THINGS TO DO

Need to get up again
Make proper coffee
Have shower (grossly self-indulgent but there you go)
Tidy kitchen
Tidy everywhere else
Have breakfast (will be possible after tidying kitchen)
Shower peace lily

Things I have done

Yesterday:

Tidied painting part of the house
Labelled painting drawers
Got Rob to photograph some paintings, put them up on the blog
Added "size" category to blog

Today:

Dressed baby
Brushed teeth
Played

Missed meds yesterday, must take them today

EDIT 2pm
Got up
Made proper coffee
Had shower (grossly self-indulgent but there you go)
Got dressed
Tidied kitchen
Had breakfast (sheep-milk yoghurt, preserved sour cherries, honey, fair-trade coffee grown by a women's collective - this has to be some sort of pinnacle)
Set up new bike rack in back garden
Scrubbed concrete using rainwater, not tapwater
Moved paving slab to help kill off the ivy
Cut away some ivy
Picked up loads of rubbish from back garden
Emptied and refilled dishwasher twice
Did load of laundry
Got dressed again because scrubbing the garden made me muddy to the knees
Cooked lunch

Yet to do:
Shower peace lily
Paint

Water usage

4 minutes is still a really long shower for me.

I feel mildly guilty washing the patio with good clean water-butt water, but fine using old bathwater.

We're not saving every drop of wastewater any more but I am still turning the taps off when I wash my hands (wet hands, turn off tap, apply soap, lather and scrub, turn on tap to rinse - uses about half a litre) and trying not to "just wash something" under the tap instead of waiting for the far more water-efficient dishwasher.

Instead of sluicing nappies under running water we're soaking them in a fixed quanitity of water and posh bicarbonate of soda called "nappy brite". I think it's bicarb with extra anionic surfactants. I wonder could we profitably use rainwater for this? probably.

I'd love to figure out rainwater or greywater flushing for the loo. Drinking water down the loo is so annoying.

If we cover over the bike storage area with some sort of roof, we'll have another gutter for another waterbutt. I wonder could we hook it up to the loo somehow?

GARD

Garden day. Rain, sun, rain, sun. I started with scrubbing the concrete where the wormery used to be and the bike rack now is, and ended up weeding and then pruning (hacking at) the jasmine. One of my hands is purple from the berries, but there's less of the jasmine than there used to be. Must work out how to reduce it even further. The milkman delivered a sack of peat-free compost so I planted the rest of the potatoes and some carrots. I have no idea why the easiest way for me to get peat-free compost is from the milkman.

This summer the garden should be pretty usable. And we will have at least *some* food we grew ourselves. I really, really want to get some beans to grow this year, though. They are such a rewarding crop.

And I want the Herb Robert to stop being such a feeble wimp and start standing up to the bigger plants. I *like* Herb Robert. Maybe I'll have to dig up all the blinking lungwort or whatever they are. They really are taking over.

Finish your lunch, I'm going to find my temper

It was, it turns out, down behind the sofa cushions, and after I'd sat on them long enough, I found it.

That was that

Things I did:
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And a poem I liked as a teenager, and still like now.( Read more... )