Sunday 17th January 10

A very odd night. I'd had a headache most of the previous day and so before bed time I went looking for a paracetamol. There was one left and I usually take two. Gill suggested having that plus an aspirin so I took both. Then I just couldn't get to sleep, just lay there from about 2am til 4am with my mind quite active but body tired and reasonably still, just listening to the sounds of Gill sleeping next to me and other noises. At 4am I gave up and came downstairs to say hello to the silverfish and spend some time on the computer. I heard Gill get up at 6am as she usually does, to go to the loo so I went upstairs to go to bed.

Later, when I'd had about 5 hours sleep, generally all I need, I came downstairs at 11am and Gill told me she knew why I'd not slept earlier... the aspirin she gave me had caffeine with it. I'm very sensitive to this, and ephedrine (in some decongestants) as I've had this happen before and realised the following day. But as long as I get a few hours sleep I'm all right.

So I had breakfast at lunchtime and then went outside as it was a lovely day, and the boys were playing with their friend who lives just up the road with a radio-controlled car, driving it over some ramps. To ensure fair play, I did some work in the front of the house... I had actually wanted to continue doing the compost heap I'm digging out but it was more sensible to stay near the children to intervene if anything needed adult intervention. But it didn't, and I was even allowed a single go with the car. But the play lasted less than an hour as the batteries started giving out, and I took the shredded pine stuff from yesterday down the garden and continued to dig out the big 1 cubic metre pallet heap which will be refilled very soon with all the materials I collected over the snowy time... quite a lot, and much of it will be composting away in it's boxes and sacks already. It won't be as pleasant a job as my normal composting activities.

When it was too dark to see what I was doing I came in and helped one of my sons with some homework and had a 'use it up' tea which included a bread-and-butter pudding which used up some spare bread thrown out by Freshways. I'll post a recipe to that soon, when I'm not typing away at 2am.

Lots of email traffic today for some reason. Spent a lot of time writing a couple of posts for this website: http://forum.homemadelife.com/ which I like as it covers lots of subjects I hold dear. My e-friend 'Compostwoman' invited me to join. Some of the emails were all the replies on the forum, each of which generated it's own email. Grrrr, should switch them off!