Monday 9th November 09

Woken by anti-school noise but children did go to school.

However, this got me up and I did some moving of broken bricks from our shared driveway down to where the wall/fence is going to be built.

Pauline rang following an email conversation over the past few days and I agreed to go round today and pick up the Freecycle-request credit card holder she has found for me, and to help her with her wooding. So I got 3 sacks of logs together as this is my 'traditional' seasonal gift to her, loaded up my trailer and cycled round for 12.30.

I helped her stack the logs in her outhouse and then used her bow saw to chop a few bits of wood for her Clearview Stove, and brute force to smash up an old chair she found in a skip.

This didn't take long and at just after 1pm I had my sandwiches and Pauline made me a coffee, and we caught up on assorted news. I didn't stay too long as I had to go to the Building Society to put in a cheque from the weekend and take out a big cheque to pay off the last of our Council Tax, which I then went to pay. I cycled back via Country Fresh where I met some fairly old people trying to ineffectively break up a pallet outside the shop. They were happy to accept some help... and I showed them how to do it, by slamming the pallet down on one corner and then on another corner til it falls apart... which i was very glad it did, because it made me look like a veteran pallet smasher (which of course I am!!). Picked up two sacks worth of compostable items and some dryable ones too... includung four 'dragon fruit' which are very expensive and weird, not brilliant to eat but do make an interesting addition to a bag of dried fruit. I'm now thinking ahead to the LETS event in December where I'm going to do a very large number of bags of fruit, and try to do a bit of a clearout.

Got home in reasonable time to load up two of my tumblers with a load of stuff.

For tea I had a veg stew that Gill had done on the woodstove plus half the last slice of quiche and three slices of roast squash. Very filling!

At 8pm there was a meeting at the Yorkshire Terrier on Stonegate to do some planning for the Towards Carfree Cities Conference. This is going to be the 9th international conference run by the World Carfree Network, and it is to be at the end of June 2010 in York. My friend and Green Festival colleague Randall is heading this up (he's been involved in this organisation since their first conference) and Ivana and Richard met in Prague whilst working in the Carbusters office, as far as I gather. I also met Graham Titchener from Cycling City York and Andy from my favourite cycle shop, Cycle Heaven. I think I'll be doing some volunteering with this event, although I don't know exactly what yet.

Home at nearly 11pm, went straight onto the computer to sort out emails and record a good day.