Saturday 23rd August 08

My eldest son's birthday, so was woken by Gill asking me to wake up as he wanted to open his present from us, which was, as requested, a radio-controlled tarantula which he'd seen in the Anti-Gravity shop. So he wasn't surprised but was happy... I fitted the batteries and they both played quite happily with it for a while.

The post came and it was the latest edition of the Community Composting Network's magazine 'The Growing Heap' which I proceeded to read cover to cover... it's always riveting and never long enough! Their AGM is in a few weeks and once again it's on a weekend when I'm working, such a drag. I would REALLY love to attend this event sometime but it won't be this year, as I'm in Preston entertaining new recruits to the University.

During the day I got an email from an American email discussion list called 'Compost Digest' which I subscribe to (managed by the US Composting Council) and there was a message with a link to this, saying that the first sentence was just the best first sentence in any piece introducing composting:
http://www.grist.org/advice/how/2008/08/19/?source=most_popular and I totally agree!
If you want to subscribe to Compost Digest, send an email message with subject or body 'help' to compost-request@mailman.cloudnet.com or, via the web:
http://mailman.cloudnet.com:80/mailman/listinfo/compost.

Our birthday boy had a visitor, a lad in the year below him, but less than a year younger and they get on very well (as we do with his parents!) and the three of them spent the whole day playing happily, and they had a late tea after which the birthday boy and I cycled him back home, picking up a good pile of logs on the way from the usual free logpile place, now seriously depleted!

I did some chainsawing today in an attempt to try and tidy up the front garden. Also, when I logged into Facebook, found that Scrabulous had gone... the owners of Scrabble have finally got to the UK Facebook users, so I spent some time posting various bits and bobs on the several pages devoted to saving Scrabulous, and sent an email to Mattel the UK owners.

Late in the evening Gill and I had a good game of Scrabble... on the board, not on our laptops (there are several online versions, but not on Facebook) and fairly predictably, I won. Gill says it's because I've been getting loads of practice with Scrabulous... but no more...