Tuesday 28th December 10

Another late lie in... I'm going nocturnal, as is usual when I'm not forced to get up at a sensible time.  However, I had a busy day.  I went to the Co-op to get cereal and marmalade... Gill cannot live without Seville marmalade, apparently!  But the Tang Hall Lane Co-op didn't have the crunchy cereal that I like, so I went to the Hull Road Co-op, which did.  I popped in on Debbie, who was not yet a Grandma.

A bit later Gill said she was going to go to Marks and Spencer in town to spend her £40 voucher given to her by her sister Linda; yesterday she'd spotted that they had a DAB radio which would enable her to get Radio 7 which has various things on which she'd like to listen to. I said that instead of her buying yet another bus ticket, I'd cycle down and get it.   BUT I wanted to see if there was an energy efficient digital radio, as I'm aware they use quite a bit more power than analogue radios.  So I found this page about DAB radios, and this list of energy efficient DAB radios. Fortunately it had one of the models Gill had seen yesterday in M+S, a PURE ONE Mini, for £45. This only uses 2w when in use, and 0.8w when just left plugged in.  Obviously when unplugged or switched off at the wall, it uses no power!

So I cycled down to Country Fresh and bought a bit of fruit and veg, and picked up a small box of compostables. From here I went on to town, handed over Gill's voucher card and a fiver and within 30 minutes was back home.  Gill was delighted.  Now all she needs to do is to learn how to use it!

At about tea time we got a text message from Debbie; her son had become a father to a little boy, so Debbie's a Granny!  She'll be over the moon!

Gill was putting a load of washing on in the washing machine in the conservatory, and said she could hear running water in there.  But nothing was obvious.  Later, she heard it again and suggested I go and check the studio, which has a flush toilet and my compost toilet.  I found that a pipe had burst in the freeze and was now flowing freely into the little room which has both the (unused) flush loo and my commode which is the 'business end' of my compost toilet set-up.  I switched off the stop tap which is in there and spent an hour clearing up, pulling up the carpet, moving stuff, and by 11pm had put the dehumidifyer in there to start it drying out.  What a bummer.  However, this will force us to declutter in there, which it desperately needs. I know we're not the only people with burst pipes, and we're lucky it's in an outbuilding.