The last three months (two and a half) have been wonderful but the down side is that my already poor housekeeping standards slipped even further.

So now it's the 'back to school house clean frenzy' which has already seen me blitz my disgracefully cluttered bedroom, work through a veritable mountain of ironing, clean the cooker, the fridge and the freezer (well the last of these is still ongoing - takes a heck of a lot of hot water to melt that much ice! No auto defrost on this freezer) and sort through a cupboard that was chockablock with ancient storage containers, a large proprotion of which will be joinging the legion of the lost. 

In between times I have made a pot of soup and some bread (bread machine variety) so at least there will be something tasty for tea.

Every time I blitz my house I tell myself I'll do better, will keep on top of it, won't leave it so long... and every time life gets in the way.  But then no-one ever did say on their death-bed "I wish I'd devoted my life to housework"!!

All in all a good way to spend the weekend, and perversely I actually quite enjoy intense bursts of housework - it's the routine stuff that I dislike so much!

This afternoon I grubbed up and disposed of the triffids (tomato plants) that have graced my kitchen window cill (sill?) all summer.  As I did so, I garnered one final harvest of small green triffidberries:

Not enough to do anything much with (would be a very teeny batch of triffedberry chutney, and I had fried green triffidberries yesterday) but I will put them to use.

Now I have daylight in my kitchen and, shock horror, a view!

I have enjoyed growing the tomatoes, which have yielded a steady supply all summer long.  Now it is time to return the plants to the earth as compost, their work complete, harvest gathered.

That bit in the vine image/parable of John 15 about branches being torn off and burned is not (imo) about worthlessness or waste, it is about a use once the function of fruit-bearing is over.  As my tomato plants and the compost in which they grew go the way of all flesh (and plants) they will enrich the good earth for another season... so the last fruits pave the way for the new growing season.

Evidently I am a Severus Snape... you always wondered!

(from imgur.com)

... you are already one week into the 2013 porridge season, yum!

... you have taken your red duffle coat to the dry cleaners ready for its fourth winter (fourth! I could never have dreamed of that when I bought it!)

... you pick the last few green tomatoes and fry them up for lunch (the triffids will be disposed of over the weekend)

... the cat looks at you pleadingly until you relent and switch on the central heating because, actually you have a very cold nose yourself!

... 'Strictly' is back on TV!

... you are finally knuckling down to writing about your sabbatical visits!!

This week BUGB launched their new-look website.  Gone is the intense green and instead we have gentle shades of blue.  And a new logo, about which I have to confess I am not sure.  I 'get' it, and it does, as claimed, have all the elements of the old logo, but I'm not sure I like it.  Undoubtedly it is 'cleaner' and more 'contemporary' but I can't help feeling the attempts to keep the 'old' symbols of cross, water and fish have resulted in something a bit contrived.  See what you think:

The site is easy to navigate and I was quite taken with the use of an external resource for the 'what is a christian' section, which is not dogmatic or narrow and does not exalt any one understanding over any other on 'hot topics'.  Of course there is also a section that explains more about what Baptists (Anglo-Cymraeg variety) are like.

I like the new site a lot more than like the new logo!  As rebrands go, this one seems positive - a softer, less clinical feel, easy navigation and not too defensive.  Having recently done some user testing for another website that was being relaunched, I have the teeniest inkling of just how complicated it is to design something that works on diverse platforms with varied browsers.  I think there is some tiny glitchette with Windows 7 and Firefox as each time the page loads I get a black rectangle top left for a few seconds, but overall it seems to working very well.  Huge thanks to all who worked so hard to design, test and launch the site, which I look forward to using for a long time to come.

You can have a look at the website here