Wednesday 4th January 12

Woke fairly late, and had a good chat with a friend who's in a pretty desperate situation.  There's nothing I can do to help, really, apart from listening and being sympathetic.  Lots of this person's friends are offering advice and ideas and these don't help as the person is unable to make any decisions or change their situation.  It all makes me very sad as I'm very fond of them. I hope to go and visit sometime soon.

I didn't get a lot done today really... the only 'things' on were to go to Country Fresh towards 4pm to take some of the last fruit and veg, as today is the last trading day before it closes, and then to take our eldest to Cafe Scientifique in the evening.  I did do mountains of washing up, finished making the soup I started last night, and nearly finished making the passata - stewed, whizzed, sieved tomatoes.

However, I made the trip to Country Fresh into a circular journey, by going via Hazel Court recycling centre to put a load of drinks cartons into the carton bank, some low energy lightbulbs in the CFL barrel, some iron nails etc out of the stove grates into the metal skip, and a load of small plastic bottles in the plastic bottle bank.

Seeing Country Fresh was sad... I've enjoyed my relationship with them for nearly 10 years, helping to reduce the amount they've had to send to landfill.

Wednesday 14th September 11

Well a good day... spent the morning with our eldest son who was off school, watching a really interesting video, explaining how to understand annual percentage growth rates and the exponential curve.  We both really enjoyed it, and I feel it is an important concept to understand if you class yourself as 'green', or use the word 'sustainable', or enjoy a bit of maths, or are involved in public policy.  It renewed my belief in having a zero growth economy.  It is truly the only way we're going to get through the next few decades.  It also features the work of one of my favourite oil scientists, M. King Hubbert.

I'm looking for resources with which to illustrate my Cafe Scientifique presentation on 5th October, which is titled 'Climate Change, Peak Oil, Sex and Death'.  I need to make a Linux equivalent of a 'powerpoint' and I'm not too sure how to do it....

In the evening I visited Helen and Phil round the corner to talk them through using the apple press which has found it's way from Brunswick Organic Nursery to its next group who want to use it.  They are getting together with a few friends and want to make cider.

Wednesday 1st June 11

A good day, with a reasonably late start but once I'd got going, I got quite busy in the garden for a short time.

However, I had a decision to make... I need to go to Brunswick Organic Nursery, town to pay David's cheque in, pay my cheque in, pick up from Richard, take 3 sacks of clothes to a charity shop and go and buy a second pair of shorts from the Woodlands shop... Gill bought one pair yesterday and they fit perfectly, and there was a second pair there which Gill suggested I might like... or need...

So... I took the clothes to the Woodlands MS Respite shop and bought the shorts, for £1.50.  Then zoomed down to the Council office to pay David's cheque in.  Then to my Building Society to pay my cheque in.  Then via the lemon stall (donation of lemon halves) to Country Fresh where I did a little bit of shopping and loaded up my trailer and pannier rack with biodegradables. I came home and took some of the stuff down to the current heap.

I decided that there wasn't time to go to Brunswick, so I'll do that tomorrow.  After tea I walked to town with our eldest to attend the monthly Cafe Scientifique, which was a short talk from Professor Jonathan Reece, on various aspects of the subject of skin.  It included a bit about the genetics of skin and hair colour, and the way that DNA analysis allows us to see where people came from and where they travelled after leaving Africa.  A bit about sweating and body hair.  Quite a bit about UV radiation and skin damage, Vitamin D production and more.  It wasn't the best talk we've been to but it was still worth going.

Graham delivered the megaphone and walkie talkies to City Screen and I picked them up after the talk, and my son and I had some good conversations on the way home.

When I arrived home, Tony rang and we discussed the latest developments re the World Naked Bike Ride on Saturday.  I then wrote a letter to a participant who had contacted us, and did a variety of other bits and bobs. 

Wednesday 4th May 11

Woken by my eldest who had knocked something onto the floor in the kitchen and it had smashed, so I gingerly found the broom and swept it up into a tidy pile which allowed breakfast activities to continue safely.

After I'd had my breakfast I dealt with a range of paperwork and admin type things, and at about midday, went to see if Debbie would be able to help do the eve-of-poll Green Party leaflet round which we often do together. She wasn't well so I did the round myself.  It only took an hour but then I had a long chat with my physicist friend Adrian about political matters.

After lunch I went round to Debbie's again and asked if she'd got her broken key replaced.  She hadn't as she's been unwell for a few days, so I offered to get the key replaced, if I could.  I went to town to the station to pick up the tickets I bought over the net, one set to go to Bristol this weekend and another set to go down to the Little Green Gathering in July. This is the first time I've got tickets out of a machine.

From here I went to the Credit Union to pick up a cheque to pay for this term at the Steiner School, and I cycled there and paid it in, plus cash to make up the full amount.

I then cycled back with our youngest and once home, popped round to the fix it shop on Lilac Avenue, who do keys.  They were able to put the two halves of the broken key in their machine and cut a new one.  I went back to Debbie's and it fitted, and she was delighted.

As I returned from her, John Bibby was about to unload another job-lot of wood.... some oak fencing, some tree roots, and other bits of tree.  A big messy pile.  It will need a lot of sorting out.  However, it is free heating and would have been burned in a bonfire, or taken to a landfill site, so I'm relatively happy to have it.

I spent an hour doing the smallest bits, cutting twigs from branches and breaking up small lengths of fence plank.  There are some much sturdier timbers to contend with, next week when I have more time.

Gill made a simple pasta tea and then at 6.45 I set out, on foot, with our eldest son, to town to attend the Cafe Scientifique meeting at City Screen, which tonight was all about food and flavours, with a Professor from the University of Hull called John Bradley.  He started with a bit about how the tongue senses tastes and how the olfactory epithelium deals with aromas and fragrances. Because these signals end up in the Hippocampus, there is a connection between emotions and smell, memory and smell, and it's even been found that people with a reduced sense of smell are more prone to depression.  He explained about herbs and spices and volatile molecules, and then the exciting subject of chirality, the way that some molecules are left handed and the same molecule can be right handed.  This has some profound effects on odour molecules... limonene smells like lemons with one enantiomer (shape of molecule) and of oranges with the mirror-image enantiomer. However, another molecule smells like passion fruit with one and like burning rubber with it's mirror image.  Fascinating.  He then finished with a look at combining flavours, such as carrot and coriander (although I prefer carrot and tarragon), caramelised cauliflower and cocoa, banana and parsley.

Following a question and discussion session, we walked home, getting in at about 10pm... a really lovely and interesting night out, with good conversation with my son, especially on the way back.

Lit the stove when I got in and did some more dried fruit and washing up.

Wednesday 5th January 11

I got up early as it was the first day of term and I had to be around to help.  However, our youngest decided to not try going back to Archbishop Holgate's, and will therefore start a two week trial at the Steiner School next Monday. 

However, as we had not had a reply from the Head, I wrote a letter to him asking him if he'd had it, and if so, he had anything to say about the issues.  I hand delivered this.  Later, we got a phone call saying they hadn't received the first letter.  Gill rang the LEA, and they had been sent a Fax of it, so there are obviously major communication breakdowns at that school.  We'll be invited to an interview there next week, apparently.   I am very angry with the way our children have been treated, and I'm not going to back down and accept that it was all a big mistake.  I believe that the school are denying that they have a problem with bullying as if they admitted to it, they'd be obliged to do something about it.  And that's tough, in a culture which likes bullying behaviour and condones the belittling of people.

So both boys were at home and working, reading, and had a quiet and sedentary day.

I went on the HMRC website and submitted my tax returns.  It took a couple of hours, but ended up with a calculation with them owing me 25 pence.  My earnings have gone right down, so this is the first year I've not had to pay tax for well over a decade.

Got a booking for a Charity Cabaret for mainly retired and elderly folks in February, in Fulford.  Should be interesting... I'll adapt my Woodlands MS Respite Care Centre show for them! 

I made soup for tea... pumpkin and parsnip, as suggested by my dear mother who left a comment on yesterday's post.  I was considering soup but was also considering a nutloaf.  Nutloaf tomorrow... will contain some soup!

At about 6.30, I set off walking into town with our eldest son, to attend the Cafe Scientifique at City Screen.  The talk was by Tim Clarke, from the Department of Electronics at the University of York, and was called 'Control: A Fundamental For Life and Living'.  He's a control engineer, and gave lots of interesting examples of different sorts of controls... from genetic controls with genes being switched on and off, biological controls in homeostasis, keeping our body temperature constant, and biochemical controls, such as insulin and it's role in the management of blood sugar.  It was quite an unusual talk, very wide ranging, from inverted pendulums to flocks of birds through to robots.  For instance, check out this video of the Big Dog Robot.  Really amazing.  At one stage, Tim wanted a volunteer from the audience to demonstrate something, and as there were no other volunteers, I put my hand up.  What he wanted me to do was to balance a stick on my hand... he couldn't have chosen a better person to use, as I was able to not only do it but describe what I was doing.

So, a good talk, I'm not sure I learned a lot of new stuff, but it was good to learn the meme of 'control' and put all these various things into it.  Enjoyed the walk home and the discussions with my son.

My Feedjit widget tells me that over the past couple of days I've had a visitor on here from Buckingham (maybe, it's not always accurate!) who's been poring over this blog, viewing all sorts of links and spending more time than most do here!  Makes me curious!  So hello Person from Buckingham, on Internet Explorer 8.0 and using Windows Vista!  Glad you're exploring!  Do say hello!

Thursday 9th December 10

A milder day weather-wise, so it was cold but not bitter.  This meant that I was able to go and do some work in the garden, loading sacks of compostables onto two heaps, and building two logpiles.... a dry one outside the front door and on each return trip, freshly chopped 'green' logs, heavy with sap, to be taken down the garden to sit quietly for a year or two in a tidy pile.

The space between our house and the semi next door, our shared driveway, had become extremely icy and slippy, so I spent a bit of time with the spade, breaking chunks of compressed snow off the concrete and making a less slippery path to walk along.  I worry about Gill falling and injuring herself; she doesn't need snow and ice to do that, so the slippery conditions make it a lot more likely.

I also did a bit of work inside, washing up and hoovering, and keeping the stove going (just the one today), and soon after 6pm, Melody came round to deliver her 12 year old genius of a son to me, and I took my own genius son plus Melody's on the bus down to Cafe Scientifique at City Screen to go to a talk about Dark Matter.

This talk was extremely difficult for me to understand.  The presenter was Tom Whytnie, a PhD student at Imperial College, London, and part of the High Energy Physics Group.  He explained that scientists think that the visible and measurable matter and energy in the Universe is about 4% of the total, and the remaining is 70% Dark Energy, and 26% Dark Matter.  This has been hypothesized by looking at how disc galaxies revolve, and our understanding of gravity.

Tom works at the Compact Muon Solenoid at CERN, the Large Hadron Collider, which smashes protons together at almost the speed of light.  The debris from these collisions might give hints as to what Dark Matter is... but it is unlikely that it will ever be seen, as it is 'dark' and invisible.  Whether it exists has to be inferred from what goes into the collision and what comes out.... and if there is stuff missing, that might be Dark Matter.

However, if these experiments don't come up with some results, it might be that our understanding of gravity is incorrect, and a lot of science will have to be rewritten.  I now understand quite a bit more about this subject area than I did, but my son got his head around it far more easily than me, and at the end of the talk, he asked the first question, which was a really good one, and showed he'd taken in a lot of the ideas.  I felt very proud of him.

The talk overran a bit, and finished at 9.30, the time Gill was expecting us home.   On the way out I spotted the tethered balloons floating above the Mansion House.... nice one James Alexander, not a litterbug!   We went to get the number 6 bus and didn't have to wait that long.  We got back home just after 10pm, and Melody soon set off home with her lad, and we got ours up to bed pretty quickly.

Wednesday 5th November 08

A good start to the day. Gill took our youngest to school and then went to art. I had a relaxing morning.

Gill came back having drawn an apple which looked like a dog basket or ball of wool or possibly a tam o shanter hat.

We had a pretty good afternoon and then she offered to go to pick up our child if I would go to the only place in York which she'd found which sells 'Buffalo Mozzarella' cheese (phone poll of 4 or 5 places) so that my eldest can do his food technology class tomorrow. I called in on Kyi-Po on the way through town, and gave in the Planning Application forms from last night to the council.
I found the mozzarella needed at the delicatessen in the market.

I found a skip on the way home which had assorted electrical flex in it, so asked the electrician who was tipping stuff in it if I could have the wire... he was only too happy to know it would be recycled. I strip the plastic off with a craft knife and eventually take the copper to a metal merchants. Home via Country Fresh in good time to house/baby sit whilst Gill went to the parents' evening at the secondary school. Good news from school, which is nice to hear.

For tea I finished off the vegan beany hotpot from last night whilst the kids had a chips and omelet meal... and I went out to a short night out to Cafe Scientifique where Dr. Lynda Boothroyd was speaking about the science of human attraction, something I find fascinating.

Home at 9pm, joined the family in the loft watching fireworks from the Velux.

Wednesday 7th March 07

Another very full day. Got up at 8.30 as I heard the kids getting ready to go, and said goodbye to them and Gill, and thanked her for taking them as she'll be picking them up too. Got a phone call from Keely at York Rotters advising me that at 10ish this morning she was expecting a delegation from Hull (a visit I'd organised, because of my attending a Recycling Action Yorkshire event in Leeds in Jan where Id asked around if any local authorities might be interested in setting up a Rotters type scheme). She apologised for this being short notice, but she's been unwell and busy on some funding courses. Fortunately I was able to attend, and I'm very glad I could.

The Hullites were the Council's Waste Minimisation Officer, the head of Parks, the organiser of the Environment Forum and a new volunteer from Friends of the Earth, all keen to hear about York Rotters. I was able to give them a mini-tour of St Nicks, explaining about the site history, the passive solar design of the building and its photovolteic panels, hot water panels, sedum roof with drinking water harvesting, compost toilets, waterless urinal for both sexes, kerbside recycling collections, employment of various groups to help sort recyclables and the composting demonstration site, as well as the straw-bale urinal and hibernaculum for overwintering beasties. The mating frogs in the pond were also pretty spectacular!

Keely and I provided lots of useful info about how York Rotters was set up, funded and what it does and has achieved. I have been invited to give a presentation in Hull at the end of this month by Hull Organic Gardeners, and this may be a perfect opportunity to start the process of launching a Hull Master Composter project. I hope so.

That meeting was nearly 2 hours, so I shot home (via the St Nicks communal logpile, always a good place to find a few kilos of free fuel!) and had lunch before my scheduled meeting with Liz Topi at the City of York Council. This went well, she's happy to say yes to the Green Gala on July 29th, and she gave me some very helpful pointers and ideas. Then a quick visit to Out Of This World, to pick up a small volume of compostables.

Then I went to the Merchant Taylor's Hall to give blood as it's been over a year since I did so. This always entails a lot of waiting, but they always have some good magazines, I read Men's Health and Psychologies Magazine, the latter being very good. Actually giving blood only took 5 and a half minutes, the waiting and tests, nearly 2 hours. Worth it, though.

Zoom home via Richard and the veg shop, where I disobeyed instructions to not lift anything and loaded up my trailer and bike rack with about 6 sacks of biodegradables, including loads of grapes destined for raisinhood. Gill had cooked some potatoes and I made a yellow pepper and cheese omlette to go with them, and a simple coleslaw salad and some dead baked beans left over from the boys tea.

Believe it or not, I then went out again, to the Cafe Scientifique meeting at City Screen, which was an interesting talk about English Partnerships work on their (allegedly) zero carbon housing projects. Should be low carbon housing, as they are not counting the embodied energy in the building materials, just the energy used in the use of the house. Good work, though.

A long day, but finished the game of superscrabble I started yesterday with Gill, and then did my blog, finishing at 1.30am....