Monday 7 December 2009

Monday 7th December 09

Up before 8.30 in case the builders came whilst Gill was taking our youngest to school... and they walked down as he's achy and bruised from falling over at the ice rink last night.

The plumber, Lee, working with Harris Builders arrived at 8.30 and started checking through the various boxes and packages which have arrived from Solartwin. He found that the large box which contained the cylinder part of the system had been bashed and had a damaged corner. However, this is, I hope, cosmetic damage and is the result of inadequate packaging and mishandling. Although I'm not a fan of excess packaging, it has a purpose... protection... and in this case, some extra polystyrene or thick card on each corner would have protected the contents better. I wonder if we'll get any money back for this?

Fortunately the huge panel was in perfect condition, and all the other bits and bobs seemed to have arrived. Lee's brother Andy arrived and they worked harmoniously til after 5, but they just did the internal work. Tomorrow morning the panel will be hoisted up to the roof and fixed in. I don't think they fancied it in the rain.

I spent the whole day at the house, making sure the chaps were well dosed with tea and anything else they needed. I chopped up another load of apples for drying and did a wash up and made another batch of tomato soup on the woodstove, this time with a slice of pumpkin whizzed up into it. I also started building the logpile on the right hand side of the front door, looking out. With both stoves going now, we are getting through the logs really quickly.

So, pasties and soup for tea... the soup was delicious.

At 7pm I got myself ready to go down to the Seahorse to attend the last LETS core group meeting of the year, and the social and trading afterwards. The meeting was very well attended, probably because of the social. The funniest thing was that Rakesh brought loads of goodies to trade and this generated quite a bit of excitement and more trading than the core group meetings have seen over the whole year... I think anyhow! We did have a short meeting and I took minutes and will write them up. I was pleased to chat with Jini, whom I've not got to know before now. So, an enjoyable meeting and I brought back some interesting edibles.

I got home soon after 10.30 and watched Newsnight which had reports from Copenhagen, and wrote up the YiT emails from last night.

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