others are around, but quiet. Meggan comes to mind. She hasn't updated her site since 2020 but I follow her on instagram and know she's still kicking. Sometimes we like each other's posts. HI MEGGAN.

A few other folks I still see around (mostly thanks to instagram) - Aisling who still has a site and has kind of gotten back into blogging recently, Amanda... I don't even know if she has a site anymore but she has an instagram account! Clementine, Katy who I have on facebook and can tell she is still alive, in spite of not blogging since 2021. Jem. Whitney.

Kind of a small list.

A lot of people I have just... forgotten? Which is sad. How could I forget all these people I once spoke to all the time? Who am I missing from this list? Will they read this and be terribly insulted?

I also have somewhat dropped off the internet in the past, mainly because real life became all consuming and the internet become less alluring. I was a lot more self aware of how I sounded, how my words are permanent, and how incredibly self absorbed it could all be.

But then I miss people and I want to know what they're up to, and I'm grateful for those I did know back then and those who I still have some loose thread of connection with.

Anyway that's it.

Sometimes I think the internet is nothing but a ghost of what it once was, but I think there is still value there if you search for it (the people building in communities like neocities, for example!), and I'm grateful for what it has given me in terms of connections with people I would have otherwise never met.

I have never touched a cigarette. I don’t do drugs. And two years ago I also stopped drinking alchohol.

The first two were pretty straightforward. The combined influence of my parents, government scare-labels on cigarette packs, and the school system’s “Just Say No” was effective in scaring the crap out of me about the bad health effects of smoking and drugs, so that's a path I never went down.

Alcohol was a bit different - it’s more normalized in our society and everybody I knew was a drinker, at least occasionally, so for my 20s and early 30s I didn’t really think about it in the same way. Frequently I'd see magazine articles about how "a glass of wine a day is actually good for you".

So while I was never a heavy drinker to begin with, I would sometimes have a glass of wine in the evening after work and think nothing of it. Or have a drink or two when out for dinner with friends.

Then in late 2022/early 2023 Canada came out with updated guidelines on the safety of alcohol and it was like a lightbulb went off for me. “Oh obviously alcohol is a total poison and really bad for you. If I don’t smoke, why would I drink?”

And from that day on I stopped all casual drinking. And also felt a bit stupid that I ever assumed it was safe.

Around that same time I also began a regular exercise routine. This wasn’t really related to the stopping of drinking - I had been struggling with anxiety, and research shows that regular time exercising outdoors can really help with mental health (it worked for me! Two years in and while I’m not a pillar of mental health, I’m less of a mess.)

But the effects are the same: Healthier me.

However… there’s still a lot of things that I do that are not healthy.

• I eat sugary snacks.
• I eat red meat. I do try to limit my red meat consumption and more frequently choose plant based foods, chicken, and fish, but I still have red meat around once a week on average.
• I eat random junk food like chips sometimes.
• While we mostly eat whole foods (minus the sugary snacks 😬), ultra processed ingredients sneak into our diet sometimes via flavoured sparkling water and mass-produced bagels.

On the one hand, I don’t want to live my whole life freaking out about my diet and trying to perfect it.

On the other hand, a lot of this stuff is 100% bad for you and has zero benefit. And I would like to live to a ripe old age and be physically and mentally fit enough to enjoy it. This is both just for myself (having a fun late-life sounds better than a short one or a sickly one!), and also so that I can be a helpful parent/grandparent when my kids are adults, and not just a burden to them.

Eliminating these additional foods is a challenge. I am absolutely addicted to sugar. I have cut it out for a month or two here and there, so I know it can be done, but the cravings are strong and I've never sustained it for longer than that. Red meat is a bit more do-able, but I fear not as impactful. Ultra-processed food is absolutely everywhere and usually the most convenient option (Note: We don’t eat straight up pop-tarts and processed cheese in our house or anything… but my understanding is that even things like flavoured sparkling water qualifies as ultra-processed!)

But I would like to try. Sure, you gotta enjoy life, but I think in this case I could still enjoy life while also being even healthier than I am today.

I am curious though: What is your philosophy on balancing a healthy lifestyle with life enjoyment? I don’t have comments enabled on my blog (yet) but send me an email if you’d like to share, and I may share answers in a future post.

A few years ago when I was on maternity leave with my second child, I decided to do a bit of a deep dive into the world of CSS art, which is a strange and magical niche filled with some very talented people.

At the time, I blogged about it and shared some of my creations on dev.to; you can see my old posts if you want.

• Playing with CSS animation in 30 minute increments
• CSS Variables, input[type="color"], and form animations
• More experiments with form animations

I was certainly not the greatest at it but it was kind of fun and something different.

More recently I saw this challenge: Suck at something September and I thought… hmm, maybe I can try my hand at this again, this time more along the lines of using gradients to draw, like at cssdrawings.com or a.singlediv.com

Getting to the quality bar of the two websites I just shared is probably totally impossible for me. I suck even at drawing things by hand. Manipulating gradients to bend to your will seems infinitely harder than that. But that is the spirit of suck at something September- sucking is kind of the goal! It encourages you to just play around and try something without feeling ashamed of how crap it might be.

So this month I will try out drawing things and see how far I can get. You can see my first attempt for the month below. Starting with some happy/sad faces because it's very circle-based art and doesn't require any complex shapes.

Here's what makes these drawings tricky: You use 1 div, and then you use a complex background image of layered gradients to draw it out. There's a detailed article on css-tricks.com of how this is done if you are curious/want to try for yourself.

See the Pen Attempting drawing pictures using gradients by Rose (@roseyrobertson) on CodePen.

So fun and satisfying to play with! I'm endlessly impressed by the creative ideas people come up with on Codepen. I wish I had some need for gooey buttons on my website, but it doesn’t really fit with the rest of my site 🤷‍♀️ 😁

....how can gradients accomplish so much 🤯

I recently learned there’s a whole Etsy marketplace genre around people who hand embroider Fjäll Räven bags and sell them on Etsy... And they are just so cool. It makes me want to take up embroidery and try it out for myself.

I expect to never receive a dime… but if you don’t have it there then you definitely won’t receive a dime. So my odds of making money off my site have increased from 0 to 0.0000001%.

Why a tip option? Well, don’t we all dream of becoming rich from random passive income?

Hey maybe one day this site will have enough content and visitors that people do want to say “thanks for the great content” and leave a couple bucks. Unlikely? Sure. But I can dream.

How did I do it? Stripe makes it so easy!! (No this is not a sponsored post… I am just a big fan of Stripe.) I made a payment link, pasted their code snippet on my site, and then wrote a bit of code to have it toggle in and out of the screen.

Note - the code is kind of bespoke. If you have a million modals maybe you want something a little more re-usable. But this site is all about YOLO shipit so I just throw stuff together and tidy up when I realize I need to 😉

<a class="nav-item buy-coffee" id="tip-link" href="https://buy.stripe.com/3cs6rF9Yj2iBe4w8ww">Buy me a coffee</a>

@keyframes buy-button-animation {
    0% {
        opacity: 0;
        transform: translateY(-100%);
    }

    80% {
        transform: translateY(0%);
    }
   
    100% {
        opacity: 1;
    }
}

stripe-buy-button {
    position: absolute;
    top: 0;
    left: 0; 
    right: 0;
    bottom: 0;
    margin: auto;
    width: 288px;
    height: 243px;
    z-index: 10;
    display: none;
}

body.show-tip {
    overflow: hidden;
}

body.show-tip stripe-buy-button {
    display: block;
    animation: buy-button-animation 300ms ease-out forwards;
}

@keyframes animate-in {
    0% {
        opacity: 0;
    }

    100% {
        opacity: .7;
    }
}

body.show-tip .modal-underlay {
    display: block;
    position: absolute;
    z-index: 8;
    background: rgba(0,0,0,1);
    left: 0;
    top: 0;
    right: 0;
    bottom: 0;
    animation: animate-in 200ms ease-in forwards;
}

var tipLink = document.getElementById("tip-link");
if (tipLink) {
    tipLink.addEventListener("click", function(event) {
        event.preventDefault();
        document.body.classList.add("show-tip");
    });
}

var modalUnderlay = document.getElementById("modal-underlay");
if (modalUnderlay) {
    modalUnderlay.addEventListener("click", function(event) {
        event.preventDefault();
        document.body.classList.remove("show-tip");
    });
}

I own a house. It’s a great house and I feel very lucky to have it.

However, there is this one thing about the house that we discovered shortly after moving in three years ago, and it is driving me bonkers.

Every once in a while, usually on a hot summer evening, when the rest of the family is in bed, I’ll creep around the house, find a likely spot, crouch down, squash my face up against a wall, and strain my ears for the soft sound of rustling. Some people say it sounds like running water, or popcorn.

I am listening for the sound of carpenter ants.

We have carpenter ants… somewhere. I don’t know where. But I know they are there because in the summer we see them: Worker ants marching around trying to steal the honey we spilled on the counter, and usually once the summer is in full swing, great big ones (I mean they are HUGE. Disgustingly huge.) with wings come out, and I know that means there’s an established nest SOMEWHERE… that we can’t seem to locate or get rid of and it is driving me absolutely insane because I know that carpenter ants = water damage = rotting wood = house slowly being eaten from the inside out.

The internet opinion here is mixed. “Carpenter ants are not as bad as termites.” I have read fairly frequently. “It takes years for them to do any real damage,” the local professional pest control company tells me. “Don’t worry too much.”

But then I read a reddit thread where some contractor talks about a bathroom renovation he did where when they pulled out the old bathtub the wood around it was riddled with carpenter ant galleys and the giant wooden beams were as light as a feather when they should have weighed several kilograms.

So naturally I have this image in my head of my house suddenly collapsing on one side due to these ants that I cannot find.

We’ve hired pest people each year, we’ve cut open walls where we think they might be, we’ve drilled holes and injected poison into wall cavities… we have spent thousands of dollars, and… nothing.

So it kind of makes me crazy, and I wonder if everyone around me thinks I am crazy… I SWEAR THERE ARE ANTS I AM NOT IMAGINING THE ANTS.

And I also feel kind of bad about the whole thing! Here I am having pest control companies harass and kill these poor ants endlessly in an attempt to save my house from imminent collapse… meanwhile the ants are just trying to live out their happy little ant lives doing what ants do. Can’t we coexist in peace? Can’t they just chew their wood and make their little homes and live happily ever after? Isn’t there a way to let that happen?

...Well, no there’s no way of this to happen but I wish there was a way.

So that’s the backstory…. and the backstory is probably going to be longer than what I actually wanted to write about, which is this weird thing I learned about ants after experiencing it for myself and doing a bit of googling. (Warning: No peer reviewed study here, but I believe it. Feel free to find a source for me and I’ll add it to this post 😉 )

Earlier this year, after an interior spray in the house (which, by the way, I hate doing. No matter how safe “they” claim pesticides are this just seems like bad news to me. But desperate times call for desperate measures…)

Anyway! After the spray, we began to find dead ants, as well as living ants that were behaving like they were drunk - and eventually died as well - hanging out by a doorway downstairs.

You’d sweep them up and a few hours later there would be a new hoard of them. Always in the same area.

This went on for weeks, dead ants on the doormat, dazed ants wandering around until they ultimately collapsed.

But WHY? I mean sure they were impacted by the poison, but why were they all congregating here? It was way out in the open, and definitely not close to where a nest could be.

Well a quick google search tells me that ants have graveyards a safe distance from their nest, to avoid contaminating the rest of the nest with deadly diseases. Ok sure that seems familiar, I’m sure I’ve read that in a book somewhere before.

But get this: Ants that have a certain “death” chemical (Oleic acid) on them will MARCH THEMSELVES to the designated graveyard and just hang out there and wait to die. Once the chemical wears off they realize they aren’t dead and they return to the nest. Here’s a video where someone tries it out. 🤯 I don’t know if that’s what was going on with my drunken ants - that chemical only is supposed to be secreted once they are already dead - but they certainly seemed to recognize something was wrong and a graveyard trip was in order.

Ok that’s all I got. This blew my mind and I hope it blows yours too. Which me luck with my ongoing battle with the ants.