Winter

I'm not sure where the time has gone lately, so apologies for not posting over the last couple of months. Maybe I need to consider my New Years resolution for 2011!

Winter has well and truly arrived at Hillside, along with a delivery of two tonnes of wood pellets that we've been making good use of. Unlike this time last year when we were having a few teething issues with the pellet feed auger, all is well with the boiler and it's chugging along quite happily. This is as long as I remember to fill up the hopper, something that I didn't do in time a couple of weeks ago when the sub zero conditions resulted in us using far more fuel than normal.

The bitterly cold weather has meant we've had to call it a day on most jobs outside so we've restarted work on the second-fix carpentry. An opportune couple of weeks holiday between jobs has meant we've been able to get all the architraves along with most of the skirting. We've used pine even though we are painting the wood. It's not as cheap as MDF but we didn't want to use something with formaldehyde in it, let alone a material that produces very fine dust when sanded which could well turn out to be the next asbestos.

With Christmas fast approaching we've decided to go for the budget and recycled option on the tree front this year - so the circa 1980 plastic tree has been retrieved from the dark of the lost and is now decorated and illuminating one corner of the kitchen/diner, with LED lights of course!

Needless to say the freezing weather means there's very little to report on from the garden and allotment; the leeks are frozen in the ground and other than the last few potatoes from this summer's bumper crop stored in the shed there's no other produce out there. Once Christmas is over I think we'll have to start looking at what crops we want to grow in 2011. Roll on Spring!