Over the last months, I have been initiating a worm composting project in our highrise community in Edinburgh. I found a very enthusiastic supporter in Jenni Marrow, the chair of the Muirhouse Community Council, who managed to get a waste recycling grant from Edinburgh Council for this pilot project. Unfortunately, Jenni died in the middle of May, the funeral was pretty big with about 120 or so attendants. However, Jenni worked hard for so many more people – she pretty much single-handedly managed to derail the privatisation of social housing in Edinburgh by campaigning hard against the stock transfer which had a multi-million pound PR project, and she won against them.

Last weekend, we started the allotment rhubarb crumble season. Delicious! It’s such an easy thing to grow and cook and I don’t understand why rhubarb is so expensive in the shops – £1.88 per pound or about £3.86 per kilogram. The last two years I had less rhubarb than the first year, by minimising the four or five rhubarb plants to just one gigantic one, which seems to have died now and needs to be split into all the little rhubarby knots developing out of it. The first year I had so much rhubarb I did not know what to do with it – I distributed it to neighbours and friends and fellow allotmenteers and had gigantic loads of plastic bags full to give away.

I had a dream this weekend, but a less dramatic one than Martin Luther King’s. I dreamt that my three guinea pigs had multiplied into a colony of 40 and come all with their own cages or so, and I went on holiday and quickly needed to find people to look after and keep them. So, my task in my dream was to match up guinea pig personalities with friends’ and colleagues, and it was a quite weird task. Luckily Minilli, Guinea Lee and Misty weren’t appearing in my dream. The three pumpkins are doing well though I haven’t yet managed to integrate Misty into Minillis and Guinea Lees close-knitted community.

SB is proud to have published more blog entries over the last few months than I did. So, though am not really keen to do some blogging I’ll just summarise some of what’s been going on – I have been starting to participate in the Couchsurfing networking site. As I haven’t been able to stay anywhere yet, I have just hosted people, and experiences differed quite a lot: my first guest was a really nice guy from Germany, who cooked us an excellent Salmon and Leek lasagne and we got on really well. My next guests were from Australia and America, and because I have written in my description that I like leftwing, alternative people I ended up with some kind of spiritual ghostwhisperer and energyhealers on their way to Findhorn Community.

This year’s NUJ ADM in Belfast also had a blog, although it seems nobody knew about it, few contributed, and it wasn’t linked from the NUJ’s front page. The Blog for the ADM in Birmingham seemed to be quite successful last year, and the year before in 2006 in Liverpool seemed to start the whole blogging experience off. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go this year, and I am a bit doubtful that I actually would have wanted to go either. It seems to be easier to go as a student than a member of the NUJ anyways, as there are only 2 positions for the Edinburgh Freelance Branch available, but last year, four students from Edinburgh were able to go to the ADM.