Tuesday 2nd March 10

I took my youngest nearly all the way to school... he walked the last bit alone and I cycled slowly back, stopping to pick up quite a few aluminium cans for the metal merchant, steel cans for the kerbside recycling, and several bits of wood for processing into stove fodder. I also found a large clump of edible mushrooms which I picked. I went straight on to the chemist on Tang Hall Lane to get assorted over the counter medications. I'm getting more headaches than normal, I think it's stress.

I spent an hour on the computer, and was happy to be of use to a friend up in Scotland who is in the middle of launching a bicycle-powered delivery service, and wanted help with a letter to go out to potential customers. I was able to partly re-write the letter to make it read a bit better. This help was appreciated.

Gill went into town on the bus, and I did quite a bit of sorting out in the front garden, chopping up treestumps and some sticks, stacking, cleaning out the stove ash pans, and washing up, the endless washing up.

But it was nice to be working outside in the sunshine, but the remainder of the day went all too quickly.

After 4pm I loaded my trailer up with 3 paper potato sacks of drinks cartons, all squashed and mostly packed inside each other, and an old toaster I found in a skip, and went to the Hazel Court Civic Amenity Site, where I never know if I'm going to be waved in with a smile, ignored, or confronted and told that cyclists aren't allowed in, and I have to explain that I'm choosing to ignore that stupid rule and I will kick up a HUGE fuss if I'm prevented from using the recycling services. This time, I was ignored on the way in and when a chap walked towards me whilst I was pushing cartons into the carton bank, he was just loading a dead neon tube into the neon tube recycling area, and he was friendly and didn't comment on my mode of transport. I put the toaster in the WEEE area and unloaded some batteries, and left, with no hassle whatsoever. Great!

I then went on to Country Fresh and got assorted fruit and veg for a very reasonable price, and loaded two bags of compostables into the trailer for recycling.

The rest of the day was reasonably quiet... Tea was pizza, with a large pile of Velvet Shank mushrooms I picked this morning on a tree stump between school and home. After this, I was tired and went for a lie down after taking a large can of water up for our youngest to have a bath. I went to check the temperature of the solar heated water in the loft, as I ran the hot tap as well as the stove-heated water, and the tank thermometer was reading 59 Celcius, which is warm enough to bypass the boiler. Excellent! I must find the commissioning certificate and set up the system with Good Energy for our HOT ROCS credits. Life is hectic and I'm disorganised, and I don't know where the certificate has gone.

I dozed from 7.30 til 8.30 but was woken by shouting. Homework. I came down and hovered around, and things calmed down. I half-watched Horizon but didn't concentrate much on it as I was feeling depressed. Life is tough at the moment. We will work through this and hopefully things will be easier in the future. Parenting is very hard work.