If you live in Bradford you might want to consider giving a home to an unwanted cat or kitten. An appeal has recently been launched because there are more than 100 unwanted cat and kittens at rescue centres in Bradford that need a good home. The RSPCA has recently seen a huge increase in the number of cats being taken in and their facilities are now full. Kittens usually don’t stay in rescue homes very long but adult cats can be hard to re-home. However, giving a home to an older cat can be a rewarding experience. I took on two cats that were about a year old and have now had them around three years. When they came to me they hated people but are now well adjusted and although they still don’t like visitors, they are very friendly with me and my husband. You can view some of the cats wanting a home at the Bradford and District branch website. Some of them include Louis, Ryan and Tilly pictured below.

Ryan


Tilly



Louis

Ikea has started selling flat-pack homes. The homes are on sale at their Gateshead store. They have a timber frame and come with their own plot of land. The concept started in Sweden in the 1990s with around 1,000 flat-pack homes being sold every year. The homes are called BoKlok and are made using renewable materials and featuring solar panels so are eco-friendly. The properties will all be south-facing in order to catch as much sunlight as possible to help warm the house. An area of land has been set aside near Gateshead for an estate of 90 homes. The homes cost between £100,000 and £125,000 for a flat, £132,500-£139,500 for a two bedroom house and £150,000 for a three bedroom house. First time buyers on low incomes will be given priority in the allocation process. If the project is successful Ikea will expand to 12 more sites over the next 18 months. The homes are provided ready assembled, which seems a shame, half of the fun of Ikea’s products is building them.

A new Wallace and Gromit short film is coming to TV next year. It is called Trouble At’ Mill and is about Wallace and Gromit’s attempts to run a bakery. The half hour long film will be screened BBC One late next year. I’m looking forward to it.

I read this article the other day that suggests one in ten British adults has been a victim of mass marketing scams. The most common scams include Nigerian pen scams and notifications of winning a foreign lottery. More than 3.2 million people have been conned out of their hard earned cash by one of these scams according to the Office of Fair Trading. Many of the gangs who run these scams are based in English speaking parts of Nigeria and West Africa and use their profits as funding for drug trafficking, according this article. In a month long investigation in Nigeria investigators seized more than 4,500 fake cheques, postal orders and bank drafts with a value of around £8m. Most of the scams involve the victim having to pay an advance fee to claim a prize or to have a large amount of money transferred to their account. As always if it seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

I read this article about a computerised pillow designed to stop snoring. The pillow is attached to a computer which analyses snoring noises, it then reduces or enlarges compartments within the pillow to help nasal airflow and minimise snoring. I wonder what it does with a really bad case of snoring that it can’t stop; maybe it gives up and suffocates the user…Job done.

I read this article about how Ebay and Paypal are working to try and cut down on fake emails. They are currently working with Yahoo using their anti-phising technology to try and block fake emails by validating the sender with a digital signature. The emails they are targeting are the ones that look exactly like an email from Paypal or Ebay but if you click on the link you are directed to a completely different website that looks the same. They are designed to fool you into entering your user name and password into their fake site, thus compromising your account. Personally I never click on a link from any email that looks like its come from Paypal or Ebay. Instead I tend to log into my account, if there are any issues that need my attention I will have received a notification about them. However, 99% of the emails are spam.

Boots have started selling a product called Expert Sensitive Facial Spritz. The product costs £3.99 for a 125ml can. The can contains only one ingredient, water. It claims that it can protect the skin from dryness. It appears though that you could create the same effect for nothing by simply putting some tap water into a spray bottle.

John Lewis is branching out into the grocery business with the opening of a food hall in the basement of their Oxford Street store. It is designed to cater for local workers and shoppers and is part of the stores £64m makeover. John Lewis has linked with Waitrose to launch the new department, which if successful could also be extended to other locations around the country. The store targets the increasing market for premium food and will have an in-store bakery with 40 different types of bread, over 109 lines of fish on its fish counter and 115 cheeses half of which are British. And if you fancy a bottle of champagne you will have more than 80 to choose from. It sounds great.

A grant has been given by the lottery fund to try and help Britain’s bats. All 17 species of Britain’s bats have declined since the end of the industrial revolution. The Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £600,000 to conservationists is designed to increase the awareness of the sorts of conditions bats need to survive. The project has been called England Bat Count and will give people training in how to spot bats as well as information about how to encourage them back to their former territories.

I was reading this article in which a survey was carried out by the British Market Research Bureau, in order to see whether people would be prepared to pay for plastic bags. The results suggested that three quarters of adults would be prepared to pay for a reusable carrier bag. The survey is aimed at finding out whether it is feasible for supermarkets to stop giving out free bags and instead charge for bags. When asked how much they would pay for a reusable bag 14% said they would pay £2 or more, 64% would pay between 50p and £1 and 11% said they would pay 20p.

Personally I think that supermarkets supply bags much too readily. I have been to Tesco and brought a single loaf of bread and have been offered a bag, when I don’t really need one. I now take a rucksack with me for my shopping and only use the supermarket bags to wrap a product that might leak out on the way home. Even these bags I later reuse. It is easy to see how much rubbish is caused by these often unwanted carrier bags, when you stand outside any supermarket. I don’t think charging a few pence for carrier bags will impact much on the cost of most peoples shopping but I wonder if it might make them twice about taking a bag they don’t need, or even better encourage them to take their own bags.

Campbell’s condensed soup, famous for its red and white label is to be rebranded. It will now be called Batchelors condensed soup and will carry the slogan “Formerly Campbell’s. Same great taste.” The soup has to be rebranded due to the fact that the brand name expires in 2008. When Premier foods brought the Campbell Soup Company, they did not purchase the brand as well. The recipe of the soup will remain unchanged. The Campbell Soup Company will still produce Campbell’s Condensed Soup but are not allowed to sell the brand in the UK for another five years.

I took these pictures of Lucy and Ollie on the shed the other day. They like sitting on the shed because they can see whats happening on the other side of the wall.

We made this pie the other day. We didn't have any plain flour so we had to make the pie crust with self raising flour but it turned out ok. We made the pastry for the pie crust and then cooked the spinach. We put the cooked spinach into the pie crust, followed by crumbled feta cheese and a handful of grated cheddar before finishing with the top crust of the pie. You can see some of the stages below.

Staffordshire cheese has now been given protected status under EU law. This means that only cheese from that region can be called Staffordshire cheese. The cheese is said to have a distinctive taste and texture because of the diet the dairy cows are fed on. I haven’t tried it yet but might have to get some.

If you have ever planted some seeds and found that none of them grew into plants, then you, like me, probably put it down to the fact that you are not very good at gardening. This article, however, suggests that as many as 99 per cent of seeds in packets are dead. Seeds were tested from 15 different suppliers, with only six companies meeting industry standards. Seeds from Edwin and Tucker were the worst with 99 per cent of delphinium seeds being dead and the others unhealthy. Unwins also did badly with two per cent of their delphinium seeds producing healthy plants. Thompson and Morgan came out best with 83 per cent of seeds producing healthy plants. I usually buy my seeds from Thompson and Morgan, mainly because they have such a good range and looking at these results, I will continue to do in the future.

In the latest news surrounding Northern Rock it has announced a cut back on the range of mortgage products they will offer. Two thirds of its mortgage product range is going to be axed in what seems to be a major product overhaul. This change is unlikely to affect the banks risk profile because it is still prepared to lend up to 125% of a properties value, something which is the root cause of its present problems. Despite the changes rates on their fixed rate and variable mortgages are likely to remain unchanged.