Saturday 6th November 10

A funny day for our 11th Wedding Anniversary!  I slept for 9 hours, woken by Gill at 11am, with a phone call from Candy, offering to come and look at the bathroom lights for us.  So she said she'd come round at 1pm, with her son who is friends with ours. 

So, after breakfast (!) Candy arrived and after a coffee, she came up to the bathroom and when I got a stepladder tall enough, and turned off the upstairs lighting main, she extracted the existing halogen downlighters, and told us the good news, they are the sort which run off the normal 240 volt supply; there are no transformers to 12 volt bulbs.  This was good as she had with her two new Supalite Mini GU10 7 Watt lamps, which replace the 60W halogen GU10s which gobble up the power, wasting most of it as heat. This will save us quite a bit of electricity in the long run... we don't spend a long time in the bathroom, but over the years, the savings will mount up.

Candy had bought these lamps for between £9 and £10 each, for use in her own house, but I think they were surplus to requirements.  We gave her £20 for them, and an old brass and cast iron kitchen balance which we were going to freecycle or take to a charity shop, and she was really happy to be given that.  She stayed with us as her lad was enjoying the company of our two plus another of their friends, and she chatted to me as I made a log wall, and a bit later, as I filled sacks with the last of the leafmould collected in 2009.  She was happy to spend the afternoon with us as her husband was with a friend, and showing her round the City walls as a touristy experience.

Later on, after tea, our boys had another visitor and he stayed til after 9pm.  I listened to Tracey Smith's Slow Down and Green Up show and did the washing up.

Later, I went out on my bike to collect leaves for the recently emptied leafmould enclosure.  I have a good way of doing this... using my Wellington boot-clad foot I scrape up a load of leaves from the gutter by riding fast towards the leafy gutter, and then putting my boot into it, aiming to get a large pile by the time I come to a stop.  So I collected 9 bin-bags full... and then went to pick up a trailer load of hazel logs too, getting in at half ten.

I had a bath and washed my hair, as I'm working tomorrow and want to look clean.