Human Lifestyle

Another good day. Got a lot done. Up early and got busy outside the front to tidy up a bit, chainsawing a pallet and some recently acquired branches.  Also started stacking a new next-to-the-front door pile.

Gill went to the library with our eldest and I got a message from Nick, who wanted to come and pick up some riddled compost for his gardening work.  There was also talk of growing mushrooms on logs.

So he arrived just in time for a hommous sandwich and then we went down the garden and he picked up about 6 carrier bags of riddled compost.  He's bought a load of inoculated dowels from Adrian at Gourmet Woodland Mushrooms, of a native Yorkshire Oyster mushroom, so I gave him two recently felled Ash logs which I hope will make a good host.  I think he's going to give me one of them back with dowels in it. I will supply him with more logs as and when they become available!

So he left at 2pm and I got on with more work, digging out a compost heap into sacks, and then doing the same with a builder's bag, which I need to have empty as another compost heap needs turning/emptying as there's signs of life in the base, and I want them not to get too settled!

I came in as it got dark and put the tomato soup on the stove.  Gill made toasties.  This evening this meal tasted just perfect... the boys both enjoyed the soup and complemented me on it. I did a few apples still looking fine from the garden which had just been left in the preserving pan in the conservatory, put them for drying, and then later, got 5 free onions and a large carrier bag full of tomatoes and made a preserving pan nearly full of tomato and onion 'base'... which I think we'll freeze most of.  It can be used for soup, pasta sauce, nutloaves, all sorts.  This is the first time I've made so much, but it's because of the large number of over-ripe tomatoes thrown out by Freshways. 

So, a productive day.  But a late finish, just after 3am.  This is when I'm at my best, though.

Well, a mixed day for me.  I was very sneezy and had a running nose, especially during the first part of the day.  Also, I'd offered to take one of the children swimming to help him with that, but no, he'd decided that the cycle to Yearsley Baths was too much.  I cannot understand why a 15 minute cycle is enough to put someone off.  In fact there were several parenting issues this morning and I felt like a crap Dad, and was glad to get outside and away from the house at midday.

Today has been on my radar for some while.  I am very positive about people making a special effort to 'be green' but I do it most days, my whole life is 'greener' than most.  So I hadn't planned to do anything special for the 350.org 10:10:10 Global Work Party.  But I thought about it and the nearer the date, the more keen I became to do something myself.

I only decided to run my event on the evening of the 8th, and it only went live on the website on the 9th, so although I posted it to facebook, there wasn't much publicity.


I wasn't expecting many people to come, and in the end, no-one did.
BUT I had a really good day managing my composting operations. I had rescued about 200kg of waste fruit and veg from the landfill bins on Thursday and Saturday, and cycled it back home in my bike trailer. I'd also pruned a lot of brambles which fruited earlier this year, so I was able to build good layers on two of my 40 compost heaps. I put the brambles on first, then cardboard, and the chopped wet and sloppy fruit and veg on top of that. The heaps are contained within pallets and material kept in with layers of cardboard up against the wooden pallets.
Additionally, I dug over a builder's bag (one tonne) of mature compost, removed uncomposted sticks and lots of plastic windows from envelopes which were given to me from a school last year for recycling. The plastic will unfortunately get landfilled and the sticks went into the top of one of the heaps I'm currently adding to. The builder's bag full will get bagged up soon in 20 -30kg sacks, and will end up being cycled round to a nearby raised bed being planned by Abundance York, who grow foodplants in public places in the city.

Gill mowed the top lawn and we worked together pruning overgrown shrubs and fruited brambles. That part of the garden is looking a lot tidier now.
However, just as I was finishing my work, Melanie and one of her friends came round and said they'd wanted to do a 10:10:10 action, and decided to plant trees. However, the garden centre was closed, so they drove round to me and asked if I might have any trees they could plant. I plant tree seeds every year, so I was able to give them a Horse Chestnut about 1m tall and a Walnut about 40cm tall, and they took these to the Buddhist Centre about 12 miles East of York, to plant there. This was an unexpected extra to the day for me, and I was really happy to have been able to help.

They came just as I was getting ready to go to the St Nicks Photo Exhibition at the National Trust Shop on Goodramgate.  So I didn't set off for that until nearly 6pm... but there was still plenty of food and wine left.  I met a nice Mexican composer called Claudia, and a chap who works in the shop called Nick, and an ex St Nicks Recycler called Sophie, plus quite a few of my existing friends.  Ivana had taken most of the photos, and there were also lots of the Haikus written during the birthday celebrations. I enjoyed the hour I spent there.

So this wrapped up a mixed day.  I'd enjoyed my composting activities despite feeling low with my dribbly nose and problems with the children, and was very pleased to be asked to provide trees for this 'special' day.

A kind of relaxing day, except that I had an accident with the blackberry and apple fruit-leather-to-be. I was using the vacuum cleaner to remove the fruit flies which were being a bit too interested in the tray, balanced on the big saucepan on the stove. I'd lined the pan with a plastic sandwich bag, as when the leather dries, it is really easy to take the sheet of fruit pulp out and peel the plastic off it and put the damp sheet on a rack to dry further. BUT the vacuum cleaner sucked the plastic bag and dislodged the tray, which spilt all over the top and side of the stove, hearth, and carpet in front. Whoops.

I was able to pour the rest of the blackberry and apple into a receptacle, as I hadn't lost all of it, but I then had to do quite a bit of clearing up. I was very annoyed with myself, as preparing the fruit took AGES!

The rest of the day was just fine. I received two books I bought yesterday from Amazon, using a gift voucher for £20 which I got for filling in a questionnaire months ago. As I've been asked to speak at the screening of Colin Beavan's 'No Impact Man' on 7th September, I've bought the book so I can read it first. I also bought Mark Boyle's book 'The Moneyless Man, A Year of Freeconomic Living'. So I've got a lot of reading to do now... as if I hadn't already!

I did some work outside too, picked beans and a tromboncino squash, and windfall apples for drying, and I dug out a dalek bin of very mature compost into sacks which I've stored in the broken Compostumbler, and half-filled the newly emptied dalek with material from the medium sized Compostumbler. I then started to fill that Compostumbler again.

I really enjoyed an hour of weeding the pond-to-be area, another patch of ground elder, it is most satisfying.

Apart from that, I did relatively little today!

I had a late start and a quiet remains of morning.

I spent much of the day in the garden... the pond area is coming on nicely and I spent several hours removing vegetation and roots to make the area as bare as possible before moving soil around. I was lucky to be joined by our eldest son who helped for half an hour, which was a real pleasure.

I finished digging out a compost bin which I started doing a few days ago and continued with Janie yesterday, and put in a load of stuff which has been building up, including ground elder roots and brambles. I riddled another sack of very mature compost and will bag up all the riddled stuff soon.

During the evening I watched a series of programmes about cycling and bicycles on BBC4 which was nice, but my mood was saddened as I tried to chat with someone I care about, using facebook chat, but they were rude to me and removed them self from the account I was using. I felt sad all evening about this.

However I did manage to get some minutes written from the last York in Transition meeting, and sent to the other participants for checking.

Spent the morning reading and writing.... wrote a letter to the Press about a carfree York, in reply to a letter published yesterday.

But in the afternoon I did quite a bit of garden work, including transferring the contents of one dalek into the one next to it for maturation, and harvesting a load of worms to restock a wormery. I shredded the large pile of woody shrubbery which I cut down before my ankle broke to give the redcurrants more light. I despatched another two rodents to rodent heaven (a hot compost pile!)

In the house I did some washing up and hoovering. I had several Fiddlesticks phone calls. Gill has just about finished the accounts and this past year (09/10) is about £2000 down on last year on the gross income. In a recession, people cut out non essentials, and bought-in entertainment is in many cases a non essential. I really do have to find some other way of generating income.

After the children came home I cycled down to Country Fresh and got some veggies plus 4 boxes of 'resources', some of which I was able to load up into a dalek which has space.

After tea I cut some hedge with shears and the sky got dark and thunder rumbled in the distance, then got nearer and there were a few flashes and a bit of rain. I came in and dried off.

I got an email from a neighbour up the road saying there was a branch waiting for me outside their house so I went out again to pick it up in my bike trailer, and found a couple of broken chairs too which had wooden legs and backs which looked suspiciously like kindling to me...

I popped into see my friend who is fighting alcoholism, and they had news of their friend who has had a liver transplant, needed because of the same illness. Later on I chatted with two friends both of whom are fighting difficult internal mental battles.

Later, my laptop developed a problem with the power supply and kept on shutting down. I wonder if the battery needs replacing, and why was the mains power not keeping the machine going? I wonder if the mains power thing has gone wrong. I feel a visit to Ben might be in order!

But, I was able to use Gill's laptop to type this up, but it's not the same as my machine which has all my bits and bobs on it... like a button which sends me straight to a dictionary website.... and a 'favourites' list, etc etc.

A good day, up early and encouraged the children to get out to school on time, and then went on the computer to do today's emails and facebook messages.

Gill had an appointment mid morning so I stayed in to deal with the Suma order which arrived at about midday.

During the afternoon I got a lovely message from someone. The message says it all:

"You may not remember but I watched you do a Professor Fiddlesticks show a few years ago and afterwards we had a chat about juggling. I just wanted to write a quick note to let you know that I've recently been reading your blog and I really enjoy it, your positivity is a real inspiration to me. I feel the world would be a better place if there were more people like you."

I replied with a big thank you and an invite to come and visit, and maybe see St Nicholas Fields.

The reply was incredibly moving and left me in tears:

"I'd wanted to write to you for a while but I was concerned it would seem odd (I have some issues with anxiety or 'nerves' which cause me to overthink things) I looked your name up out of the blue one day to find out if you were still doing Professor Fiddlesticks and I was amazed to see all the good work you did on the green side of things. As I read on through the diary I could really feel a positivity and enthusiasm that inspired me during a slightly dark time. My 'problems' were nothing major, just some concerns about what I wanted to do in life and whether I had made the right choices. I found what I needed in your words to reassure me that you can do whatever you want to in life. The fog lifted then and it was a wonderful realisation, there are people out there who lead a somewhat modest life and are happy and others who have lots of material things who are not. At the moment I'm doing some work down south so won't be back up north for some weeks but I would love to come to York to shake your hand, see the environmental centre and ask a few questions about my own green living aspirations."

I thought about this for the rest of the day. I feel it is just as important that I get positive feedback about my lifestyle choices as it is that I encourage and support other people (which I do a lot of, mainly privately and not explaining in great detail on the blog). We all have doubts about how we live and the choices we've made, even people who come across as very sure about their path, and for me, this message was very life affirming. Thank you to the person who sent it and I look forward to meeting you soon.

In the afternoon I decided to have a go at protecting my walnuts from marauding squirrels, so I put several bunches in plastic bags. I've had success in previous years with plastic bottles, but getting them onto the tree is not easy. I have no idea if bags will confuse squirrels, or whether they will just laugh at them and tear them open to take the walnuts out. Maybe I should consider getting a squirrel trap.

After tea I dug out a New Zealand pallet bin and put it all into the newly reconstructed Komp 700 on a solid based pallet, hopefully this will be less easy for rodents to access. My rat trap is working well at the moment, placed inside covered containers and baited with bread.

I also did quite a bit of Fiddlesticks stuff today, several phone calls from people booking me and a chat with my agent about a future gig. However, the most important bit of 'paperwork/admin' I did was to initiate a CarFree York group, on facebook initially, but I hope to expand this to a website and meetings, actions etc. This felt like a positive thing to do.

Gill woke me up absolutely ecstatic. She'd found my shaver recharger. And it wasn't what I'd remembered what it looking like. Friends, this is what senility looks like. You are CONVINCED that the trimmer lead you are looking for is two-pronged and has a curly flex. You look everywhere and at one stage find the old one which does look like that... but the jack on the end fits your old, now dead, trimmer. You have the vision that the lead you are looking for is curly and has two prongs, and look everywhere for it. Your wife looks everywhere. Your wife finds all sorts of things which were lost, some of which are very welcome finds. You go to great lengths to get another one, as your beard continues growing and you don't want to look like a hairy monster... just a well groomed one. You even bother a friend who customises another piece of equipment to enable you to charge the bally thing.

Then the next morning Gill looks at a mini transformer doodah which has been sitting on a shelf in plain view all the time with various other bits of electrical nonsense... it is three pinned, has a straight flex... and it has 'Remington' written on the back. An OMG moment when you realise that you are fallible, have a faulty memory which leads you astray (no pun intended) and that you cannot totally trust your brain anymore. This must be what senility feels like.

So, I took my trimmer off Ben's charger, and tried to trim my beard. I managed half of it before the trimmer died on me. Ben's charger hadn't worked. So I plugged the gadget into the newly found charger and the green LED came on, indicating it was now charging.

I was disappointed that the weather was really nice and I could not help going outside and tidying. At lunchtime I came in and on a freecycle message, saw that someone was offering a garden parasol, something which Gill has been hankering after for a while. So I messaged the offerer and got a message back quite soon from my friend Linda, saying yes, I could have it. I hadn't recognised her freecycle name. She had got it from another freecycler but had realised it was too big for her little yard. So I said I'd go over within the hour to pick it up.

So I cycled over to South Bank and Linda was pleased to see me, and she was on good form, looking lovely and healthy and happy. The parasol looked perfect. Linda showed me her little compost bin, which she said I inspired her to have, and it was looking good too (not quite as attractive as Linda!) but good looking nevertheless. I offered to riddle it for her, to create a small sack of material to top-dress her many pots and planters. I'll do this in a few weeks when it's convenient for her.

So, home via Country Fresh where I picked up a box of gubbins and a sack too. I then spent some time down the garden, I dug out an old pallet bin and put all the contents in a builders one tonne bag. This allowed me to start filling the newly emptied pallet bin. Which is good as Gill was doing a lot of pruning and tidying, and had produced a lot of vegetation for this.

But I'm feeling torn as I really should be shutting myself away and sorting out the website which is going live soon. But I cannot let a good day go, and I've seen the weather forecast for tomorrow... rain all day! Which means I should be able to do the website...

I'd soaked some beans and boiled them on the stove last night, and Gill mixed this with some tomato/onion stuff, to have with rice. It was delicious.

After this I went round to Ben to give his big transformer back and he showed me that it would have charged the trimmer if I'd have put the voltage up a bit. He had also sourced a solar charger which might do the beard trimmer and will probably do mobile phones. He didn't want this and gave it to me... so I'll give him some more dried fruit, which he and Jill really like.

When I'd collected the 'resources' from Country Fresh I'd found perhaps 40 pears of usable condition in one of the boxes. So I spent over an hour loading up several drying racks with sliced pears. So I was again not in bed til after 2am.

A reasonable day... both boys have a tummy bug and are off school, but they just read and did stuff on their computers/DS. Gill too was achy and found a that the medicine she is taking to deal with her painful ankle is affecting her kidneys and making her ankles swell up... back to the drawing board on that one then.

I spent the morning doing assorted emails, a Fiddlesticks booking, and a phone chat with the Cemetery Warden who has agreed to see me tomorrow. Also a brief chat with my Aunty who might be visiting this neck of the woods soon... she hasn't seen where we live so that would be nice.

But I spent most of the day in the garden... a bit of planting but I got distracted by a compost bin which needed emptying... well, two did, the finished bin, which is an old tumbler which has come off it's stand and is effectively a static barrel, and when I'd unloaded this into several sacks, I transferred the dalek-bin contents which have been sitting and rotting quietly for a year or more into the now available barrel. The tumbler, whilst in use (before I rescued it from a skip) had been gnawed by rats, and they had made one of the aeration holes a bit bigger. So I utilised this hole to carefully put a courgette plant in, so it will grow (I hope!) directly into the compost as it continues to rot down. I'm quite pleased with that!

I also got distracted by ground elder, which I now need to eradicate from the raised beds next to where the hedge was and is now replaced by the wall. I will need to remove the roots for several years to get rid of this weed.

After tea, which for me included some very stringy purple sprouting broccoli, the last of, I unicycled down to the Co-op for cereals for me and muffins for the children. I couldn't be bothered to get my bike out, nor could i be bothered to walk, as I wanted to get back for 9pm to see the Science programme on TV.

Spent some time on the new website later on, to edit a few bits. We'll be launching it next week!

I was expecting a visitor at 10am and told Gill last night... but I slept til the phone rang at 9.50... it was Nick saying he'd be with me at 11, and then Freecycling John arrived, as I was getting dressed. I met John through Freecycle when he was offering some wood from trees he'd removed from his garden, to make space for vegetables... so I told him then about my excess of compost. He emailed me a day or two back and arranged to come round at 10 today.

So, I showed him round and he was very happy to choose four sacks of mature compost which I wheelbarrowed up the garden and he loaded into his car. Then a while after 11, just as I was having a coffee after my cereal, Nick arrived. We chatted and he had a coffee and then went down to the composting area... and he chose some sacks to put in his cycle trailer.

So, I sold 7 sacks and one bag of riddled... probably my best day's sale EVER!

Then I had lunch, did a bit of wood management out the front and then did lots more outside stuff down the garden, despite the rain.. including lots of weeding, and digging out a dalek bin with some very friable and crumbly compost... loaded it into plastic sacks and I hope to riddle it and use it soon. The weeding I did was around the raised beds where the hedge has been replaced by a wall, and I need to eradicate the ground elder from there, which was growing through the hedge and continually re-invaded the raised beds.

A very satisfying day.

A very good start to the day. I put a high score for 'joy' on my waking emotions questionnaire.

The rest of the day was good too... although I did lots of washing up and jarred up dried fruit, washed the drying racks and refilled them with apples and pears. I also did some assorted paperwork... fulfilled a Good Energy request to send them my gas meter reading, and had several Fiddlesticks enquiries and phone calls.

Towards the end of the afternoon I got out into the garden and dug out a builders sack of very mature compost and put it into a long line of plastic sacks, ready for riddling over the next few days or weeks. The builders bag will be refilled with the material which is currently in the metal-sided compost bin... the sides of which are both corrugated iron in a J shape, from an air raid shelter. I love digging out old compost heaps! I never know what I'll find... although this lot was quite 'clean' with relatively little plastic and glue strips.

I came in at 7pm for tea... Gill had added some macaroni into the chunky veg soup I made a day or two ago, and it was a delicious meal.

Later, after dark, I got a message from a Freecycler who wanted some compost, manure or topsoil. They asked how much a tonne might cost! Well i sell carrier bags of riddled compost for a pound or two or three, and sacks of unriddled for £2 to £5, these sacks might be 20kg or so. Which means that a tonne of unriddled compost, at £2 per 20kg, would be £100. I hope that price didn't put her off! I did say I could do a bulk discount, but I wouldn't want to let it go for much less than that, after all it is lovingly and carefully made!

Several good moves on Scrabble, but my top opponent Gael is on good form and I'm falling behind again.

A busy morning... got up soon after 9am to be ready to take the spare seeds from the York in Transition seed swap along to the YUMI Community Garden.

So, after breakfast and a shower I cycled along to the Danesgate Skills Centre on Fulford Cross and arrived on the dot of 10.30. Sasiki and her colleague Helen Hays, a garden designer, were there waiting, and Nick Haines, the organiser of the seed swap, had just arrived. The idea was to hand over the seeds and get some photos of the handover. A handful of users of the garden arrived; a Mexican woman who's been in York for just one week, to learn English and do her MSc, and two Chinese women and a small boy.

The Press didn't turn up, so we took our own photos and will submit these with some extra copy and hope the Press will run a story next week about our two organisations working together.

I came back via Country Fresh, St Nicks and Freshways, getting home at about 12.30, to find a peaceful household.

I spent the afternoon in the garden, taking stuff down from the conservatory which Gill is tidying, and then I got stuck down there, digging out a compost heap. But halfway through the afternoon, our youngest came down and said we had a visitor... it was Alan Leach, who used to live next door to us in Emerald St, with his three children. I spoke to him on facebook yesterday... he asked if he could drop off a bag of kitchen biodegradables. So it was really good to see him, as haven't seen him for a while.

So they all had a wander down the garden, but didn't stay long. I got on with my rearranging my heaps... I dug out one pallet heap and turned it into a 1 cubic metre builders bag which fits into a wooden holder, and dug out both my Compostumbler bins. All the tumbled material needs to sit in a 'New Zealand Bin' (pallets lined with cardboard) for quite a while before it's ready to use as compost. The adverts saying 'makes compost in 14 days' are complete nonsense. Also, I'm going to have to retire the largest Compostumbler as the metal sheet sides have corroded and now flex so much that the door catches bulge out and prevent the cylinder revolving all the way round. I might be able to purchase new metal bits... the plastic end pieces are fine, it's the sheet metal which is rusting. This is a disappointment as it cost a lot and I'd have hoped it would last a decade or so, but it's only lasted about 6 years I think.

Gill had made a nutloaf mix for tea, and using a plastic tub, formed it into rounds and fried them, making home-made burgers, which we had in bread rolls, with baked beans and mushrooms.

Later in the evening I blanched some grapes to make raisins, and chopped up more pears to dry them.

I got a message from the journalist at The Press saying that the story about YiT and YUMI would probably be in the paper early next week.