Human Lifestyle

Not a bad day, on the whole.  I didn't get up that late but had a slow start to the day, and watched a bit of Politics Show and started doing the hazelnuts which have sat in a bucket long enough, and needed to be processed.

After lunch, I got a phone call from Freshways who had a bag of wilted herbs for me, so I collected them.  When I got back I noticed that the sacks and bags of aluminium cans I'd put at the front ready to take to the metal merchant had gone.  I asked Gill if she'd moved them but she hadn't.  So, they'd been taken, stolen, and someone else had got about £20 worth of aluminium.  The only consolation was that I know that they will be recycled, and won't be going to landfill.

Then I decided to go down to the Get Cycling show in Rowntree Park, and I called in on Country Fresh on the way there.  The Festival of Cycling was excellent.  I first looked in at the fixed stage area, where there were a lot of different unusual bikes available, and a queue of mainly families with children waiting to ride them round and round.  It looked like a lot of fun.

Then I cycled round to the main field, which had stalls round a couple of the edges and a big jump-landing bag on another, with a ramp and stunt riders demonstrating different types of jump.  On the concreted area in front of the toilet block was a toddlers cycling circuit.  Then there was a the cycle powered Scalextrix and in the basketball court, a tricycle recumbent racing circuit. 

There were the usual burger vans, ice cream vans and inflatable slide and bouncy thing.  The whole park was full of children with their parents. It had rained briefly earlier but whilst I was there it was sunny.  I met quite a few people I knew, including someone who gave me feedback about their experience of last weekend's Peace Festival.  They told a story of a particular Council Officer who had attended the event and made themselves a real nuisance, behaving in a completely unacceptable and unprofessional manner.  Amazingly, this person was not even supposed to be there in any official capacity.  However, the good news is that this person, who made life difficult for me whilst doing the Green Festival, may be retiring next year.  Maybe I should organise a festival to celebrate their going? 

As I cycled home, over Millennium Bridge and through the Stray, it rained briefly again, but not enough to make me want to cycle any faster.  I found a dead fallen tree, about 6 or 7 metres long, and it found itself attached to the back of my trailer, and I dragged it home.

I didn't do much more work outside after this, just picking up windfalls and putting a bit of shop waste  resources in a tumbler.  I helped Gill in the kitchen too, cooking some courgette and some slices of tromboncino squash, and mushrooms, to go with her pasta dish.

During the evening I finished the hazelnut job part one... removing the nuts from their frilly leaf-like sheaths.  This resulted in 5 envelopes of hazelnuts, which are now ready for cracking and rendering edible.  What a job!  I fully understand automation, but in the spirit of self sufficiency and low carbon living, I'm doing it by hand.  And anyway, it's only a couple of kilos!  Took me an hour or so.

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.