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.

An excellent morning as we had a visit from someone who was able to help us sort out a problem we are having... great advice, lovely chap, very professional and helpful.  Both of us felt greatly relieved afterwards.

I had an early lunch and cycled down to town to the Big Green Market, where York Rotters were having a stall.  This was my first time back for exactly a year... as it was at last year's Big Green Market that I received complaints about mentioning inappropriate subjects, so I've promised not to mention them, and have a minder to make sure I behave myself.  So I did a 12.50 til 1.15 stint, chatted with quite a few members of the public, and LOVED IT.  I had forgotten how much I enjoy talking with all-comers about their home compost heap.  I love it when they find out that they can put cardboard on the heap, or how they can compost cooked food and meat scraps.  Today I also had a 'growing mushrooms' enquiry which was a bit unexpected.  And I kept to the subject... or rather kept OFF the subjects I'm banned from talking about, and everybody was happy.  Especially me.

I came home via Country Fresh and Richard had a vast pile of stuff for me. I put a carrot sack and a thin polythene banana bag in the trailer and four boxes on top.  Two boxes went on the pannier rack.  One of the greengrocers who isn't as bothered about recycling had put about 15 bags of English pears and 5 pineapples in the bin, not in the recycling where I could take them.  So these got rescued, and later I sorted out the pears (there were 70 in perfect condition) and had a bit of a wobbly about how I was going to use them all.  We had pears with chocolate custard for pudding tonight, and I spent the whole of the David Attenborough programme halving, peeling and balancing pears on the drying racks.  The pineapples will have to wait!

So, a good day.  No money earned, but a lot of resources saved, and information shared about how to reduce waste by home composting. 

I had a lie in.  And then a fairly lazy day.  However I did go to Country Fresh for some potatoes and a cauliflower, via St Nicks with 5 demijohns for cider-making tomorrow.  I came back via Freshways, and did a bit of compost heap loading.

I also did a good lot of fruit slicing for drying, pears, apples and a couple of hands of bananas. I turned out the quince leather stuff, membrillo, and it wasn't completely set, so it went back on the stove on a metal sheet to dry off and set a bit more. I hope.  However, it tastes FANTASTIC!!

So, a pretty nothingy day... and what has this got to do with water, being as it's Blog Action Day, with the subject of water?

Well, I try to live my life with low levels of consumption of fossil fuels, resources and of course, water.  So, as today was a 'normal' day for me, what did I do, or not do, to reduce my water footprint?

Well I have a 'pirate wash' every morning, running the cold water tap over my flannel about 6 times and after each time, wiping my body down with that.  I don't really like showers but I have a bath once a week.  And this kind of low water use wash every day.

Diet is really important when considering embodied water.  Some foods are much more 'water heavy' than others, and meat is a good example of a foodstuff which has a huge water footprint.  So if I'd had a burger for breakfast (or equivalent, say a bacon sandwich) then that could have had a hidden water use of 24 litres just for one burger and bap.  But with a vegetarian diet, the embodied water is vastly less. See this water footprint calculator for some comparisons.  For breakfast, I have a bowl of cereals and soya milk, and a cup of coffee.  For lunch I always have sandwiches... nearly always vegan, ie bread, dairy free margarine and/or mayonnaise, hummous, peanut butter, marmite or avocado.  However, today one of my sandwiches was cheese and red pepper.  Cheese has a higher water footprint than plant-based foods, so a black mark against me here.  My evening meal was macaroni and cauliflower with a soya-milk and goats cheese sauce... reasonably low in embodied water, compared to a meat-based meal at least.

The biggest direct water use in most Western houses is the flush toilet.  We have two of these in the house but I much prefer to use my home made compost toilet, sometimes known as a dry toilet or sawdust toilet.  The only water I use directly is from a water butt to wash my hands afterwards.  However, the recycled tissue paper does require water in it's production, but I'm not giving that up!!!

The other activity connected with food is washing up.  I do the washing up in our house, and I'm very careful to keep the water use down here too, although I rinse the plates and saucepans with clean water and then leave them to drip dry/air dry, rather than wiping a (dirty) tea towel all over them... a great way to get bacteria all over your washed crockery.  I re-use the washing up water in the summer in our conservatory, but at this time of year the plants don't need as much, so today, the water was just tipped down the sink and would get cleaned up at the sewerage works.

Our water use has gone up recently.  Both boys now need to wash more, being as they are getting to 'that age' where boys start to emit adult male odours, and therefore they now use the shower more, and the washing machine has a few more smelly clothes to deal with.  This means our household of four uses 92 cubic metres of water a year (it's on a meter!), which is about 252 litres a day, or 63 litres each per day (23 cubic metres per year), if shared out equally.  This is direct water use, of course, as embodied water use is much more difficult to work out.  However, I did a rough calculation using this Water Footprint Calculator and it came up with 479 cubic metres per year for my personal water footprint.

I have written a special 'page' about my water use, as I feel it is a really important subject.  This can be found in the top right hand corner of the blog, or by clicking on this.  Thanks!

A good day.  I did a fair amount in the garden; I had about 6 sacks of greengrocers stuff waiting to be slopped onto the heaps, so I pruned loganberries and blackberries, the bits which fruited this year, and they formed a good 'airy' layer to put some cardboard on, with the really wet fruit and veg on top of that. 

I also almost finished the new stack of fuel next to the front door, started yesterday.  I did a lot more fruit drying... I'm speed-drying apple rings now, in about 24 hours.  I could do with more drying space as I have more apples than I can cope with.  In between times I stripped cable to get the copper wire out, so I had a busy day.

At 5pm, Barry from Transition/Abundance came round to pick up the fruit press and apple crusher, to be used at tomorrow's Eco-Family Day at St Lawrence's School and Family Centre.  I'm on the Transition stall, but I expect I'll help with the apples too.

Not sure what else happened today, but I'm feeling happy at the end of it.  Maybe it's because Steve Miller Band is on Jools Holland...

Up reasonably early in order to get to Leeds for the hospital appointment to remove my dressing and the stitches.  So I left home at about 9.15 and popped into Cycle Heaven as both disc brakes need tightening and the rear brake's plastic wheel with which it can be hand-tightened has disintegrated, and the socket to use to tighten it has become stripped, so I'm unable to tighten the rear one.  The front one is movable, but difficult.  I am not happy with these brakes.  I had a chat with Ash who said he'd do something about them.  I left my bike with him, and took a Cycle Heaven replacement. 

I took this on the train to Leeds, as I missed the fast 9.58 which would have got me into Leeds with time to walk to the hospital, so I got the 10.11 stop-everywhere, which takes over 30 minutes to get there.  So I put the bike on the train, and then cycled up to the LGI, and arrived at the Plastic Surgery dressing removal place at one minute past 11. 

I didn't have to wait long, and the nice nurse took just 5 minutes to deal with me.  I was really pleased to see that the scar is very well healed, is small and tidy, and already looks fairly invisible.  Amazing!

I cycled back through Leeds and got on a train before midday.  Cycle Heaven had sorted my brakes; Ash had dismantled and rebuilt the front one and removed the plastic disc from the rear, so that it can now be tightened with a spanner.  He said that next time I brought my bike in for servicing he'd consider putting brakes on which had bigger pads, which he hoped would last longer.

I got home via Country Fresh, and 3 sacks and two boxes, about 60kg, and had lunch at 1.30pm.

So, the afternoon went quickly as my next appointment was at 3pm, with Owen about 10 minutes cycle away, who had asked me to install two compost bins at his block of flats.  He'd had a neighbours meeting which I'd provided information for, and they'd then decided to get communal compost bins.  One week later, Owen was lucky enough to win a compost bin!  So he'd only needed to purchase one, and today I took a spade, a roll of chicken wire to make them rat-resistant, and pliers to cut the wire to size.  To install a 'dalek' bin, it is best to first find level ground, in a sunny corner if possible, and to place the bin on the ground and mark out where the base of the bin sits with a spade.  The bin is then moved away and a narrow trench made for the foot of the bin to sit in.  Then Owen helped me cut the wire into a square big enough to cover the whole of the base of the bin, and stick out each side.  This is put onto the ground, on top of the trench, and the bin carefully placed onto the wire and pushed into the trench, so the wire completely covers the base of the bin.  Then the soil from the trench is put back onto the foot of the bin, to help hold it down.  This makes it difficult for rats to get in through the base, although if they really want to, they can gnaw a hole in the side of the bin.  However, I've only seen this once.

So I was home soon after 4pm, and I did a bit in the garden, and after tea (the delicious carrot stew/soup, with extra pasta in it), popped over the road to deal with another pile of waste wood... chopped shrubs and bits of trees, which I pruned down to useful sticks.  Later, I went to collect a wheelbarrow full of them, and was accosted by a Woodlands staff member who was surprised to see me working there at that time in the evening.  I guess she didn't know I've been visiting that bit of woodland for about 9 years, and tidying up some of the detritus the gardeners throw in there.  I hope it doesn't put my becoming an official volunteer in jeopardy!

Later in the evening, I couldn't resist opening some of the windfall walnuts, and my fingers ended up black.  I also got a load of very ripe plums from Country Fresh, so I halved them and skinned them and put them on the drying rack....  I had time to do this as facebook was playing up and I couldn't have my usual chats and Scrabble...

Got up before 9am and got going after breakfast and email/facebook session... but then had to concentrate on the forthcoming election, as I have to get papers in as soon as possible.  So I looked all through the Register of Electors which Andy, my Election Agent had sent me, and found about 25 people whom I either knew or thought that would sign my form saying they were happy for me to stand.  This doesn't commit them to voting for me, or voting at all, but it does mean that they shouldn't sign someone else's form!

Over lunch I sorted out some more plums... they don't last long when sitting in a bucket with I don't know how many other plums, and quite a few were well on the way to compost.  Sad, but I've been too busy to deal with all of them.  But I filled another cake rack with halved and skinned plums, and balanced this over the warm woodstove....

During the afternoon, I popped round to a couple just round the corner, and explained that I wanted to ask them a favour but I wouldn't be at all offended if they said no.  They were happy to fill in my form, and then we chatted about politics, lifestyles and all sorts for quite a while.  Then I went looking for another two who live close by but neither of them were in.

A bit later I went out on my bike and got the next 7 that I needed (Gill was my proposer, and 10 are needed).  This included a lovely old gent of 89 who was very pleased with some company, two Green Party members, a young chap who'd helped with the Green Festival, one of my neighbours and a friend who is politically active but I'm not sure she's a Green voter!

So I was done, all filled in, and this meant that I could take all the forms down to the meeting about the proposed incinerator.  My agent said he'd be there towards the end.

The meeting was really interesting but when I got back home I had internet connectivity problems and ended up typing my blog out on Gill's laptop.

A very productive day.  I got up fairly late but was busy soon, did some housework and after lunch, did a load of fruit picking.  I started with the plums as they are very ripe, many have fallen and others gone mouldy on the tree.  I took the ladders down and picked quite a few, about three quarters of a bucket full, and then asked my neighbour if I could take my ladders down his garden to reach the rest of the plums in our tree from his side of the hedge.  He had no problem with that... they have two similar plum trees which were equally loaded.

So I ended up with a whole bucket full of plums... what will I do with them?  My neighbour also told me that I should be taking the opportunity to pick the apples from our tree which are accessible from his side, so I moved the ladder and picked a large box full of James Grieve, a delicious and fairly early eating apple. We have a Cox apple tree too, this ripens later in the year.

So, lots of fruit to process.  I had some quiet time and sat and cracked shells off hazelnuts.  We have a really good nutcracker, with a spring which opens it up after squeezing it, and the nut goes into a conical chamber which copes with all sized nuts (well, not coconuts!) (looks a bit like this).

I also did an hour or so chainsawing and log stacking, on the right of the front door as you look out.  This means we are now using the stuff on the left which has been there all summer.

I had a quick tea at 6.30, reheat rice and some tomato sauce Gill made, and microwaved green beans, perhaps some of the last from the garden.

Then at 7 I went down the garden and found 4 sacks of compost for Suki, Ann's housemate, and took that round on the way to the York in Transition meeting.  It was Peter's birthday and he, Edward and Andreas were drinking coffee and eating doughnuts... they'd had a Directors meeting which I'd missed, but the Steering Group was from 7.30.  I took minutes.  We finished just before 10pm.

Then I came home via Freshways, picked up a couple of sacks of limp vegetation, and lit the stove to keep the plums drying.  I cracked more nuts whilst watching Lorenzo's Oil, a moving film.  I chatted with an American friend on facebook called Sheila, who sent me a recipe to use some of the plums.

Bed ridiculously late again!

Another late start... I've got into the habit of going to bed in the wee early hours (was after 3am last night) and then getting up late. So I had breakfast when some people would be having an early lunch, and then I got dressed just in time for a mid afternoon appointment with Lucy from Yellow Pages and Yell.com... and I agreed the same package as this year for advertising Professor Fiddlesticks. I've dropped Thomson Directories and I might drop the BT Phone Directory too... I don't know. But Lucy and I didn't just talk business... we covered peak oil and diet, amongst other subjects. I promised to send her a couple of links via facebook, and later in the day she 'friended' me and I sent her a link to the peak oil article and also one to a nutloaf recipe I wrote yonks ago in the Community Care blog I wrote.

I responded to a Freecycle offer of a drill bit which Tara asked me to find so we can do her water butt on Friday. I cycled round to meet John, a chap of mature years who has a lovely engineers workshop in his back garden. He showed me a Sterling engine he'd built... but lamented that it didn't work very well.

Gill went to town and found a second-hand desk in the Banana Warehouse for our youngest to use in his bedroom. It was delivered, and Gill and I took it upstairs and it looks great there. Our son was pleased with it.

After this, I collected a load of windfall fruit from the garden (apples, pears and plums) and spent some of the evening sorting these for drying. I also dealt with a lot of hazelnuts. I am inundated with hazelnuts. A bucket full of them takes a LOT of time to process. I have only just started, perhaps a fifth of them, probably less than this. Maybe this is why I'm not sleeping much, I have too much to do.

Straight back to work today, I started with a shower to wash my hair and then loaded my bike trailer up with jugglestuff and my unicycles... the first day with my big unicycle in 8 weeks.

I popped in on Country Fresh to say hi to Rich and then on to the station to park my bike, gather my belongings and get a ticket to Leeds. The 12.15 train was late and due in at 12.37. But there was an earlier train, also late, due in at 12.13, so I went to wait for that. I sat on a seat on the platform and started chatting to a nice older lady, who turned out to be involved in her Transition Town, somewhere near Oxford. She was Ros Kent, and a quick search shows that she is centrally involved in Transition Eynsham Area. We had a really good chat on the platform and then on the train all the way to Leeds.

I had my sandwiches for lunch whilst waiting for Alan to pick me up at the back of the station, and in less than half an hour we were at Middleton Park, and I got ready to perform. It was a very standard show, workshop and balloon show, two hours non-stop, and very enjoyable. The unicycling fitted in with no problems, my ankle breaking 8 weeks ago is now becoming just a bad memory. However, I will try to be more concious in the future and try not to let it happen again.

I especially enjoyed meeting Paul and Margaret, volunteers with FoMP, and my young friend with Aspergers who is doing really well with her Poi, flower sticks and diabolo skills. She's attended all four of my visits to Middleton Park.

4pm came soon and I did the last of the balloon requests, got changed back into 'civvies' and Alan took me back to the station. There was a train within 20 minutes, and I got into York at about 5.30pm. I visited a ripe skip on the way back, and found some electrical cable, which I'll remove the copper wire from, and some lead sheets, which will realise a pound or two at the metal merchant. The skip user gent was happy for me to have these bits and bobs.

Home at 6.10 and I had some quiet time running a blade along some flex and pulling the wire out whilst watching Secret Britain. Gill had created a nice rice-based tea, with home grown tomatoes and home grown beans... totally yummy!

After tea I got the big ladders and picked a big bucket full of pears from our early pear tree. I first put them up in the self-supporting shape, which gets me 6m off the ground, but then I put them into the straight configuration and leant them against the tree, and went up the full 9 metres, my head popping out into the top of the tree! Many of the pears are over-ripe but some are just right for drying, so during the evening I halved, cored and peeled a lot of them and put them on the drying racks over the stove. Dried pears are one of my favourite of all the dried fruits I make. I still have a lot to deal with, and there's more on the tree... and several more trees to deal with, none as big as this one though.

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.

Had quite a busy morning, up just after 9 and dealt with a slight hangover by having a large coffee and 2 paracetamol, and a shower.

I needed to be in tip top condition for work... Professor Fiddlesticks had been booked by Anna, the organiser of today's 'Multi Sports Day' near the Fulford end of the Millennium Bridge, which was due to run from 2 til 4pm. So I had an early lunch and got going with my bike trailer full of the usual gear at just after 1pm. I also took a couple of bags of dried apple rings for the LETS stall, and the York World Naked Bike Ride leaflets.

Stuff was already happening when I got there, and I secured a place on the path with my bike propped up against a lamp-post and immediately there were youngsters wanting to have goes on the unicycles. So I was busy for over 2 hours, unicycling and helping people with the 4 wheel unicycle, 2 wheel unicycle and occasionally the one wheeler. Oh, and rewarding people with balloons and doing some unicycle and devilsticking demos.

But it wasn't a perfect day... we had gusts of wind, strong enough to lift up some of the gazebos, rain showers and even a hailstorm, but several nice patches of sunshine. There were at least 100 people there, possibly up to double that, and it seemed that everybody had a good time. I was pleased to see quite a few of my friends, including Tony my WNBR friend who had collected the Yorkshire WNBR leaflet, half of them for Sheffield, half for York, and he'd also got some flags. These will be available on the York Ride, at a slightly discounted rate.

I packed up soon after 4pm as I'd had a phone call just before I'd set out from Randall, who wanted me to help fill in a Risk Assessment for the forthcoming CarFree Network Street Party, and he was due to come round at 5pm. I got in at 4.50, and then got a phone call from Rand saying he'd been moving paving slabs around with his bike trailer and would prefer not to have to cycle from Acomb to Hull Road... so could we do the meeting by Skype?

So we had a 1 hour 45 minute Skype call, filling in the documentation and raising several important questions. At the end of it Gill gave me a bowl of home-made celery soup which was delicious, and then home-made 'stuffed crust' pizza with salads, also delicious. Gill is an awesome cook, and knows it, and loves it. She's always saying how much she likes being a mother and looking after us. We are all damn lucky.

I visited Ben as he had offered a CFL bulb on freecycle which would fit our ceiling light socket in the front room (downlighters) and he also might have a solution to my shaver conundrum. He'd found a large heavy transformer, a box with knobs on which changes mains power to whatever voltage you set the dial at, and analyses whether things are shorting, etc. In return, I'm taking a box of waste metal to the recycling site for him.

Later I did the washing up and sorted through the bananas and set about 30 of them to dry, and left my shaver charging on Ben's machine.

I think it was quite a good day... I did get quite a bit done and nothing terrible happened.

Although I went to bed at 3am last night, I was up just after 9 this morning and feeling fine, and soon got myself on my bike with the paperwork needed to pay our Council Tax and re-subscribe to Resource Magazine, which is always a good read.

So I got cheques out and then went to the City Treasury to pay in half of our annual Council Tax. We have the opportunity to use PayPoint in a local shop, but this would be connected to our bank account, and I don't pay the Council Tax from this... I always pay from my Fiddlesticks income, from the Fiddlesticks Building Society account, so I'll continue to pay twice a year, using a cheque from this account. I did find out though that I could get a cheque out made payable to The Post Office, and use a card (which is being sent to me) to get that paid on to the Council. I had a 20 minute wait at the Council Treasury, as they no longer have the numbers of staff that they used to, so I might use the Post Office option next time.

I visited Dylan at Millers Yard, but someone else had taken his last bag of orange halves, shock horror, for their allotment. I was delighted!

Then back through town, collecting halved lemons from the lemonade stall, and visited Rich at Country Fresh and came home.

After lunch I did some paperwork (an invoice, emails, several phone calls) and sent a reply to the US Composting Council about the Sierra Club's new proposed policy on composting and then outside, yet more foodplant stuff, getting the last tomato plant potted up, and some of the squashes and beans outside in the radiator raised beds.

At teatime I was informed that our eldest had to take 500g of cooking apple into school tomorrow for his 'food technology' so he can make apple crumble, so I cycled down to Country Fresh again and got two cooking apples (550g, allowing 10% waste for peel and core... clever, eh?) plus a large load of blood oranges which are past their best, bruising a pale powdery blue colour... They'll be absolutely fine on my compost heap, though.

So, finance, paperwork of the electronic kind, phone calls, assorted eco activism on the web, making potting mix, planting plants, riddling compost, collecting compostables, building another layer on the heap, seems like a good active day.

During the evening I told all my German friends about the forthcoming screenings of The Age of Stupid in German, had a discussion about vaccination and immunisation on facebook, stimulated by my delight that Andrew Wakefield has been struck off the Medical Register for unethical practices, and played a bit of Scrabble... and washed up, and washed and blanched grapes ready for drying into raisins.

Oh, and watched the Community Channel on Freeview to see assorted Age of Stupid stuff. Which as usual had me in tears. Wonderful, still!

A pretty quiet day in many ways. I did a lot of housework and some work on the computer, sliced up two pineapples and 8 kiwi fruit for drying, and did some compost heap management, a bit of chainsawing, some riddling, and bagging up of the clay soil from the wall excavations. Oh, and I installed this year's bean poles, some rescued long branches which I decided not to chop for firewood, as I thought ahead to their possible use.

I went to the Co-op in the afternoon, as Gill asked me to, and popped into a friend who is preparing to conquer her alcoholism, she hopes! I'm going to give her some support next week when she starts going through her detox. She will need a lot of strength and good luck. I went to the Co-op shop and then decided to go and visit Freshways... I didn't go yesterday which is when they do a big stock rotation and throw out an average of 40kg of fruit and veg. So I went there and picked it up (they'd put it round the back) and met a friendly student called Geeta, whom I know from the People and Planet Allotment. She'd gone to Freshways to buy candles... so I said, "I can give you some if you want.... as I've got bags of them in the loft, left over from assorted skip-diving."

So she came back and I found about 10 different candles for her and then took her on a tour down the garden to see the trees (all in bloom and at their prettiest) the Shiitake mushrooms, and the composting and recycling, etc. I think she enjoyed the visit. I enjoyed her visit, it feels good to give stuff unexpectedly!

An equally quiet evening. Tea was foraged sweet chestnuts (dried one Autumn, and then soaked and boiled), home grown Shiitake, rescued onion, and a bought tomato all cooked up together, with a toastie with blue cheese and black olive paste in it. Tasty stuff! Also had a nice Googletalk conversation with my Canadian friend/colleague Rory and made plans for a visit next month to Manchester, for the Spencer Tunick exhibition and the World Naked Bike Ride.

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.

Before I left Sheffield I met up with my sister in law Katie, who had found some clothing belonging to our youngest... easiest to meet up and hand it over rather than to post it.

I used the train journey back to do another bout of email deletions, so my inbox is over 200 emails lighter now.

When I got home I popped up the road to see if our youngest, who was playing with a friend, wanted to come home and play here... but he was happy there. I came back and went online and sent all the emails I wrote on the train and last night, and sorted out various things. Gill and our eldest came in, and I lit the stove to get hot water for washing up, and went outside to do a little bit of stacking.

After tea, I sorted out a potato sack full of cables I'd collected from skips over the past few months... I cut off the outer casing, revealing the two or sometimes three insulated inner wires and often a single uninsulated copper wire. Gill wound up this naked wire round her hand or fingers, depending on the gauge of the wire. When I'd stripped the whole sack of electrical flex, I started on the inner wires, pulling the wire over a blade and revealing the copper underneath. I then passed this to Gill who removed the metal from the plastic, and after an hour, we ended up with several kilos of lovely shiny wound-up copper wire, and a lot of waste plastic insulation. I now have a couple of carrier-bags of copper wire... I'll need to take them to the metal merchant soon. Far better than this stuff going to landfill.. and this method of stripping the wire gives a very clean metal, and no emissions. Some people put the cables on a fire, burning off the plastic, which obviously results in lots of nasty pollution.

Later still, I did a bit more fruit drying... more pears and a pineapple. Good to stop these going into landfill too!