It's me ... real me ... not just scheduled posts ......

Haha ..... I think I've managed to catch it though ... you don't get away from me that easily!!

 

 

 

Books and cats, they're all I need to keep me sane and happy, oh and Lovely Hubby, a couple of dogs and a rather large flock of unruly chickens.

 

*** *** ***

 

We're just back from our two weeks of hard labour, err I mean holiday in Wales (the next person who asks 'did you enjoy your holiday' I'll deck good and proper, I'm shattered), and I'll be back on here tomorrow with a proper Blog post, but first there's the little matter of the 289 emails to trawl through and a few of my favourite Blogs to catch up with.   You've all been so busy and productive while I've been missing from the internet there's loads to read, I'll do my best to get around a few aided and abetted no doubt by a couple of cups of coffee and a few little bikkies. 

 

It's nice to be back, and the good news ..... we actually have a Broadband link to the new house now, although we did have to buy a satellite dish to get it !!  I'll let you see a little more of what we've been up to over the course of the coming week.  And now .... with the background sound of Lovely Hubby riding round on the little ride on lawn mower to get a new spot ready for moving Chicken World to later on this afternoon I'm off round Blogworld.

 

Sue xx

I Must Remember This ....

 

 

I must remember this ..... I really must.

 

Sue xx

Old Trees

 

We had the tree surgeons in last week we had no choice ...

 

 

.. the tree that was over the lovely little Wendy House had come down so low over it, it was literally inches away from crashing through the roof ... who builds a gorgeous (and expensive) child's dream under a tree with such a dangerous slant ... our landlord that's who!!

 

 

Half a day later it was in slices.  Poor tree, I hate to see decades and decades of growth gone in a few hours.

 

 

The gorgeous old Apple tree in front of his office is no more either, it crashed to the ground itself a couple of weeks ago, and while he was here the tree surgeon made it all safe and chopped the wood into transportable logs for us to take to Wales.

 

It will burn well in a couple of years and Apple wood smells divine as it burns, but it's sad to see two lovely trees gone.

 

Sue xx

Plans

 

Soon the house will be all finished, well as finished as we need it to be and the time will come to make plans.  This picture is a plan by the guru of all self sufficient types the great John Seymour of how to be completely self sufficient on a smallish patch of land, I think it looks lovely although slightly impractical for us to copy being at the bottom of a rather large Welsh hill ....

 

 

... this was Lovely Hubby's brilliant computer done plan of our Veggie Patch here, so I could make notes of what went where and what would go there the following year.

 

With our wallets firmly padlocked again, save for really needed and budgeted for items I am making plans that will incorporate the  polytunnel, the net tunnel and the new raised beds ....

 

... and I have also spotted something during my trawling of the internet that would be the most perfect thing to help us sell our surplus fruits and veggies and our free range eggs at the farm gate next year once I am back in production.

 

I think my Lovely Hubby will be able to knock one of these together out of his stash of wood .... and then I could give it a coat of paint, in a rather fetching shade of green  :-)

 

Sue xx

Honey and Burns

 

Honey, that luscious stuff that Lovely Hubby loves so much and wants to raise his own bees in the future to produce.  He loves it on toast and it's gorgeous in so many recipes, flapjacks, cakes, drizzled over veggies for the final five minutes of roasting.

 

 

Last week though I slathered it onto a nasty burn I got from catching a slipping bread tin straight from the oven with my arm.   I know we do the daftest things don't we, better to let it go but instinct takes over and you catch something, knowing full well how hot it is.

 

At first I did my old trick of putting on some Lavender Essential oil straight away, it takes the pain away and usually stops the scar from being as bad.  But this time although it partly did the trick the burn was too deep and too wide and as it healed the scab kept being stretched and then coming off leaving sore exposed flesh once again.

 

So I changed tack and went to my second failsafe method, I put liberal amounts of honey onto the now scab-less burn and covered it with a sterile plaster.  The next day I removed it and put a slightly less liberal application on and covered it again.

 

After two days the healing had really started and I left the dressing off whenever I wasn't doing messy or dirty jobs.

 

It healed together well ....

 

 

... and this is my arm after just over a week, the mark is perfectly flat, not sore in the slightest and no longer red and inflamed.

 

So two natural products both brilliant in their own way.  In future if it is a small surface burn I will continue with my Lavender Essential Oil, but if it goes deeper or wider I will turn to Honey straight away.

 

No dashing to the chemist and buying special artificial burn remedies, just opening up the storecupboard and grabbing something that is already to hand.

 

Oh and by the way ... I can't stand the taste of the stuff .....

 

Sue xx

What can I say .....

 

What can I say ..... to simply say thank you seems inadequate, but THANK YOU.

 

You all pulled me up and set me straight just when the doubts were creeping in. 

 

You're all absolutely right, maybe I just needed someone else to tell me, and boy did you tell me.  I snuck onto the computer for ten minutes last night while Lovely Hubby was in the shower to see if there were one or two replies and there were 41 comments all telling me in no uncertain terms what I needed to be told.  I lay in the bath that LH ran me after his shower, thinking over what I had just read, glowing in the warmth of your involvement and care for me and it straightened me out.  We have worked so hard for so long to get to this position, owning our own home, filling it with the things we want, the things that we have wanted and needed for so long.  If I don't lighten up and enjoy this moment I'll miss it forever, because this is our one and only burst of spending, our one chance to set ourselves up and get it right.  What we do now has to last forever and I have no right to tarnish it with negative and downright daft thoughts.

 

New page, fresh leaf, I will continue to show you what we do and what we buy and I WILL ENJOY DOING IT :-)

 

THANK YOU.

 

And thank you to Karan for my lovely cosy socks, a gift from a friend who started off as a Blog reader and who has turned into a confidante and true friend who comes for coffee, chats away and lets me into her life as much as I let her into mine.  They will be travelling with me in the morning and until the wood burner and the Aga are installed at least I know I will have cosy feet inside my boots.  Blogging brings such treasure and brings me into contact with so many truly lovely people.

 

It helped my head slightly yesterday afternoon too, I had taken off the summer weight duvet and replaced it on the bed with our old heavier weight one.  We have new duvets in both weights for the new house, so these will not be needed again.  Usually I air the one I have just removed, wash it if necessary and then store it away, but what to do with this one if it is not to be needed for a bed again?

 

And then I realised ... the dogs need another bed. 

 

 In our house the dogs (and cats) have lots of beds.  They have their main ones, the ones they sleep in at night, outside ones, living room ones, yes they still prefer the sofa like all pets do, but in our new house with our new sofa we have decided they will not be allowed up.  So we were going to buy them a super duper comfy long style bed that they could snuggle up on while we sit on the 'posh, animal banned from' sofa.

 

As I folded the summer weight duvet I realised  I could make it 'doggie sofa shaped', I lay it on the floor to check the 'comfiness' of it, the dogs immediately got the idea and came to test it out.

 

The verdict was obvious.    "Yes Mum ..... this is perfect, please can we have it ?"

I decided to stitch right through in a number of places to hold it together and then I will blanket stitch around the three open edges, when LH saw me doing the these stitches he said "so it's going to be a Chesterfield then" haha ....not quite ..... but it will be comfy and by the time I've finished it will look posh!!  I have a large fleece blanket that I can cut to size and make two covers for it so they can be popped in the washing machine when needed.  So the dogs have a new bed that smells of their favourite humans (not in a bad way I hasten to add) and this will bring them some comfort at bedtime during these weeks of upheaval, and I didn't have to spend a penny.

 

 

This has all made me realise ... well this and a lot of you telling me so, that it's these little things, the saving of money in what seems like incidental ways that has made it possible for us to save so quickly and get to where we are today.  Yes I could have rushed out and bought a super duper all performing top of the range doggy bed (the one in the photo is £42.99) but I thought things through and saved myself the cash ...... I'm back on track :-)

 

 

And as I told myself to 'lighten up' ......

 

I did ... literally, went to the hairdressers got it all virtually chopped off and then used half a box of lightener on it, other half saved for eight weeks down the line when it'll need doing again.

 

 

New head of hair, new balanced mind set, last box of dye from my start of the year stash.

 (See the page at the top of the Blog 'I Love Saving Money - 2013' for more details of my New Year stash).

 

I'm back on track and back on form - thank you.

 

Sue xx

Eating on the Cheap .... and a Dilemma

 

While we've been travelling backwards and forwards and with no real cooking facilities inWales save for the microwave and the Remoska, and of course little time to cook anyway, because frankly who wants to down paintbrushes and start rustling up a three course meal ... not me for sure.  I've been spending the day before we travel bulk cooking things that can just about survive a journey and can then cope being kept in just a cool bag for a couple of days.

 

We have had two main meals of choice which have been homemade soups and curries.   The soup is simple and is just made with my brilliant value soup mix and different additions to use up what has been leftover in the fridge at the end of the week.  This time it was simply the end rindy bit of a Parmesan cheese, it really does add flavour and if I don't use them straight away I pop them in a tub in the freezer for future use.

 

If you decant lots of dried foodstuffs into jars it makes sense to put any cooking instructions somewhere you can refer to them if needed in the future.  I used to put them on the back or bottom of the jar but lately I've been taping them to the inside of the lid, nice and neat and it doesn't clutter up the outside of the jar. (just a little tip, I seem to have turned into a 'tipaholic')

 

It's amazing how manky the veggies can be and still taste gorgeous if you add them to a curry.

 

 

I added a couple of homegrown carrots to this one too, boy oh boy was it hot!! 

 

As well as being easy to reheat in the microwave most of these things were bought in bulk from Approved Foods so cost literally pennies, so much better than getting in a takeaway and so much quicker too, when our nearest takeaway would take us at least 20 minutes in the car each way.

 

 

Of course there are some tasty little treats too that I'm rustling up, this cupcake mix cost me just 25p a pack and when a spoonful of butter has been added and one of our own eggs it must only bring the cost to about 35 - 40p for 6 cupcakes.  I made them the 'old school' way like Butterfly Cakes but without splitting the 'wings', just so that there was sponge on top to stop the cream sticking to the box they travelled in.

 

So although we're eating a bit 'snacky' at the moment and having lots of 'ready meals' the cost is kept right down and I know that when we stop for a meal or a break we are eating something filling and tasty.

 

And the dilemma ?

 

This Blog has always been my 'online diary' and as such I write about what's happening in our lives on a day to day basis, the progress we are making, the mistakes we make and the things that we and our animals do.  All this is done with the idea that we can look back ourselves either weekly, monthly or way down the line in the future and see that progress was and is being made, and when we are losing hope of things ever being finished we can look back and say 'yes things have moved on, we have accomplished some or most of what we set out to do' there are the words and pictures to prove it.

 

I never set out to have hundreds of Followers or so many of you from all over the world reading my words each day, don't get me wrong I absolutely LOVE that you do and I love the feedback and the comments you leave me.  I love the contact with each and every one of you and sometimes I'm downright amazed that you like being a part of our lives so much that you take the time to do so.

 

At the moment though I feel like a show off. 

 

I never liked the 'show-offs' at school or in the workplace when I was there, the folks that came in after a weekend away with a list of purchases and costs and then sat and planned what they would buy next time they 'hit the shops'.  I always sat and listened but could never bring myself to join in.

 

 And here I am showing all of you (or about to show you) 'befores' and 'afters', showing you things we have bought for our new home, showing you what we have spent our hard earned money on. I know the monetary cost of every single thing we are putting in our home and the figures are imprinted in my head.  We worked hard to earn the money and it is being spent on things we need and things that will we hope last us for the rest of our days.  But it feels, to me anyway, like 'mass consumerism'.  I can't help it, I've conditioned myself to make do and mend, to find alternative uses for things and suddenly there I am in the queue at Dunelm waiting to hand over cash for duvets, covers, rugs and lampshades and .... well you get the picture, the list goes on.

 

I can trot out the excuses, we've done without while we saved up, we've been in rented accommodation so we have to buy washing machines, fridge freezers etc because they have always come with the house before, I can trot them out to you and I can trot them out to myself, but still I feel like a show off ....

 

So the dilemma ... do I stop listing and showing and therefore lose a huge chunk of our history from my online diary or do I grit my teeth and carry on, and see if I can bring about a mindset that allows me to truly enjoy my purchases.  Because maybe once I could have stood up and said "my name is Sue and I'm a shopaholic and my new jug cost me £14.95", but now I am truly 100% cured.

 

Sue xx