Cupcakes and Cadenzas

The Day of the Dead It's October the 31st today and we all know what that means but instead of talking about Hallowe'en or 'Trick or Treating', I would like to tell you a bit about the ancient Celtic festival of Samhuinn (pronounced Sow-in) and sow as in the female pig as opposed to sow seeds. Samhuinn translates as 'Summer's End' and falls halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. Samhuinn (Scottish spelling) was and in some cases, still is celebrated in Scotland, Ireland and The Isle of Man. It is the time of year by which the harvest must be gathered in and everything is ready and prepared for winter. This is also the time when the country folk brought their cattle down from the summer pastures to be closer to the farm and selected the ones to be slaughtered to provide food for the communities over the coming winter months. Although November 1st is officially Samhuinn, the night of October 31st or November's Eve plays an im

Today, I feel a bit sad.  Having decided to start posting regularly to Cupcakes and Cadenzas again I was looking through the blogs that I have listed on my 'Blogs I Love Reading' page as well as all the blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader and it was what I found there that made me sad. A large number of the blogs have been abandoned. No updates, no warnings...nothing! The bloggers have just given up and the really sad part is that many of them were well established blogs with followers and really interesting content but, for whatever reason, they haven't been updated for a long time. It made me wonder how many other abandoned blogs there are out there in the Blogosphere. Thousands, maybe even millions. An uphill struggle Blogging is a funny thing. Pro-blogging and business blogging aside, a huge number of blogs, as you know, are written by people who want to share their hobbies, day to day lives, photographs, love of books etc. etc. They start off well but i

Makeover Because I haven't done much with Cupcakes and Cadenzas for quite a while, I thought that it was perhaps time to give the blog a bit of a makeover. I've always liked the Dynamic layouts which Blogger introduced last year but, having looked at the some of the online reviews, it seemed that a lot of bloggers seemed quite unimpressed with the templates. They didn't like that fact that you can't really alter the code to make the blog look exactly as you want it and they also didn't like the lack of compatible widgets. Because of that I decided not to try out the new layouts but I think it's time to give it a go. I have two other blogs, both with Wordpress.org and I can alter html/code and use plugins and widgets to my heart's content on those. You can check them out if you want to see what I mean. My personal one is Life with Yvie  and my business site is Indigo Horizons . Both are relatively new and I love what can be done with them but, at the en