Monday 18 May 2009

Monday 18th May 09

I woke with a phone call from Thomson Directories AGAIN pestering me for payment for advertising. I am unsure what this invoice is for, as I already sent them a cheque earlier this year. I rang Thomson directories back to find out what the two cheques were for and got nowhere. I rang my Building Society to see if the previous cheque had been cashed, and was told that someone would get back to me by the close of the day. They didn't.

However, I had a couple of things to do in town, and called in to Cycle Heaven to ask about tightening my disc brakes. I left my bike with them and walked into town, and when I got back less than an hour later, I was told that it had seized up slightly and they'd tightened it up, but the next time it needed adjusting, I'd need replacement brake pads. Disc brakes are good, they are not wearing out my wheel rims like with previous bikes (I needed to replace my rims every other year) but the downside is that the replacement thingy inside the brake is about £15 a pop, more expensive than brake blocks!

Anyway, came home via Country Fresh (one box) and Freshways (two sacks) and within these there were two pineapples, so Gill made an upside-down pineapple cake... slices of prepared pineapple in the base of a cake tin, and sponge cake mixture on top of this. 6 minutes in the microwave and voila! A cake! A delicious cake!

I had some time potting up tomato plants in their final position in big planters in the conservatory, using home-made potting medium. Very satisfying. I had an early tea, just sandwiches, as I was going out to two talks with no time for tea between them.

The first, at 5.30, was the Professor John Whitelegg Inaugural Lecture about designing a zero-carbon transport system. This was in the Physics department at the University of York. The lecture was streamed and recorded, and I'll put a link to the recording when I find it! It was an excellent lecture, and I like John Whitelegg's enthusiasm and delivery. This finished at just after 6.30, and I skipped wine and nibbles to cycle swiftly over to the Priory St Centre to see another Stockholm Environment Institute researcher, Andreas Heinemeyer, give a talk to the Co-op Members Group. I know Andreas reasonably well, but I've never seen him present a 'Transition' style talk. He was very animated and injected lots of humour, I really loved the way he delivered the information. I stayed for the meeting afterwards and spoke to the item on York Green Festival receiving funding, and put in two items of AOB, one on York Credit Union becoming Yorkshire Credit Union and one on the Transition Picnic.

Cycled home, arriving for 10pm, and had a bowl of pineapple cake and cold custard whilst watching the news. Had a chat with Ali on the phone about her creative writing which she wanted me to read and hear.

Got a lot of writing to do this evening... still!

Blog page view counter (from Bravenet) went past 10,000 since September last year. I'm amazed!

1 comment:

Greg said...

The York lecture sounds interesting. As for disc brakes, I had some once and while the brake pads may cost a bit more than brake blocks,I did find that the pads themselves also wore out much less quickly.