I've had a pretty good day today - I've got quite a lot done. It's always a satisfying feeling when I manage to empty the Today section in Things.
Killing two birds with one stone, I added all the letters from local MPs that have been cluttering up my desk for the last few weeks to the SAEN and SEEFoE websites. I also went down to the airport and took some photos, one of which I then used in the design for a leaflet SAEN will be distributing when the second phase of the JAAP consultation finally gets started. Given current economic situation and the large number of redundancies at the airport following the collapse of Flightline, though, there has to be some doubt about whether Eddie Stobart will want to go ahead with the airport expansion plans - particularly as the airport would then cost them an extra £5 million.
I was particularly pleased with the WordPress plugin I wrote this evening for the Marine Reserves website. EDM 337 is supportive of the campaign's aims and I wanted to show on the website how many MPs have signed it. In the typical way that the Government does everything IT-related badly, there's no nice RSS feed of this information, so I have to scrape it from the EDM page directly. In order to make it more efficient, I cache the resulting value and only fetch it again if it's been more than 12 hours since I last got it. The information is then stored in the Wordpress database. Not bad for the first plugin I've ever written, I reckon! You can download it if you want, not that it's likely to be much use to you. :-)
Following the realisation that I only made two blog entries during the whole of 2008, I resolved to do better this year and when I read that a band of SUCS-related ne'er-do-wells are having a "Blog-a-Week" competition, I thought I might as well give it a go. Willwel is keeping track of everyone's posts on this calendar. So that's another thing achieved - my second Blog-a-Week!
Saturday was a busy, but successful day. It started with a trip to Billericay High Street with the South East Essex Friends of the Earth to get people to sign Big Ask postcards. As an incentive, we were supplying two free energy saving light bulbs courtesy of the Energy Saving Trust to all comers. We gave away 428 light bulbs and completed over 200 postcards, so it was a good morning's work.
After lunch, I headed to my great aunt's house to organise a barbecue to celebrate the completion of her new conservatory. The rest of my family (except my older sister, who is in Scotland with her boyfriend) turned up later on, along with my aunt and uncle and my great aunt's next door neighbours, who had been instrumental in warning about the shoddy workmanship of the original builder of the conservatory. It really had been bad - the walls weren't at right angles, the breeze blocks weren't parallel with the bricks and the whole thing was sagging. It all came down and was rebuilt by the builder who did our extension. Anyway, it's fine now and the barbecue was a great success.
Once we had cleared everything away and got the dining furniture back into the kitchen, I headed for home and then played in the final of the Tron World Cup, an Armagetron Advanced Fortress tournament that I hosted and helped organise. We (the UK) were playing against Germany, and it was a very close match indeed. We ended up winning 3-2, despite having 6 players to their 7.
This morning, when I took Morphy for his walk in Churchill Gardens, I took the camera with me. Well in fact, I took him for his walk, remembered I'd intended to bring the camera, went and got it and came back again. I think Morphy thought it was Christmas or something, what with getting two consecutive walks. He was certainly very waggy when we went out again.
Anyway, the reason for taking the camera was to get the photo you see on the right (click on it to see a larger version).
I really like this path, because suddenly you feel as though you're not actually in central Southend at all. The path runs through what I think is a disused clay pit, from the days when they still made bricks at Milton Hall. This means that with it being a fairly long way below the level of Victoria Avenue and surrounded by trees, you can hardly hear any noise other than the birds singing.