Thursday 22nd April 10

Another good day. I got up at 8.30 and did assorted things around the house, and Gill went to the GP as she's had a very painful foot for months and months. She has often wondered if she has broken a bone in there.

I washed up. I found a way to get the solar hot water through without the boiler kicking in. Firstly I checked the temperature on the tank in the loft... the incoming temperature from the solar panel was 80 degrees Celsius. So this was hot enough to bypass the boiler and be mixed down with cold water to a reasonable temperature for it to come out of the tap. But we don't think the system is working properly, as when we turn the hot tap on, even with the tank so hot, the boiler goes on. I need to contact the installers to get this checked. So what I did was to turn the hot tap on with a low flow, too low a flow to make the boiler kick in. A few litres later (water for the Papyrus plant!) the water ran warm, enough to do the pots, pans, plates and cutlery. I was very pleased. When Gill came in she said she'd been having showers like that for a while! I checked the temperature afterwards, back up in the loft, and despite the sun still shining fully on the panel, it had gone down to 76, proving that some of the hot water in the tank had been replaced by cold. Result!

I went to the bread shop and got two small loaves and six bags of rolls and some Danish pastries and some flapjack offcuts... all for £4. That's the beauty of Yesterbake!

On the way back I couldn't help seeing several builders vans outside a house, which was having a huge log cabin built in the back garden. There were loads of offcuts already available, actually I think it was packing wood.. as the planks were fixed to steel bands, fortunately easy to pull off the planks, so I asked the builders and they were very happy to see the stuff go. I took one trailer load before lunch and at about 2pm, went to pick up a second load. There were also a vast quantity of thin slivers of wood, again, something to do with the packing, so I brought those home too, and I broke each one of those into about 4 pieces and popped them into a sack... I got 5 potato sacks full of kindling. Excellent. They also said I was welcome to have the pallets.

When our youngest came in from school he had a friend with him and we all chatted together about the things they have done, as he's been on a special day up at Manor School and seen a video about electrocution, and not playing on the railways, and various other things. Apparently it was 'pretty random'.

I dug out about half of the metal-sided compost bin into the builders sack. I riddled another sack of mature compost dug out of the builders bag yesterday. I had a lot of interest from some robins, and I put a small yellow centipede on the palm of my hand and held it out... and one of the robins came and pecked it off my hand. Hand-feeding robins! Lovely!

I had fried egg sandwiches for tea. We have more eggs than we need, some out of date ones, so I used those.

Later I finished breaking up the kindling and watched the politicians debate on BBC2 after it had gone out on Sky which we don't have. I think they are all grey parties. None of them inspire me. Caroline Lucas inspires me. I will be voting Green.