It’s the little things

I posted at length late last year about all of the things that had gone wrong with our new house. This week marks a year since we moved and as I feel like we’re finally starting to settle in — I know, after 12 months! — it seemed poignant to give an update. Many of… read full entry »

Running Barefoot

I run in barefoot shoes. Vivobarefoot, to be precise. Now, to describe a shoe as “barefoot” seems somewhat of an oxymoron, but barefoot shoes — shoes with a flexible, minimal sole with generally a zero drop between the heel and toe — are designed to give you that barefoot feeling but with added protection for… read full entry »

Always Another Goal

I am now about 2 weeks out from Edinburgh Marathon, with my last long run programmed for this weekend (20 friggin’ miles?!). I’m dreading this last long one, although I’m not sure why. As usual, I have full support of my running club who’re pacing me around different segments. Despite not having run the marathon… read full entry »

New Things!

New Look! Yes, as you can probably see, I’ve changed the way the site looks again. I’ve been tinkering about with this one for a while between work projects. The theme is based off the lovely Storyteller by Mauer Themes. I paid for the theme (fair’s fair) then completely re-created it so that it would… read full entry »

When Life Gets In The Way

I’m less than 4 weeks out from Edinburgh and I’m currently sitting here having a bit of a mini breakdown. I knew that training for a marathon — and doing so while working, keeping on top of my strength goals, raising kids, volunteering etc — would be hard. I knew it would take up lots… read full entry »

pipdig: Your Questions Answered

This blog post is a follow-up to yesterday’s post: Security alert: pipdig insecure, DDoSing competitors. Firstly, to re-iterate, my accusations are as follows… pipdig did knowingly and with malicious intent: used other blogger’s servers to perform a DDoS on a competitor manipulated blogger’s content to change links to competitor WordPress migration services to point to… read full entry »

Instagram isn’t the problem, you are

Forgive the click-baity title for just a minute and hear me out. I responded to Molly Forbes‘ tweet earlier today (which admittedly lacked context, so I was making a massive assumption on its intent)… https://twitter.com/mollyjforbes/status/1107661795261665283 …with the words “Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person who likes instagram.” Admittedly, my response was actually borne… read full entry »

Low Expectations for Shrewsbury 10k

This weekend saw me diverting from my Edinburgh marathon training plan to run Shrewsbury 10km, a race I’ve run and enjoyed 3 times now. I should have been clocking up around 26km but I didn’t feel like dropping one long run would dramatically affect my prep at this stage. Having made the decision to forego… read full entry »


The jemjabella Top Ten: Best of Jem

After a brief twitter conversation yesterday, I realised that I have over 17 years of blog posts on this site, but no way of distinguishing those actually worth reading from what is mostly a collection of personal old waffle. So, here’s my jemjabella all time top ten, as decided right now on no scientific basis… read full entry »