Human Lifestyle

Up early to help ease our youngest out of the house.  Today was his first day of a two-week trial at the York Steiner School, where we hope there will be a nicer atmosphere than at Archbishop Holgate's where bullying is rife and the school don't admit there's a problem so they don't have to deal with it. 

So, the taxi arrived at 8.15 and 5 minutes later, he and Gill were heading away, in the freezing rain. It was a good idea not to try to cycle there on the first day.  Amazingly, Gill got a bus back into town and then another one straight out and was home by 9. 15.  She got an all day rover ticket as she'd planned to go to the library with our oldest child as part of his home schooling, but actually he wasn't feeling up to it so that didn't happen.  Gill and I were discussing things when there was a phone call at 10.15 from Catherine at York Rotters asking me if I was planning on coming to the Management Group meeting.  Whoops!

So i quickly got dressed and jumped on my bike and got down to the Environment Centre in about 10 minutes.  The meeting was subdued as my colleagues wanted to know what I knew about Stella Rawson, and of course this saddened all of us.  However, we had to get on with the meeting, which was mainly about our work plans for the 2011-2012 financial year, so our talk was of targets and aims, objectives and how to communicate, how to enthuse, persuade even.  We decided to target two wards, which we have data for from a Council survey last year, and we decided to see if we could get the composting rate up by 5% and 3% in those wards, we worked out how many households this would be and how many tonnes of landfill it would prevent, based on DEFRA figures.  It was an excellent meeting for discussion, decisions and successful group working.

I got home at about 1pm and Gill was in the house, not heading for the library as I'd expected.  I had a quick lunch and just before 2, cycled off to see Pauline who'd asked me to help her cut some kindling.  She has been buying logs at £70 a load, but to get them lit, needs kindling.  So I spent about 45 minutes doing that, then it was time for coffee and some good conversations, about all sorts of things, as always with Pauline.

I visited Alligator on the way home, picking up a good load for my compost heaps, and then popped in on Country Fresh where Martin gave me 4 spare pineapples.  Nice!

When I got home, Gill was dancing round looking very pleased... the day at the Steiner School had been very successful and our little one was happy.  HOORAY!  This is a huge weight off our minds.

A fruity evening... carving up pineapple for anyone who wanted it and a load on the stove to dry, and watched a programme on measuring temperature with our eldest, ad I enjoyed Newsnight as I'm very interested in the Kingsnorth collapsed trial and the undercover cop story. 

However, although I heated bathwater, I didn't get as far as a bath so I must have one tomorrow as I'm working tomorrow evening and the next day.