Now I’ve caught up with myself  I can settle back to blogging almost in time for Sustainable Living Project’s first birthday.  (It was Monday I think!)  To celebrate I’ve made an archive for my witterings and also I’ve added an extra page with some of my favourite photos. 

This time last year I could just about send an email, it was quite a learning curve setting this up – vertical in fact.  The best thing about blogging is that it has made us get on with things.  I loved getting better at using my camera, though shamefully still haven’t read the instructions.  We made progress with the slope and it was fantastic to eat my own sprouts and parsnips at Christmas.  We’ve met new people through our project, both on and off line.  The guys who turned up in canoes at our 350 off-road soup day inspired us to get hold of a canoe of our own - it had its first maiden voyage with all three of us this weekend and it’s going to be such fun.

Things don’t always work out the way you think they are going to.  During the summer I was visiting Granny Goo and was unable to write a post about what was going on here so instead chose to write a generic filler about how I use bicarbonate of soda to clean.  I didn’t think too carefully about it, I just bashed it out.  We were going to try and film Goldilocks’ volcano exploding but all you could see was shadows and me and Granny Goo could be heard yelling at each other to get out of the light!  All you got was a picture of the volcano in the end.  The funny thing was that the brain of Google, which moves in mysterious ways, decided that the whole world should be able to share my wisdom in cleaning with bicarbonate of soda.  That post gets way more traffic than any other!

While I’ve been busy doing my ‘water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink’ thing my spam queue has grown quite large.  I’ll delete it in a minute but first of all I’m going to copy the jokes left by the guy trying to sell viagra.  They are perfectly, Christmas cracker corny and I will recycle them into home made crackers next Christmas.  Here’s just a few:

How do you get holy water? Boil the hell out of it.

Why is the letter A like a flower? Because a Bee comes after it!

What do you call a crazy baker? A dough nut.

What did the Scotsman do when he couldn’t find a pair of pants? He kilt himself.

What did one wall say to the other wall? Meet you at the corner.

What do prisoners use to call each other? Cell phones.

Thank you Mr Viagra man, sorry I didn’t include a link!

And finally a pretty picture because it’s the SLP birthday and I can if I want to!  We went on a snowdrop walk this week, aren’t they fantastic? 

Writing this saves me editing today’s post right now and I can task avoid until next Thursday -Hooray for Blog Action Day!  Of course I’m inviting fellow bloggers to click the button and join me on Thursday 15th October.

Besides frolicking men however (Gossypium do rather nice stuff for women and children too by the way) I thought it was high time I included a blogroll.  At least we can keep our feet dry when exploring the web. These are some of my favourite places to visit currently and I’m sure I’ll be adding to the list.

First up is A Self Sufficient Life.  I take my hat off to Mr and Mrs Dirtyboots, I don’t know how they find time to do all the stuff they do and then write about it aswell, even their three dogs have a blog!  Well worth a visit for lots of ideas, recipes and pointers. 

I visit The  Birds In the Meadow just to drink in the beautiful nature photography.  Bird takes fantastic pictures often accompanied by thoughtful and lucid prose.  She makes nice stuff too.  I wish I was that clever!

When I first started this blog I made a deliberate and conscious decision to try and keep things light-hearted.  My reasons for doing this were largely based upon the notion there is no need to preach to the converted but every need not to alienate everybody else.  A sustainable future necessarily has to involve everybody.  If you find my ‘eco-topia’ approach a little unrealistic and sacharrine a visit to Environment Chaos is probably the antidote.  This site deserves a wider audience.

Focus Organic is one of my favourite sites for having a peep at what’s going on over the pond.  It is a gateway to all manner of fascinating blogs and articles.  Sephanie is a lovely lady to deal with who works really hard at promoting eco-sites, go visit and take your blog with you!  

Forum for the Future is probably already well known to many of you.  It examines issues of sustainability from a broader perspective and I feel offers a realistic basis for business initiatives and  for policy making at local, national and international levels.  I am never bored by a visit here.

Mrs Green is another energetic blogger to say the least.  Little Green Blog offers a really good snapshot of what’s hot on the green barometer in bite-sized digestible posts – I think the idea is you can make quick visits, but I just end up reading more posts! 

Positive News is a recent discovery but now I’ve found it I’m going to be a regular visitor.  It is what it says it is, go there for a lift and inspiration.

Last, but certainly not least as they say, is Self Sufficient-ish.  A great site and a great resource, I’ve learned so much from visiting here.  It has a really lively and active forum also, full of lots of friendly people with very silly names like..er…Goo?

A nice wet weather pic for you of sparkling horsetail ferns!