Great words....

My friend has to write 4,000 words by 10am tomorrow. I randomly gave him four freebies to be getting on with:

Spanner, Waddle, Philanthropist and Welly.

I think they are great words. Do you have any better nominations? I am sure David will gratefully take any suggestions.....

A REAL front garden!

With a boundary and evryfink!

I wish I could claim credit for the two new fence panels that will (I hope) stop dog walkers thinking my front garden is an extension of the footpath. But I cannot. I can thank my mum and dad though, who did all the work while I sat in the queue for the tip for about an hour and a half, and then mowed my lawns.

Looking half-way smart isn't it? :-)

P.S. Please note.... extra half fence panel is cut and ready to go once my dad recovers his breath... plus genuis trellis thingy to hide bins while enabling me to leave them there so never have to actually put them out for the bin men is being plotted by moi as we speak (/I type...)

This man deserves a book deal

Courtesy of A Beautiful Revolution (www.abeautifulrevolution.com)

Something about Daemons...

Not entirely sure what this is all about - but its fun, and quite pretty...

Green???!!!

Does this sum up BBC2 and Channel4??

Having watched the Strawbridges talking me through practical ways to go green on BBC2 (Its not easy being green), I switched to Channel 4.

The Human Footprint. Where the waste of seeing thousands of eggs broken, thousands of nappies trashed and tonnes of chocolate being stamped on was too disgusting for me to watch.

The programme had a thin thread of a telling-off running through it. Eye opening information about the distance some apples travel to our homes, and the carbon footprint we establish by the age of 2 (greater than an inhabitant of Tanzania will achieve in their lives) was supposed to make me think "aha! I shall stop being wasteful".

Instead I was left thinking "I cant believe they wasted all that stuff just to illustrate waste in a prime time TV slot." Sensationalist and typical Channel4.

I will stick with the Strawbridges thanks. Just looking into the planning permission process for a wind turbine actually....

Effective democracy is not possible without knowledge

I received my postal voting form today, so decided it was time to go online and decide who would get my vote.

Its really rather liberating being a floating voter, but it does take more time to research.

Having googled candidate names from the voting form, and googled more general terms "local elections 2007", "Letchworth East Ward", "local election candidates".... you get the picture... I have discovered that as far as the internet is concerned, we aren't going to the polls on May 3rd.

The BBC got the closest to anything of any use, and if I were a resident of Scotland it would be rather useful, offering me some sort of manifesto outline. But the English local elections? Nope.

It did link to the party websites. In my ward I can only vote Labour (3 candidates), Tory (3 candidates) or Lib Dem (1 candidate) so those are the three sites I surfed.

Of the three, only the Tory site seems to acknowledge that there are elections afoot. Over-riding message from them? Vote Blue, Go Green. OK, got it. Wondered if there was any more to them on a local level? Obviously not.

Lib Dems had a handy news piece with their old dude telling me not to vote for fashion but for principles... but failed to mention what those principles were (aside from green things... which I assumed was what he meant by "fashion". Confusing.)

Labour is aparently far too focused on more important things to worry about the small issue of local democracy. No harm done, wouldn't vote for them anyway.

Which leaves me with no choice. I get three votes. From three Tories and a Lib Dem.

What is it they say about undemocratic countries? Oh yeah, whats the point voting if there is only one choice...

... I know how they feel now.

And they wonder at our apathy. I used to be really rather political. I passionately believe that (particularly as a woman) its my duty to vote when so many fought for me to have the right. You have got to wonder why they bothered sometimes.

cruel....

So apart from Monday's date, I have stuck to my non-dairy, non-egg, non-yeast diet religiously (a date without wine is not, by definition, at date).

How CRUEL is it that when I get home from work at 10pm, and have to cook something to eat (now a late night bowl of Frosties is off the menu)... I sit down to eat it, and a Lurpak advert follows a Hovis advert which follows a Frosties advert.

YEAH I GET IT. THANKS. EVERYONE ELSE IS EATING DAIRY. GREAT. THANKS.

On contacts and cosmos

Today I made significant progress on two projects of mine.

The first, the great Contact Lens Attempt, I have now passed with flying colours. I had my appointment today after the weeks trial, and despite breaking rules about how long to wear them and all that jazz I got big claps for mastering control of my super-human blink reflex. Wooooo!!!! Thats my new years resolution taken care of. And my new sun glasses addiction confirmed.

The second is a newer project, allergy testing. Having been ill recently for a while, and not being sure of the cause, I thought I would just get allergy tested to be able to rule things out. So today I met with the nutricianist and had my allergy blood test and it appears that I am allergic/intollerant to (in order of reaction)....

1) Dairy (big time)

2) Eggs

3) Yeast

I love cheese and bowls of cereal - but bye bye!

I love egg fried rice, boiled eggs, scramled eggs, fried eggs and cake - cheerio!

I LOVE Bombay Sapphire and Pinot Grigio - ARGH!!!!!!

Demonstrating an accurate evaluation of my lifestyle, the nutricianist did not take these results to suggest I cut out alcohol all together, and pointed me to vodka as it has no yeast. Not a big fan of vodka - it has no flavour and just tastes of alcohol.... except in COSMOPOLITANS!!! Yummy yum.

That should keep me happy!

TOBAGO!!!

Still not well, but in a brief midweek interlude of being vaguely human again, ELLE AND I BOOKED A HOLIDAY TO TOBAGO!!!

I am so excited. This has replaced our plans for the Road Trip II, and will probably cost less (because French chateaux, Morgans, champagne and Choos aren't cheap!).

We will be there over my birthday as well, which will be amazing.

Check it out!!!

http://www.rexresorts.com/_caribbean/_tobago/_turtle_beach/index.html

Star Wars stylee

In true Star Wars stylee, with prequels coming afterwards, here are my green pictures from the weekend. From brown bin, to Ace of Herts, to the border (where the contents of the bin came from).

Fabulous (if 4 days late - how slow can MMS be???)

Recycling, the possibilities are endless...

Today I wasn't well. But it was a nice day, and my mum is on Easter holidays from school, so she came round and planted my two lovely new cherry trees. One, snow goose, has white and pale pink blossom and is now in my back lawn, and the other, Kanzan, has bright pink blossom and is in the front. My neighbours all think I employ my mother for slave labour as she toiled in the sun to plant these things while I watched from the comfort of a kitchen chair in the middle of my front garden. I am ill! OK!!!!??

Despite not lifting a finger (no, hold on, I lifted a watering can...) I am now feeling rather green and smug about the two hours TV watching-worth of carbon I may have offset with those little purchases. So I had a bit of a google this evening.

My next purchases will be a water butt and a compost bin. And looking further on www.recyclenow.com (the site behind those funny recycling TV ads) it appears that my local Tesco's recycling centre takes plastics!!! The holy grail in recycling!!

I have also emailed the council to tell them my recycle tubs for paper and glass blew away in the big winds (those of the broken fence... remember?) and please can I have more.

Add to all this the fact that at the weekend I bought some Ace Of Herts compost (the stuff that actually, genuinely, really comes from my brown wheelie bin each fornight) and scattered it over my garden, and I think I am genuinely green. I mean, that compost not only originated in my garden (possibly...) and is now back there, but it was locally collected, produced and sold. And has no peat. So my compost has a teeny tiny carbon footprint!

Feeling rather chuffed with my Green gestures (even if most of it was just Google work) I shall stop here. But pondering rearranging my shelving under the stairs to make room for a new Ultra-Plush Recycling Management Centre (some stack and store boxes with rubbish in....).

Just one question - does anyone ACTUALLY know the carbon offset value of two little but pretty cherry trees which will live around 50 years?

Oh and...

EASTER HOLIDAY!!

Don't mess

For a month now, there has been an Audi A4 parked outside my house. In my spot. Its not moved. Its wheel is at an angle that shows that its driver a) is a bad parker, and b) hasn't moved the car for months.

So on the 1st April its tax ran out. In true good citizen (and slightly annoyed resident) style I called the police to enquire whether the number plate was reported stolen because perhaps it had been dumped (it didn't look abandoned, there was loads of kids stuff on the back seat).

The police said they would check, and if not, as the tax had run out they would report it to the council as an abandoned and illegal vehicle.

Not a clue of the conclusion.

But the car has gone.

And now I am back in my spot ;-)