shopping and recycling
Well and truly back into the swing of things (reluctantly) with a phone call on Sunday morning from fellow tutor wanting to know if second marking could wait a day or so due to 'lambing'. It was lovely of her to even ask me, but a toss up between little baby lambs being born or second marking - no choice to be made really! And there it was - contact with work again. No more pretending I'm still out of the country!
Finally made it to the horsey shop and spent Christmas vouchers on;
a top (can double for skiing)
a raincoat with flaps (so I can ride that horse I haven't got yet in the rain)
a dressage whip ;)
a hat bag (okay - but it's black velvet and gets full of crap in the car)
a pair of mesh gloves that fit (so they don't get stuck in the girth when I try to clumsily tighten it up)
So now all I need is a horse, and a field, and, and, and... a job that pays a lot more!
Haven't done an awful lot of writing but I can blame that quite happily on my return to teaching, re-applying for a teaching job I've been doing for three years, and er... gardening. It hadn't been touched since winter (whenever that was) so slight mess really. Found lots of snails and slugs, and spider nests, and cleared 9 bin bags of green waste. Now that it looks tidy and the table and parasol are up, the weather has gone all cool again :( Maybe I should buy an umbrella so that the sun will come back. So much for global warming.
Which leads me to ask, do you recycle? I've just sorted out a load of clothes for charity, and kids stuff to pass on, but someone told me they threw out 8 bags of old clothes - to the tip. Eek. Clothes in landfill make methane don't they?? Then I overheard a conversation in the school yard this week. One woman was saying, "All this global stuff is bollocks." "Yeah, it was in The Sun, they're just making it up to get more money out of us." The first said, "And all this recycling crap. I can't be arsed. Can you?" To which she duly replied, "No. It's dangerous having a box full of broken glass and metal in the kitchen, not to mention it reeks." Right. Okay. If I were a proper bolshy activist type I would've explained that it takes a second to rinse things out, and another second to pop it in the box. And if you do paper, plastic (although our council can't do plastic yet for some reason), metal, and compost what you can, you end up with one bag of rubbish a week instead of the seven she told her friend her family produced. I bet they also leave all the lights on (not to mention the iron and the hair-straighteners), have a patio heater, and think the standby button means it's off.
We're all doomed! I saw some more people on the news this morning talking about new refuse collection laws. It seems some folks are having difficulty working out the difference between metal, paper, and food waste. "It's just too complicated," said one bloke.
Right - that's my moan!
Posts
5 comments:
Welcome back to the real world...this week has done that for me too. Yesterday i wrote again which was good. I feel better about all the rest when the writing is working.
Yes, i recycle, send clothes to charity shops or if too far gone there is a collection bin for fabric too far gone near by (don't know what they do with it though). I actually like recycling and wouldn't stop if if the Sun was right which I don't think it is....when we lived in Jakarta, everything that went into the bin was taken out by some and reused in some way which frightened me in some way but taught me that my trash is really someone elses treasure....even old tea bags!
Good luck with the rest of your re-entry :-)
I echo what Liz says here. In Thailand the rubbish is all gone through by people and everything recycled. It's not because of environmental reasons though (there doesn't seem the awareness here) but because, as Liz says, your rubbish is someone else's treasure.
The organisation that I'm webmaster for collects all kind of stuff and passes it onto the needy, so I just never through anything away. In the UK all clothes were passed down to little cousins, but here I give them to my maid for her children, or she can sell them and make a few baht from it. They are incredibly resourceful about recycling, though not, as I said, for environmental reasons.
I hope you get back into the swing of things soon.
JJ
Good to see there's three of us recycling!
Incidentally - saw a documentary the other night about the first colour photography in the Edwardian period - fantastic stuff. But, back to recycling etc., there was a piccie of lots of folk reclaiming an entire ship that ran aground (how does one write that word?!) in Cornwall. No landfill. No waste. Not a scrap left!
That's what we need - less waste. Reuse stuff, that's what I say! Ranting now. It's Russell Brand's fault 'cos listening to his Radio 2 show on 'listen again' and he rants awfully so he does!
I cleared out my "office" yesterday (most people refer to it as the shed as it is in the garden, but its actually very upmarket) and took two carloads of stuff down to the dump. Hard to believe really that it yielded so much stuff, at least some of which will be recycled. I hope I will now start to use it again -- it had got rather depressingly cluttered and unappleaing.
I think an office at the bottom of the garden (shed) is great. You're following in the footsteps of Roald Dahl!
Post a Comment