How Green was your Xmas?

Xmas is done for another year and, as we wait for January to begin, its a good chance to reflect on how green Xmas really was.

Every year we get a little better and every year we think of new ways to make more changes.

This year the whole family got in on the act, throwing away past worries of appearing a skin flint and embracing the giving of presents that where handmade or even second hand.

I gave several second hand books, DVD's and toys that I'd come across in charity shops (or even my own book shelves!) over the last couple of months. My Kids got a handful of "stocking fillers" that came from the 5p box, cars, little action figures, card games.
My mother and sister both received jewelry from a local jewelry maker and I even got round to making some handmade chocolates!

My own family also came up trumps and under the tree for me was a box of homemade chocolates and some homemade bath bombs from my sister, wrapped in brown paper she had hand printed, she really put me to shame with that, the parcels looked beautiful.
One of my presents from my mother was a ball of wool (nylon!)and some knitting needles, and a couple of days after Xmas she showed me how to cast on, knit and cast off. By the time she had left I had knitted a (beard shaped!) dish cloth as practice and am now working on my first scarf! Baby steps I know, but this gift will enable me to make gifts for others, as well as for myself!!

My parents also gave the kids their entire collection of star wars DVD/videos and their Harry Potter collection! How trilled were they!

I make the same promise every year but NEXT year I want to aim to hand make or buy second hand the majority of peoples Xmas gifts. I can't tell you how much more special my sisters bath bombs are and how excited I was to see them, store brought ones would have barely warranted a glance before being put in a cupboard in the bathroom.

I hereby resolve to start preparing for next Xmas now! To knit gifts and learn new skills, to box chocolates when I make them so they get to the recipient before my mouth!

Present wise I think we really had a getting back to basics gift giving which surprised us all with how very much more we seemed to get for much less money and resources.

What did Santa bring you?

Merry Xyulesolmas everyone!

I hate the Americanism (sorry American people!) "Holidays". If you have something specific to celebrate this time of year be proud to say what it is!!
I'm not a Christian so I rarely say Christmas, preferring instead to use the more secular Xmas (something my staunch Salvation Army Grandparents hated with a very un-Christian like passion).

So here it is though...whatever you like to call the winter celebration.

Today was Solstice, the shortest day of the year, and in celebration of that we did what we have done nearly every year, we put up our tree.


We get our tree from friends who have acres of baby pine trees and have invited us for the last two years to help ourselves.
I find cutting our own tree odd in the sense that when you are outside they all look like teeny tiny scraps that will look like the ugly tree none of the other trees wanted to play with but when you get it home you realise that its grown 5 inches and bushed out like a fluffed up hen.
Sure its not the fullest or the softest (the piercing "Ow!"'s that came as the kids decked our trees sharp branches seem to be another Basford tradition) but it seems more down to earth, more level headed than a genetically modified "ideal" tree or worse the plastic perfection of the false one!

Anyway, next year we plan to buy some baby trees of our own and add a little neutral carbon to our festivities.

The tree wasn't the only exciting thing to happen today. This afternoon our new puppy came home!!

Merle (which means blackbird)is a tiny fluff of Yorkshire terrier and seems perfectly happy to come live with us, has fallen in love with Jenny the vegan collie (who is trying to stay aloof but stuck her nose through the pen bars every time he squeaked)tried to make friends with Biko the cat (who hissed then went to lie by the fire and pretend nothing had changed). He had an alert hour and some dinner then went "plop", all tuckered out, fast asleep, been a long day for a 'lil pup.
Like a new mum I am left wondering if I should wake him soon for some more play so he doesn't wake at 2am crying.

Anyway, Xmasy wishes aside here's a preview of what the (almost) car-less family will have to offer in 2010!

Gardening
With more emphasis on what we eat and a lot more planning than in previous years we hope to bring you more insight into our self-sufficiency(ish) lifestyle.

Home
As we are finishing some home improvement and starting some new eco-home plans this coming year we will have lots to share, starting with how we fit a family of 5 in what is basically a 1 bed house.

EnvironmentWe have been talking about it forever but we hope 2010 will be the year that we do something with our land. A radical re-think of how we keep our horses and a plan to plant coppicing woods and "old" woodland on our acreage means lots of plans, debates and pictures on how we get on.

Cycling
Now that we are set up with a trailer the bikes should be back out in force once the ice lets up for a few days.

There will, of course, be much more than this but these are some of the main points I want to cover in detail over the next 12 months.
The (almost) car-less family is very excited about 2010 and what it will bring and hope all our regular readers (and new ones of course!) will come along for the ride with us!

Thanks for stick by the last 5 months!





Love, Kelly, Kim, Ollie, Owen and Alfie xxx

Power Off weekend diary.

Well, last night at 11pm we turned the power back on.
All of a sudden it seemed very stark and noisy.
Amazing how you get used to candle light and the sound of silence as the fridge sits mute in the corner.

On the whole we had a great time. It was, as I thought, a time for reflection and a time to remember how to use that amazing of organs, the brain and its capacity for imagination.


Our table centre.


FRIDAY
As though the house felt it needed to purge before we turned the power off it decided to give us a mini disaster.
The ball cock in the hot water tank did its yearly shrivel up and die routine, so that a whole tank of hot water gushed out of the overflow and into the garden. The trouble is our tank gets too hot and the ball cock can't cope and implodes. So with much swearing Kim climbed the ladder into the attic and fixed it with the spare (of which we keep a few).
Disaster averted!
Had we not had a spare this would have put a huge dampener on the weekend. The water would have had to have been turned off, along with the fire!

SATURDAY
Having breakfast by candle light was an interesting enough diversion for the kids so that for a whole hour they forgot about the fact that the DVD's would not be playing nor the computer switched on.
Kim got up early to light the fire so that the kettle was singing for breakfast and the room was warm and cosy.
We were out for the morning with the Bennachie Access Team on a PR exercise so were not back in the house before lunch.
Lunch was soup (from the freezer the night before)and some fried garlic bread all made on the log burner.
As we also had the electric off outside an effort had to be made to get the horses done in the daylight, so by 4pm the big horses were out in the big field and the ponies were in the steading eating evening hay. All that had to be done in the dark was to give the ponies their late night hay and Kim used the wind up torch for this.
Dinner was a half cheat. cooking by candle light.


I made a tofu Thai curry on the log burner (lots of cashew nuts!)and Kim went to the chip shop and brought us all chips to go with it ;)
After Dinner we set to teaching the kids card games, something we've never done before, but we now have snap masters and blackjack apprentices! Kids drawing by candle.

Usually the kids have a story tape on the stereo when they go to bed, but instead I suggested they play a story game and for about half an hour they bandied a made up story from one to the other, all three of them making a contribution and laughing at the silly scenarios they deampt up.
Me and Kim read the newspapers by candle light and drank hot chocolate and chatted for a while and then at around 10pm went outside to see if we could see any meteors which where meant to be spectacular over this weekend.
We saw a few but apparently the best ones where just before dawn. Even reading was possible!

SUNDAY
Sunday was a little harder. Owen in particular whined for a while about not being able to watch a film, and mooched around the kitchen all morning.
Oliver and Alfie played outside but Owen was BORED!
He perked up again when Ollie came back inside and played some snap with him though.
Ollie went to a friends house for the rest of the morning and I took the littlies for a walk with the dog. A huge puddle in the stubble field we walk in had frozen solid so they spent a happy half hour playing ice skating!
Lunch was oatcakes and fruit (apples, melon and grapes)with home made hummus. Usually I blitz the chickpeas with a hand blender so it was interesting to make it the traditional way..well maybe not traditional, I used a potato masher!
Came out just fine though and got me to thinking that a potato ricer would do a better job.
That afternoon Kim took Ollie off on a mountain bike ride and the littlies played with the train track (a toy that has been gathering dust for a few months) while I tried to make sure that all the school clothes were dry and ready for Monday.
I did hand wash a basin of socks and hung them on a rail over the log burner to dry. Fine for small stuff but don't much fancy hand wringing out jeans!
All afternoon (since just before lunch) our dinner of veg and bean stew had been bubbling away on the logburner and an hour before dinner I made some yummy herby dumplings and popped them on top!
Sunday night is a bath night, so the littlies had their first candle lit bath. An interesting side effect of this was that unlike the usual shouting and splash fest that is bathtime for Owen and Alfie, they instead lounged int he bath like Turkish lords, relaxing in the soft light. Even the mankiest bathroom looks like a spa in candle light!

After their bath they snuggled up on their Daddies lap while I read the first couple of chapters from the Terry Pratchet book The Hogfather.
A great extra was a more relaxed evening, much calmer and quick to go to sleep AND sleeping for better and longer!
Ollie played a few more hands of blackjack which really made him use his maths skills, so we plan to do much more of that.
He had said to Kim, while out on the bike ride, that he wished we could do Power Off EVERY weekend!

All in all it was fun and informative. I think Sunday nights could become "Power Off" nights so the kids could really wind down and rest well before school on Monday and maybe we could have a PowerOff weekend once a month (maybe leaving the fridge and freezer on)and candles are going to become a part of our regular life.

So, we didn't miss the fridge, but then the porch was so cold there was no need for a fridge. A long term plan could involve building a cold room on the north side of the house to use, especially in the summer months, then there would be no need for a fridge at all.
The freezer had little in it anyway. The only thing I wanted to keep frozen was a pack of diced rabbit I brought for my parents to have at Xmas. I packed iceblocks around it, wrapped them in bubble wrap, two jiffy bags and then two layers of tin foil. It stayed frozen!! So I don't need to buy anymore!
I want to experiment more with preserving food in jars rather than freezing it, we very rarely use the freezer for anything other than the odd tub of non-dairy ice cream or some frozen peas so its worth looking into alternatives.
As well, we want to look into making a "summer home" down the end of our big field, a small cabin or yurt or even a couple of caravans! Somewhere we could "live" in the summer holidays and at weekends so that we were'nt using the electric in the house.

The only dissapointment was the solar light. I don't think it ever recived enough light to charge it as it really wasnt day light till gone 9am and by lunch time it was getting dimpsy again, but we'll hold onto it and see what happens in the summer!

We had a great time, hope you did too! And I hope next time you all join in!

Getting ready to power down for Power Off!

We here at the (almost) car-less family are very excited about tomorrows Power Off weekend.In a way it has almost (almost!) eclipsed Xmas as THE topic of the moment in our house. Even a trip into town to buy the last of the children's presents turned into a buying-things-for-Power-Off trip!

In preparation for tomorrow we have brought candles, a wind up torch and a solar outdoor light. The theory behind the light being that it MIGHT be useful to bring inside at night and have in the bathroom so the kids have a little safe light if they get up in the night. It remains to be seen if the solar light will get enough daylight to a)fully charge and b)last into the night and not be run down by midnight. Be very interesting to see how all these little things work, and that's the main reason we are doing this experiment, to give us the opportunity to think away from the norm, to look at the power we have and wonder how else we can implement it.

The weather at the moment is looking good for the weekend and so I hope that most of the daylight hours can be spent outside. We will in any case have to make sure that wood is chopped and horses done in the daylight anyway, but the plan is to make sure the kids have enough opportunity to blow off steam before dark.

Tomorrow will be tricky for us as we will lose some of our precious daylight due to running an event for the Bennachie Access Team tomorrow, but with some thought it should be fine.

The inside, dark, activities will be Xmas orientated, so paper chains, card making (and writing) and snowflakes will be the order of the day.
We also have cards, noughts and crosses, hangman and even i-spy if it gets too rough!
To honest though I am not planning every second for them. They can draw and play with their toys without electric lights so they can be encouraged to do that as well.

So today I am spending washing clothes so that school clothes will be ready for Monday, baking so we have some "treats" and tidying up, so we don't fall over in the dark!

I'll be taking pictures and keeping notes and will be back online on Monday!
Have a great weekend!

Asthma. A pain in the arse if I'm honest.

Most of you know that I have asthma.
This is not something I had as a child but looking back I have suffered on and off since my late teens. Coughs that wouldn't go away and left me fighting for breath, but back then I was pretty fit (and a lot slimmer) and so got away with it.

It wasn't until I was 30 that I was officially diagnosed with adult onset asthma.

Now I won't lie, this sucks royally at times.

Just when I was getting the kids all to school and had time to look after me I end up stuck in the house not able to breath.

So far I have had a handful of "real" attacks (most of my asthma is like having a none productive cough, so you can't talk for any length of time or at all if your walking).
An attack is frightening. I always thought you wouldn;t be able to breath IN but its not like that at all. Its breathing OUT that is hard.
So you breath in a lungful of air and then you cough but nothing comes out, and soon your skin is prickling like someone is sticking you with needles all over as you try to force air OUT of your lungs so you can take another breath.
Before I was diagnose I found myself sat on the edge of the bath one night coughing non stop. I couldn;t breath, my vision blurred and went dark at the edge's, I thought "Wow! I'm either passing out or dying!" but wasn't too upset at the time, all I could think of was breathing.

Asthma happens when the hairs in your lungs get inflamed. You then produce mucus in response to this and this is what makes it hard to breath. Your airways narrow and you feel like you are drowning. You can read about it and see diagrams HERE.

People have different triggers to asthma from perfume, cat hair, dust, pollen, pollution, colds and viruses and also food/ drink sensitivities.

For myself I know that too much coffee doesn't help me, dairy is a BIG no no, even a weeny bit can cause an attack if other factors are in place. Also if I have a cold I will at some stage soon after get an asthma attack. I also get wheezy in the summer when the broom is in bloom and funnily enough so does my horse LOL.

I thought I was ok this time.

Since my last asthma period in March 2009 I have been on different meds, got healthier and fitter, eat more organic food and cycle and walk lots. I thought I had it all in hand.
But week before last I had a cold...a really little sniffly one...hardly registered. And the last couple of weeks I'd slipped into the habit of a coffee or two a day rather than herbal teas, and THEN on Monday I brought some chocolate that I thought was milk free but turned out to have butter milk in it (it was right next to cocoa so I had thought it said cocoabutter milk which is ok!).

With all those triggers lined up I didn;t have a chance of avoiding one. My meds, which at least kept me from a BIG attack haven't helped much, so I am back up to the Doctors to chat about it.

Trouble is I REALLY don't want to go down the road of Oral steroids.

At the moment I am on an inhaler that opens the airways (to use as and when) and one I have to take twice a day which has a stronger airways opener and also a steroid to strengthen my lungs. Its a fairly mild one but I didn;t want anything higher.

Looking online I think I need to go for some vitamins. Some extra vit C and D some Magnesium and some B vits, that way I can help stave off any colds. Also I need to be extra vigilant about checking labels and also avoiding coffee, especially if other triggers are present.

If anyone has any ideas or sites to share that can steer me down a more natural route please share them.
Your the best ;)

Climate change, which side of the fence are you on?

I get asked this question from time to time and I still don't have an answer.

Yes yes, I'm one of THEM that sits on the fence and shrugs and says "I dunno.."

Infuriating ain't I ;)

The trouble is that I am not a scientist, or expert. I am a normal person. The only input I get is from what I read in newspapers, magazines and online and these articles are nearly always from someone well embedded on their side of the fence, so its impossible to have an objective view.

One journalist put it very nicely the other day.

"We do not need to "save" the planet. Earth is will get along just fine no matter what happens. What we are worried about is saving the human."

And this I think hits the nail on the head.
After all the Earth was survived being a flaming ball of volcanic gases and it has survived being almost completely covered in ice. A little climate change is not going to register on grander scale of the earths life. If being on fire was the same as having flu then climate change (although devastating for us)is bearly a pimple on the side of Earths nose.

Sounds like this puts me in the doubters corner?

Well it doesn't.

The trouble is with the people who dismiss climate change is the general air of "Well I'm not going to stop burning live pandas to run my car."

Humans who think like that are like the intergalactic version of the rough estate family who throw their rubbish out the window and onto the tiny patch of grass outside. They don't care, it doesn't effect them so why bother.

The trouble with the whole movement is that a few years ago it was "the" thing to do.
Every newspaper and magazine had a "green living" column, every supermarket rushed out to make "ethical and green" products for the masses to consume. No middle class dinner party was complete without talk of the organic free range caviar fed chicken they were eating, and the solar panels they were having installed.
Then the recession came and all these ideas went out the window and showed the majority of people for what they are, fashion victims.

Take a good look around you.

Notice how all the ethical products in your supermarket have been pushed to a small corner of the store? Notice how that columnist you enjoyed reading about with her green themes and clever ideas has disappeared?
Now middle class dinner party talk is peppered with last second trips by air for half term ski trips and how cheap chicken is at the discount supermarket down the road.

So you see, a lot of the media concern a couple of years ago was little more than glorified advertising. An attempt to milk the green cash cow and get the chattering classes to spend money on their products to pretend they where saving the earth.

For the record, we are on LESS money than a few years ago but still manage to live more ethically than many people wh have pleanty of spare cash!

So where do I stand?

I stand in the clean up camp.
I re-cycle, I shop second hand, I don't waste anything, as a family we strive to leave as little a footprint as possible.

Humans are going to have to become more flexible.
Why do people think its acceptable to live somewhere like Las Vegas and still have green lawns? Why would anyone heat their pool to bath water temperature all year? Why do people think the heating in their house should mean they can walk about in t-shirts like summer.
THESE are the people who will never change and who's in-flexibility make life miserable for all of us.

Man's wish to live wherever he wants and then mould it to what he wants it to be are killing all of us. When the Apocalypse comes with the Las Vegas housewife turn on the sprinklers, shut the door and crank up the air con?
Probably.

We used to be nomadic people. We used to keep a few vital possessions and move with the seasons. In a nutshell farming sealed our fate and turned us into something more than animals.
I guess some would say this was a good thing, but the future of mankind? I don't know.

In the times past when humans migrated seasonally, land was given the chance to recover. Think about it. If all the Zebra and wildebeest grazed only one part of the savanna for a year it would be a desolate dust bowl, possibly lost forever.

BUT!!
But with our modern technology we have all sorts of tricks to keep land working for us!!
We can concrete over tracks so they remain dry, we can spray our fields to make them yield high....but.

Modern farming has a lot to answer for.

Here is an example.

Over the last few weeks we have received an unprecedented amount of rain. Seriously soggy weather.
Our fields (where the horses live) are old pasture. We have never ploughed them (and that's 9 years we've been here) and they possibly were not ploughed for as much as 20 years or more before that.
The fields next to us have been ploughed yearly forever.
Not only that, but for the 9 years we have lived here they have even grown the SAME crop!
This is farming at its most "modern".
No year left fallow, no crop rotation, no year of sown grass for cattle grazing..no no no..this is how farmers did it in the OLD days.

So back to the rain.

The fields that belong to us coped well with the rain. Whenever there was a break the solid happily sucked up as much excess water as it could.

The fields next to us though remain (still!) in parts like a network of lakes and streams. The ground has been so compacted and so heavily sprayed that there is not a thread of life in it. If you pop a spade into our field you come away with a bucket of worms, pop a spade into the ploughed fields and all you get is a hole full of water.

They are as barren as a dessert.

Do I think man has made global warming?

Yes and no.

We certainly haven't helped. Global warming has hap pend on its own for many centuries, this time we hurried it along and are now furiously trying to undo it.

I for one will keep living like I give a damn and do my best to prepare my family for the future.
One in which we should, maybe, be prepared to adopt semi-nomadic lives again.

Which ethic should I follow today?

The trouble with making the choice to be compassionate about more than one thing, whether it be animals, the environment, children in sweat shops etc, is that some days you find it almost impossible not to run up against one while trying to do the other.
For example today we drove to town for two reasons, 1.The bus is more expensive (really!) and 2.We had a lot of things to do (and carry)and would have missed the bus.
So we immediately run up against problem number 1. We wanted to hit the charity shops but knew what we wanted would be too bulky to get on the bus. So is charity shop the way or should we have stayed home, spent MORE money and brought it new?? But why buy new when there is a cheaper 2nd hand one??

Breath!

The next thing is the goods I brought.
I was after two things in particular cushions and puppy stuff.
Well I fell at many hurdles there.
One of the cushions I brought was not only silk but filled with duck feathers!! A double anti-vegan whammy!
Then I found the perfect tiny collar for my new puppy...but in leather.

I could have course have brought both of these items in ethical materials, even eco-friendly materials, but they would have been new...manufactured for ME, using up carbon and resources and ....Lots of other stuff!!

So I think I have to draw a line.

You can drive yourself NUTS trying to be a super hero for everyone.
I think that buying from charity shops absolves me from a few nasties. I am in effect buying someone elses "rubbish" Things they no longer want and they COULD (and many people DO!) have thrown these items in a landfill rather than gift them to a charity shop.

Now don't get me wrong.
I wouldn't go and buy a leather jacket or fur coat because it is someones rubbish, I would feel very uncomfortable doing that, but a wee collar for my pup? (99p!!! Never been used!!) or a cushion for my soon to be built sofa? (75p!!!)no. Im not going to feel torn over these.

The charity shop is a win win.
I get to buy items I need (also brought some Xmas pressies for people today!)at prices I can afford. I not only make a donation to charity BUT I also keep unwanted goods out of landfills.
Also, in the case of books, movies, CD's etc I often take them back a few weeks later, so the charity shop gets to sell them again.

You need to pick your battles for how you live.
I would love to buy all our clothes and shoes from ethical, fairtrade shops but honestly can't.
At least by buying clothes from Charity shops I am re-using something someone didn;t want AND I am NOT buying first hand cheap made-in-a-sweatshop clothing.

Pick your battles, draw your lines, live your life.