Saturday 9th July 11,

Up early as had an outstanding job to do, to take the cooked cherries and separate the flesh from the stones.  I decided to try to do it using a sieve and wooden spoon.  This meant I got a good lot of cherry juice and some solids, and some flash/stone mix, the stones I extracted manually when I became aware of them, but I didn't have time to remove all of the stones.  I froze an ice-cream tub full of cherry juice and a bag of flesh with a few stones left in it.   Obviously the pile of extracted stones will get composted.

By this time it was midday and I'm due to go to Manchester because tomorrow I'm at the wonderful Disability Awareness Day.

So, time to go offline and get my Fiddlesticks kit together and get down to the station!!!

I got to the station with all my clobber in the trailer and bought a ticket to Stockport.  I got a train in about 5 minutes... lucky!

Met a nice granny on the way over to Huddersfield, and after that read my NewScientist and was soon in Manchester Victoria.  Headed straight over to Night and Day, was pleased to see Sean, Swin, Laura and Colin, Robert, and later Simon and Ian arrived.  I had a mocha and enjoyed chatting.

People started drifting away at 5 so I went back to Piccadilly with Colin, Laura getting a ride on his wheelchair.  I then took the train out to Stockport, where Janie said she'd meet me.  I was very pleased to see her again, it's been a long time.  Her son was waiting at home and it was good to see him too; we get on well.  Her older son and husband Mark were in Cardiff, supposed to be having a game of blind cricket, but they'd got there and it had been rained off.

I had a bowl of soup, really nice carrot and borlotti bean, and then, helped by the younger son, cut their hedge with the electric hedge trimmers.  Janie finds this quite difficult as the machine is a bit unwieldy, and Mark finds it a bit difficult as he's blind.  So I was happy to do it for them.

Janie went to the station to pick up Mark and their eldest, and when we'd settled down for half an hour, Janie and I walked into Marple to get some drinks.  On the way back I suggested looking in a supermarket bin... and there were large numbers of packets of frozen fish fillets and breaded chicken fingers.  We filled Janie's bag with enough to fill her freezer.  I love being a Freegan, even if it's not the sort of stuff I eat!  Miles better than landfill....

So, then had 2 bottles of pear cider and some good chats with Mark and family, and relatively early to bed, and was able to borrow a desktop computer to do my blog and play a bit of Scrabble before sleeping.