Wednesday odds and ends

We have snowdrops - I hope we don't have snow

A chillier day today, temperatures dropping, but nice and sunny. We've got a bit more wood cutting done. Col feels OK standing still and just moving the chainsaw up and down and we've been doing the odd half hour cutting so the heap doesn't get too low - we have no idea how he will feel during the chemo treatment.

Two other jobs outside today, the first we did together - involving the draining rods and lifting manhole covers all the way between house, septic tank and ditch, lots of plunging the rods through various places and pouring down buckets of water - the joys of being on "private drainage"! The second job was Colin taking an old  plough back down to Friston. He brought it here a few months ago, just before he started to feel ill. The plan was to clean it, get it working properly and sell it with the proceeds being split between us and the owner. But of course he hasn't been able to do it. He gave someone we know ( who deals in secondhand machinary) a call to see if he wanted to buy it as seen, only to find that the man had had an accident and was hopping about on crutches. So the plough has gone back to the shed it was standing in where it will probably stand for another 30 years!

We've got a tree sugeons here at the moment, they are working for National Grid trimming the trees that are under the high voltage cables and pylons. This is done every few years but this company actually asked if we wanted the logs and wood chippings, whereas last time a different company just left a right-old-mess behind them with heaps of chippings all along the ditch edge. They are leaving the logs in small piles and all the chippings in one giant heap ready for the new owners to use in any muddy bits in the campsite driveway.

A Lakeland catalogue came through the letter box this morning, full of lovely things and expensive gadgets. I opened at random and found a £49.99 replacement for a saucepan and spoon -it's a special popcorn making pan with built in stirring thing. I suppose someone will buy it. I like the look of the Mason Cash bowls in very dark blue but I have enough.

I'm still going round the house packing things away in boxes and sorting out stuff to go. Today I hauled everything out of the airing cupboard, there were a few  sheets that we won't need as there won't be room for an extra bed. Also found some curtain liners that I'd fogotten we had and a couple of  old pairs of curtains that might be handy in the bungalow, as we still haven't heard what is being left behind. I've asked our solicitors twice now to see what's happened to the form the vendors need to fill in. On the selling side we had an email wanting lots of information on planning permissions for the kitchen extension, which I'm sure I've already photocopied and sent.It's a good thing we have a photocopier to do them again.

And a few primroses appearing too

 Welcome to a new follower - Thrifty, and thanks for lots of interesting comments yesterday

Back tomorrow
Sue

Tuesday Things ( with an edited in sentence at the end!)

Do you know that December, when the rest of the country was flooded, was our driest month here since June - weird. Col added up the rainfall measurements that he had written in his diary and told me I ought to share this with everyone.

Yesterday we  took a bag of glass to the bottle bank and I thought "Thank goodness we'll never have to fill the car with bags and bags (and even more bags) of empty booze bottles from the campsite." It never failed to amaze me just how much people holidaying on our site could drink. I would be worried about driving with some of the folks who've been here! and it was so embarrassing to be putting so many bottles in the bins. Not that anyone took any notice - it was just me who was embarrassed!

On my post of December 31st I mentioned that I was in a "fed up with blogging mood" because everyday there would be comments that seemed to be questioning what I did or making me feel I had  to justify what I had written. Now the same thing has happened to Sue at Our New Life in the country. The person or people who do this don't have a blog of their own but make little digs or perhaps I'll give them benefit of the doubt and say they don't realise what they are doing.  For example - I said we now had an artificial Christmas tree, several reasons for this described in this old post. But Goodness Me - How wrong this is! Surely only a real live tree will do! Never an artificial in THEIR house! So not a nasty comment and definitely not a troll. It's just when this happens on almost every post it gets a bit tedious.
Sue is starting out on the smallholding and self-sufficiency "journey" and we are at the end. I wasn't able to blog about our smallholding adventures because blogging didn't exist 23 years ago so didn't get the on-line "helpful" comments, instead we got them in person when ever we showed someone who didn't know us around the holding.
All the "Why don't you do..............." and then a list of ideas we could/should gave done. There would always be a reason why we hadn't. Mainly lack of time and cash! I stopped outside paid work in 1980 and Colin's job working for the County Council was always average wage. he worked full time right up until 2012. We had 3 children too - children aren't cheap.
Some of the suggestions that we were never able to do were 

• Cover our  roof with solar panels (  we couldn't afford to and wouldn't have got our money back)
• Start a produce box delivery service ( Never been THAT keen on growing and we did try this on a small scale with 2 of Col's work colleagues and it was fine until things didn't grow or there would be a week when there wasn't quite enough of one thing and selling at the gate worked much better anyway).
• Keep and breed pigs/cows/sheep on a big organic rare breed kind-of way. (We only wanted to keep enough for us).
• Expand the campsite to cover the whole field ( Not THAT keen on people!) 
• Apply for permission for caravan storage - that was often suggested - but it was expensive to set up and we didn't want to have more caravans here.

And many other ideas I've long forgotten.

What I'm saying is do comment, comments are lovely,they  make people feel like friends but don't think you know better than the person writing the blog. And if you really do know better then start a blog of your own!

And on that note I shall say thank you to friends who commented yesterday and good luck to Phil's daughter who wants to be an archaeologist - we always say its more of a calling than a job - and our son has been lucky to have had archaeology jobs for 10 years but  knows that he may not always be so lucky, especially if you are not single and able to travel to another part of this country or abroad.

Back Tomorrow
Sue

PS I 'only' got 64 comments after my December 31st post and Sue in Wales got 160 after her yesterday post.
 Oh that's soooooo unfair I shall cry and stamp my feet!!
(Edited to say that is meant to be ironic and I forgot that other parts of the country/world don't do Suffolk Irony :-)

Beaten to it

I got all ready to write about doing the National Lottery - if that's what it's still called - then discovered I had been beaten to it by dc at Frugal in Norfolk. Actually I should say NOT doing the lottery as we never have, not even a scratch card thing. I didn't even know that they-who-run-it, is it still Camelot?, had added another 10 balls so as to make it even harder to win until the news featured the fact when speaking about last Saturdays draw and the gi-normous amount of money that could be won. Apparently the lottery system crashed as thousands of  people rushed to spend their hard earned cash trying to win.
I've read that you are more likely to be struck by lightening, win an Oscar or become an Olympic Champion than win the lottery.
The only good thing I can say about this backhanded way of  taxing people ( I know that's naive but that's how I think of it) is that it's paid our son's wages for the last couple of years. He is an archaeologist - and lucky to have been employed as one since he graduated. Many people who do an archaeology degree find it difficult to stay in that profession, contracts are short and jobs limited especially since County Councils stopped having their own archaeology departments. His job for  Eighth in the East is Heritage Lottery funded but finishes in September. They are hoping to get funding for another similar project. Fingers crossed for him.

A grey sort of day here today and chillier too. My turn for the doctors this morning - only a prescription review and then a couple of bits of shopping. I managed to leave the cat wormer stuff on the counter at the vets - duh! Popped a bag of bits to the charity shop. A new EACH ( East Anglia Childrens Hospice) charity shop will be opening in Leiston very soon, they were starting to put clothes in today.That will be the 5th charity shop in a fairly small town. The EACH shop is taking over the premises of the Job Centre which has been standing empty for several months - or longer. I don't know if they moved somewhere else in town because if you go online they are still listed at the old place. Heavens knows how someone in town finds a job nowadays.

I'm sure there ought to be a moral to this post............... but have no idea what it is, so will just say

Thanks for comments yesterday
Back Tomorrow
Sue

Oh Dear - More Books and Sunday Shifting

Lots of windy weather here last night and some rain too, but no drop in temperatures like Scotland and Northern England. The forecast is for temperatures going down as the week  goes on. May need to get the long sleeved roll neck tops out for the first time this winter, and it must be winter because Ski Sunday is back on TV.

I spent a couple of hours this morning shifting stuff from the garden shed up to the big shed to try and get all the outside stuff that we're taking into one place. We are leaving more gardening things than originally planned as it's unlikely I'll ever grow 70 tomato plants and a dozen cucumber plants again I don't need to take dozens of  flower pots. We cleared out 3 sacks full of various pots when we had the yard sale. I've no idea how we came to have so many as we never bought any new.

Our youngest gave me an Amazon voucher for Christmas as she couldn't decide which books to get me from my wish list. So instead of buying some old 1p books, I went for a couple of books, recently published and on one of my favourite subjects.

 I've taken 2 more off the shelves and put them in the charity shop bag. The charity shops are doing very well from our downsizing and when you know you've got to fit everything into a very small space or keep it stored in a box in a shed then it's amazing what you find you can do without (and why had I kept an old large cracked Mason Cash mixing bowl when I have an identical perfect one, plus one smaller, in the kitchen?)

Many Thanks for comments yesterday and I think I missed welcoming sammie to the followers.

Now I'm having a bit of feet up session on the settee, had a horrible night of waking dozens of times in a panic thinking "What If?".

Back Tomorrow
Sue

Saturday - a very short post

The new owners-to-be, Simon and Annabel, came to have a really good look at the house, campsite and smallholding today. We showed them round again in great detail. They had come armed with a list of questions which we answered and told them many more things they didn't know that they needed to know too!
Taking over a campsite and smallholding is just a wee bit more complicated than simply moving house. Luckily they are full of enthusiasm and plans and many years younger than us, so will be able to make a real go of it.

No other news today, thanks for comments yesterday.
Just noticed new followers,  so welcome to maria and Naomi.

Back Tomorrow, although goodness knows what with, as not a lot is happening to post about and I certainly don't want to go on and on about the health "thingy".

Sue

Lack of excitement and Frugal Friday

Nothing exciting has happened but I'm back anyway and thank goodness the weather is 100% better than yesterday.

I popped to Saxmundham this morning for Tesco and Post Office. Not a lot of shopping needed this month as we need to empty cupboards as much as we can before the middle of March but on the other hand I hate seeing the cupboards getting low at this time of the year when the weather could still turn nasty.
I'm still going round cupboards looking for things that I can give to the charity shop and packing other stuff that we won't need into boxes.
We've had 2 quotes from local removal companies, either will be OK to use and both can supply boxes well before moving day to give me plenty of time to pack.
I've also been making a list of all the people and companies we will need to contact, then I'm giving Col the job of finding all the phone numbers.

In between other things this week I've got well ahead by making some Christmas cards for my Penny Pincher Paper penfriends

Also been making a note of where we've stretched the pennies this week, thought I might make this a regular thing on a Friday if I remember.

Found 2p on the ground in town
Made 4 large portions of soup from 3 tired carrots, a small onion and a tin of tomatoes.
Ate leeks, beetroot, Brussels sprouts from the garden and apples from store
Col took the shower to bits, descaled it, fitted a new washer and got it working properly again.
Free heat from wood all week
Bought new shoes in January sales, saving £20
Found Tesco Christmas 7 cheese selection reduced to £2 and mince pies to 37p for 6.

Shall I list the non-frugal things? Nah!

Many thanks for comments yesterday. I think it's going to be a huge help to hear from other people reading who know someone going through exactly the same treatment as Colin. Thank goodness for blogging.

Back Tomorrow
Sue

A bit of weather

We've had an awful wet day here today, got soaked just doing a few jobs outside, like fetching the wood in.
We heard of several roads closed due to flooding and then the wind picked up just to add to the fun.I spent the day looking for more things to go to the charity shop and packing boxes. We had a second quote from a removals company and Col had 2 visitors who called in for a cuppa.  Our youngest and bloke came round for dinner and shared a yummy scrummy joint of lamb,the first we've had for about 4 months, hopefully if I stretch it there will be enough for a proper shepherds pie tomorrow

Thank you for all the lovely comments yesterday.
I'll answer a few questions. We will be having removal men shifting everything on the day and my sister and husband, our youngest and bloke and our son and OH will all be able to help before and after we hope. I'm all for roping in as many people as possible so may ask Col's brother to help as he has a towbar and could pull the caravan or trailer if Col isn't well enough. We don't want to have to go backwards and forwards too many times.
Gill......... These are my first pair of Hotter shoes and seem lovely and comfy. I did try sending for some years ago before we had a shop in Ipswich but that was hopeless as they sent the wrong ones - twice and the right size didn't fit anyway! and I did see the answer but I don't think you word of the year should be "can't be arsed either!"
Liz, I'm glad to find someone else who hates buying shoes as everyone else seems to collect them by the dozen!
It's the garage with the yellow window and summerhouse/shed on the right of the picture, both will be used to store stuff in as we have a lot that we don't want to get rid of. We both think that as long as Col gets better we will move to somewhere a bit bigger and rent this little bungalow out. We are really only buying it because it was empty, detached, room for the caravan and on one of the older estates in a nice part of Ipswich. So not so crammed in as some new estates.
Thank you to Mrs LH for that happy info about a friend. Col will have a stem-cell transplant too at the end of the chemo, if everything goes to plan.
That crazy paving patio will definitely go as I shall move it piece by piece myself straight into a skip along with a Leylandii that will cut out the sun and the concrete rockery.


Our boy got himself into the East Anglian Daily Times again, leading a walk around one of the old wartime airbases, a huge crowd turned out. That's him in the bright yellow coat. A good thing he had it  as they had pouring rain round the last part of the walk

Apologies for not replying individually to comments and welcome to Liz, Fast SOS and Genea who are new to following.

Back Tomorrow, if anything exciting happens!
Sue