Monday 6th September 10

A good day, partly as I had a deadline thrust upon me and I work well facing a deadline. But that was later. During the morning, I did some garden work, not much, but some. I composed a letter after lunch, to Kersten England, the Returning Officer for the City of York Council, and asked for a by election to be held in our Ward, as Roger Pierce the excellent Councillor has resigned. The other Councillor is nowhere to be seen, so effectively we have no representation in the Ward, which is a bad situation to be in and we need an election. Gill wrote a letter too, as to call an election, you need two electors to call it. I spoke to the Election Officer and he told me the date of the election and gave me nomination papers. I then popped into the Press and told them I'd just called the election. Exciting!

So, during the afternoon, the chair of the Environment Forum told me he was doing the mailout at 6 and could I have the incinerator report ready by then. This concentrated my mind and I took myself upstairs away from the distractions and wrote the report. I used the report written by Carole Green as a template, and massaged it and added to it, so now this document, about the Forum's response to the Allerton 'Waste Recovery Park' , is ready to be debated and then, probably after more alterations, adopted.

I had a Macaroni cheese tea with home grown cherry tomatoes exploding hotly in my mouth.

Then there was a LETS meeting at 7.30, and it was just me and Melody; we had a lively conversation and left the Seahorse at 8.20. I collected a pile of weeds from the Edible York public bed and then a pile of 10 plastic crates for the Abundance crew after that. The boys and mum were watching some sort of Dr. Who-based thing so I stayed outside and stacked some logs in the dark. I wanted to get these dry logs under cover before the predicted rain came, which it did.

Then I came in and settled down to watch the promo-copy DVD of No Impact Man, so I have something to think about before the screening tomorrow, and the Q+A afterwards. It is an excellent film, a documentary about the year-long experiment. I enjoyed it, and was right, 'No Impact' is not literally true. For instance, at one point the family decides to do away with electricity in their home. So they use candles for lighting, and a cool box instead of a fridge. The cool box is kept cool using a neighbour's ice cubes (impact!) and candles are made from fossil paraffin wax (fossil CO2 emission impact). BUT, the really good thing about the project is that millions of profligate Americans (and now, Brits) are exposed to the idea of reducing/eliminating their impact, and may, just may follow suit and do something positive re our shared environment.

Later, one of my New Zealand relatives sent me a link to a load of photos of the Christchurch earthquake, and I spent an hour looking through them. Amazing stuff! Glad no-one was killed.