Getting shot of!

The bedroom is finally decorated and furnished... yay! A King-size bed as well. Our first ever, what luxury! On the downside, I had to spend part of today disposing of our unwanted old stuff; carpet, bed, wardrobe, bookcase etc. I was somewhat aggrieved at being forced to give up my bookcase. Mind you, it was long since filled with books, which had began to spread elesewhere. With the King-size bed, there just wasn't space for it anymore. Never let it be argued that I'm not a reasonable man. I bowed to common sense on this one. My books are now secreted here and there out of sight. I have a lot of books...

Anyway... the dump, as I call it. Firstly I had to borrow my old man's trailer to ferry the stuff. Then I had to also borrow his car, since my car does not have a tow-bar. It took us two trips. Fortunately it's less than a mile from the house. I don't know why we call it the dump, because it's nothing like a dump in the sense of a landfill site. Mainly, it's divided up into skips and bays with separate areas for different types of material; garden waste, earth, rubble, glass, cardboard, polystyrene, metal, electrical goods, household waste, wood and synthetic wood. There are probably others categories that I haven't even spotted, but there's more than enough to be going on with when you have a trailer load of assorted rubbish. We were darting all around the place trying to deposit items in their correct locations.

Now it's all well and good, us doing our civic duty and sorting out all of these items for what we imagine will be recycling or disposal in another form. However, I do harbour certain doubts about what happens to rubbish here once collected. I heard a rumour that the Council must recycle at least 25% of paper rubbish and that the remaining 75% was being sent from the North-East of Scotland to French landfills. If that's the case, then we the general public really are being made fools of. No wonder our local Council are struggling to make ends meet, with massive cut-backs (closing and selling off village halls?). No matter how much money they make, they can't manage the budget. Why not? Because they are self-serving bureaucrats, out for themsleves. That's why!

Oh Bollards!

Did I get any work done today? Yes I did, although the weather was so fine that I really wanted to go out and do some hill-walking. But I had to stay in and wait for the new cooker to be delivered, which it was around 11am, although I had expected the delivery guys to wire it in, because when we bought it there was a sign which said "Free delivery and recycling". We thought that they'd wire up the new cooker and take away the old one for recycling. I have since realised that it was probably the packaging which was to be recycled. Dammit!

So, after the cooker had been delivered I had to wire it, and the connections on the back were very different to the old cooker. In the end I spent about 2 hours on it. What a pain! And so the whole day was pretty much wasted again, although I made a start on my assessment, which was my intention. I also managed to play a game or two, upload some photos to Imageshack and generally waste an entire day... again!

Tomorrow is the last day of Uni for a fortnight, yay! I plan on some major hill-wlaking this next two weeks, only I need to buy a new (to me) second-hand car, because my present one is clapped-out. Then there's this assessment, with which I must discipline myself and do some work on it everyday. Otherwise it will never be done, and it has to be submitted when we go back. I always feel like I'm juggling crap like this, and trying to fit in some quality "me" time just gets harder and harder!

A Little Light Around the Ice-Caps!

I used to believe that those people who moaned about the town Christmas lights being a waste of money, electric and so on, were just a bunch of sourpusses. But, the cost of switching on the Christmas Lights is getting to the point where many towns are no longer bothering. They simply don't have the coffers to make it happen, especially with the government seeming to make local authorities responsible for paying for everything going, via our Council Tax of course.

Anyway, my wife's away helping with the school stalls or whatever, at the grand switch-on tonight, and my daughter will be singing carols with the school choir. Of course I said "used to believe" above implying that I've changed my position. Well I have and I haven't. Now that the kids don't believe in Santa anymore, the whole spark has gone out of it for me. They'll just become cynical about the whole thing. Beside, the eco-warriors would say that Chrismas Lights are killing the planet. Why is it always the small things we do at home and in public that are to blame as opposed to large scale industrial pollution and de-forestation. I don't feel particularly accountable for ice-shelf's breaking free and such like.

What really annoys me is the fact that every household could be self-sufficient for energy with simple tried and tested devices, cars can run on water (totally green), and as for recycling, why do we recycle everything except the stuff that isn't bio-degradable? As much as to say, recycling is a waste of time, unless it's plastic being recycled! So, yes, those people are sourpusses, but I think I'm heading the same way. Someone save me from unending cynicism?