A Time of Magic

It used to be that shopping for spare car parts involved trailing round lots of scrap yards in search of that elusive part for your car or alternatively of paying an absolute fortune for it from the dealer.

These days though the likes of Mopar performance parts offer a massive range of surprisingly affordable parts for lots of cars. The scrap yard option is, of course, still there but realistically I suspect that most people just find it a depressing waste of time these days.

You might not think of them as technology but rain barrels are most definitely technology, albeit old and cute technology rather than new technology.

Whilst you wouldn’t want to be using them to collect water if you live in a fairly polluted area, most of us are fortunate in living in relatively clean areas, even if it is in a city. Collecting the water off your roof will bring in a surprising amount of water to your barrel for most of the year although you’ll not really know in advance just how much that might be as it depends on both the amount of rainfall and the effective area of your roof that you’re collecting from.

So, you may find that you can do anything from occasionally washing your hair to bathing with it now and again (you’d be very unfortunate to be able to bathe every day with it!). Drinking is also an option though if you look at the roof that it’s washing over you might think twice about that and, for the most part, people use it in ways that don’t involve drinking it.

As always, choosing gifts for her can seem like a complete minefield.

If you’ve started off working your way through a matched sequence of jewelry you eventually reach the end of that and so it is with most things. Once you’ve been with someone for a while it’s even worse as you’ll eventually have bought them everything that you can easily think of. Even consumable items like perfume are a problem as you can’t really keep buying the same thing every year and besides Christmas presents should be something that the person would love but wouldn’t necessarily buy for themselves, not a simple refil.

Fortunately this year, there’s the option of buying a girly computer with all those cute little netbooks around and that’s something that I’m thinking of. The smaller size is more appropriate for women and you’ve a selection of colours to choose in most of them too. Think around a couple of hundred for one although you can spend twice that.