Tuesday 29th November 11

I woke just before 10 and realised that I had stupidly made an appointment for 10am at the Nationwide, to get a quote for house insurance.  I rang them and rescheduled it for 1pm.

So, housework and got all the past couple of months' soya milk cartons together, loaded my trailer with two sacks full, and bombed down to Hazel Court, where I bunged them all in the recycling bank with no hassle at all, despite a new anti-bike notice going up (which of course I ignored).  From here I went into town and spent quite a time at the Nationwide, where their quote was quite a bit higher than the Co-op.  So that's where I went next, and tried to work out a way to get the premium down, but no, varying various things (like the 'excess', the amount you pay if you claim... you pay the first £100 or £150 or whatever) didn't change the premium significantly but did incur a management penalty, so I settled for a straight renewal.  I did this on the phone in the Co-op Bank office and paid with my card.  Hooray, the house is insured again!

Home via Country Fresh where I collected a job-lot of compostables and bought £4 worth of veg.  Lunch was at 3pm.

Later, I jarred up a load of dried pears and had a good conversation about the value of dried fruit and fresh fruit; per pear, the dried fruit is much much cheaper, despite it having been peeled, cored and dried.... all that processing doesn't add to it's value at all.  However, the more I dry now, the fewer will go bad and be lost.

The empty racks meant that I spent another hour preparing pears and putting them to dry.  I also sorted out some good ones for taking to Scoop tomorrow.

I got a message from one of Sue Wallace's friends David, who had a dead tree in his garden and Sue suggested I might be the right person to deal with it.  I volunteered to go round and check it out.... it was a Eucalyptus which hadn't survived last winter.  I said I'd be able to take it down, but would need to tie a rope to some of the branches to ensure they didn't fall on their pergola or small fruit trees. I'll have to do it on a weekend when neither of us are working.  It won't yield a large amount of wood but it will help a nice chap, and Eucalyptus is a good wood for burning.... especially if it's stood for a year, drying!

I could have gone out tonight, to see a film or to go drinking with Owen on his birthday, but I just felt staying in was the sensible thing to do. Gill was grateful and I was happy to do that.

Wednesday 21st October 09

I did lots of paperwork today... I renewed our house insurance with the Co-operative Insurance Service, and got 500 points on our membership dividend. I sorted out some travel arrangements for a Fiddlesticks gig in Leeds next week. I got a pass code retrieved for a voluntary group's bank account. I did various other things involving emails, letters, the phone... But this took most of the morning. I also got an unintelligible phone call from a sales person from Titan Telecom which took a long time (I am never rude to these people, never put the phone down on them) but I also wrote a polite complaint email to the company afterwards.

Around lunchtime I went down to Country Fresh to buy and pick up some pumpkins for next week's Pumpkin Celebration at St Nicks. I got three in my trailer, one in each pannier. Came back via Freshways and got waylaid with the ever-jovial Raj, which meant I didn't get back for lunch until nearly 2pm.

Gill went to Lord Deramore's to pick up our youngest from his fieldtrip, and arrived back at nearly 5pm. He'd had a great time and was full of stories of exciting activities.

I went down to Country Fresh again to pick up their compostables, and ordered another 10 pumpkins which I'll pick up on Friday, probably needing two trips. They aren't small!

I had an interesting tea of a couple of reject sweetcorn on the cobs which I cooked and stripped off the cobs, with oyster mushroom and some rice left over from yesterday, with half a jar of 'chicken tonight' sauce (which doesn't have chicken in it) which was given to me by Gladys who doesn't eat food past it's best before date... but I have the constitution of a scavenging freegan, and pretty broad tastes, so I quite enjoyed it. I wonder what I'll do with the other half?

So a pretty quiet and unexciting day.

Thursday 15th November 07

A good day as at least two, possibly three things happened, interesting things! Firstly, at 10, as booked, a chap from the Cooperative Insurance came, Mark his name was. We were rung up last week and told he'd like to tell us about some new products.... this was the first time we'd ever been visited by someone from the Co-op, and Gill was convinced that he was coming to snoop round the house and check our smoke alarms were working, etc, and was embarrassed by the untidiness. However he was lovely. He had come to tell us about the new insurance policy and we also discussed savings and ISAs... I don't think about money much so it was interesting to have some stuff explained. He was lovely and Gill's fears were unfounded. My new bike is now insured.

I had aranged to have lunch on the allotment with Jo... whilst we chatted I dug out a working compost heap and transferred it to another New Zealand box (pallets!) and then restarted the original one with chopped up brambles. We had a good chat, she had an interesting weekend in Whitby and had a lot to tell me. Whilst there Jessica came with her wonderful digital camera and of course asked where mine was! She wants me to get some images downloaded onto my computer and onto RedBubble or perhaps even my blog... that would be good! Then Phil popped by... he's preparing for a court case as he's refusing to pay his council tax as he blames the council for the problems he's experiencing with vandals attacking his home, and he's had to board up his windows and the council have told him to unboard them. Interesting!

So got back from the lottie at 2.45 and Gill was preparing to go to school, so I did some emailing and got a comment from Annabel on yesterdays blog post, about how I am qualified to write about environmental and ethical issues. I spent quite a long time replying and explaining, but when I sent the reply, it came back as not able to be delivered to Annabel, so I hope she either sends a contact email and I'll send her the original reply, or I could explain on this blog... not sure what to do.

I went to get our eldest at 4.15 after his drama club, and one of his friends came back too which was good as it means good behaviour. Before teatime, I got a phone call from someone with an Eastern European accent, possibly Russian, allegedly called Vishka. He said he wanted to join my circus! I explained that I wasn't actually a full circus, but did circus tricks at events as an entertainer... but if he wanted to meet me or learn some skills, or find out how I organised myself as an entertainer, he could meet me. I agreed to meet him at 10.30 tomorrow at City Screen.... he said he'd be wearing a trilby! I was suspicious whether he was spoofing me, so I explained that sometimes pranksters did ring me up and try to have me on, and he assured me he was genuine. We'll see!

Gill made tea, pasta parcels and veg with garlic bread, and soon after I went to the CRAG meeting. This was really good, I learned quite a lot. Denise was from the Energy Efficiency Advice Centre in York, which is one of 46 nationally set up by the Energy Saving Trust in 1992 as a response to the Rio 'Earth Summit' which urged us all to act to combat climate change. She started with an observation about when she was young, 40 years ago, she had just 4 electrical items in the house, an iron, the telly, lightbulbs and a 'town gas' cooker (presumably electrical ignition?) Nowadays, we have several TV's, all sorts of gadgets like breadmakers, mobile phones, gameboys, ipods.... a huge list of electrical items. We got lots of facts:
UK homes responsible for 29% of our CO2 emissions,
20% of energy in the house is wasted,
UK committed to reducing domestic C emissions by 12.5% by 2010 from 1990 levels, and we are on target for this. We have made a voluntary comittment to go for a 20% reduction but we're not approaching this, mainly because of the rise of gadget use which increases electricity consumption.
She explained how the Energy EfficiencyAdvice Centres worked and why it was important, the benefits of saving energy, (not just reducing climate change but releasing money currently wasted, increasing health, effecting behaviour change, etc) and their campaign to 'Save your 20%'.
She had examples of low energy lightbulbs and a catalogue from 'Megaman' bulbs, and how much money could be saved by fitting just one low energy lightbulb (£9).
There was a diagram of where energy is lost in an uninsulated house (roof, 26%; walls, 33%; single glazed windows, 18%; floors, 15%; draughts, 11%) and lots of info on insulation.
There was one section which really interested me.... on how to insulate solid walls, as our 1930's house doesn't have cavity walls, it has solid walls, and there are 4 ways of insulating them to reduce that 33% loss of heat. There are 3 ways of internally insulating ('dry lining', using thermal board and something called perhaps 'sempatap'... I'll look it up!) and the more efficient way of externally insulating, which is what I'd like to do with out big wall on the coldest side of the house, away from the woodstoves. She even had the name of a company who fit external insulation (Wall Transform)!
Then we got onto renewable energy. tbc