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!