It snowed again whilst I was out Christmas shopping yesterday, when I arrived in town it was coming down quickly and settling and I was worried that I would have to leave to get home safely but it didn’t come to anything and as I left town there was just a light sparking in the corners that we left undisturbed, which could just as likely been the remains of a hard frost as snow.
I’m pleased with my Christmas shopping this year; most of it has been bought online but not from big store websites. Some have been from Folksy and others from individual websites of the people who make the items. And of course there where the presents the came from the LETS market.
What I haven’t bought from these places I have tried to get locally, even if it has just been the local supermarket. Yesterday I went to Gloucester for two presents these were both things that I couldn’t find local, or didn’t have a clue what to buy the person so needed ‘browsing’ time for ideas. I have one more present on my list and then have home-made hampers to help put together for Rhys’s family.
It would have been lovely to have made more of the presents this year, but time is never on my side and I dislike starting to think about Christmas to early as having to long a build up makes the day feel almost like a let down when it finally arrives.
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A big change around here in the last few weeks is the Rhys has a job, he is working shifts so isn’t always off on the same days as me. He also starts work earlier than me so even on the days that I haven’t been working I have been awake earlier than normal but I am enjoying it.
For the last few mornings I have got up and spent leisurely time surfing the internet, reading blogs and discovering new ones, catching up with friends I haven’t had time to stay in contact with via email and researching this that are important to me that I never seem to have time to spend reading about.
For example, since I first watched A Farm for the Future I have wanted to find out much more about grass, a subject I doubt many people even think about let alone want to find out more about which means that the information I am looking for is buried and hidden away but I have finally started to learn more.
There are ten thousand species of grass, it makes up 25% of all plants on the planet. Rice is a type of grass, which started being cultivated for food by humans ten thousand years again, with over half of the world’s population now relying on it as a food staple. Wheat, another kind, underpinned the development of Western civilization and now covers more of the land than any other kind of plant
This morning on the way back from dropping him of I called by at the allotment to see what was happening up there, very luckily as it would turn out as one of the nets had come off the kale and the rabbits had eaten half of it, stems and all, right down to the ground. I pulled the net that was on them back over and then added an extra one, which I had to unfreeze from its spot on the ground, for extra protection.
A Life Less Simple 