End of the month

First of all thank you all for the comments about our nasty shock regarding the cancer. It almost feels that we have wasted the whole year with chemo and hospital, but it had to be done and Col is better now than he was at the end of last year. Plus we now know that we don't like living in town, hate not being able to be even a little bit self-sufficient and I've become a confidant driver  so it's not all bad!

Anyway we've got to the end of  low spend/no spend November.
There are a few bits to be added
Spending at the Christmas Bazaar (charity) £3, Fresh fruit,vegetables,eggs,milk and things for lunches this week £13.50
Filled up with diesel again after our Surrey trip £30- should last most of December
Few more edible presents £5
Total November spend £591 + the phoneline and  broadband Direct Debit which goes out later today.
It's very handy having a month with no big bills!
Next month there is the electric/gas bill, car insurance and cash presents - No way can December be low spend. I'm extremely envious of people who can do Christmas for under £100 but with 3 children and their partners, 2 Grandchildren, 2 sisters and brothers in law, one Dad, one brother, 2 nephews and a niece, it's never going to happen here. Especially as I don't do the sort of crafts that make presents.

I shouldn't really be fiddling on the blog because there is a December job list to be written and I must start writing Christmas cards as the Ipswich Scout Post-boxes closes on December 8th, they have one at the Oncology out patients which is handy, we can pop them in next week when we go and speak to the Cancer specialist nurse, 25p a card this year so still under half the price of a proper stamp and I need to pop my repeat prescription form round the corner before it gets dark.

Thank you again for all the virtual support.......Onward and Upward

Back in a day or two
Sue

I think we are allowed to swear..............

..........................but there would be no point.

We could jump up and down, stamp our feet and yell that it isn't fair...........but there would be no point in that either.
Why?

Because, Col's mantle-cell lymphoma hasn't gone , instead it's coming back. The results of the bone marrow sample taken a couple of weeks ago were not clear of it, the CT scan showed the spleen is enlarged.
We should have known really from the fact that the platelet count wasn't rising.

So after the shock we are straight onto plan B. A new, specially applied for and very expensive (another heart-felt thanks for having an NHS!) medication, new as in it's only been available for 2 years, but has shown good results. Then another stem cell transplant, this time from a donor and luckily one of Col's siblings is a match. This treatment will be based mainly at Addenbrookes in Cambridge so I envisage lots more traveling, but not quite in the way we had planned.  :-/

The tablets start immediately, and  have a mile long list of side effects so we have no idea how he will be feeling in a few days or even a few weeks time. Next week we meet with the specialist nurse for more information about time scales as we were almost too shocked to take in all that the doctor told us yesterday afternoon.

On a much more cheerful subject, this morning we've been over to see our beautiful granddaughter Florence, 7 weeks old today. Our youngest told us the best time to come to see her awake and we managed to make her smile several times. It will be lovely to see both grandchildren together at our son's wedding next month.

Back soon
Sue

Visiting our Grandson

We popped down to Surrey for the weekend to see our eldest, son in law and of course baby Jacob, 6 months old now - how did that happen?

Poor little man, red eyes and snuffly nose - a horrible cold

Our visit coincided with him having a grotty cough and cold, poor little fella, he's not keen on having his nose wiped that's for sure. I'm puzzling how we used to give Calpol on a spoon to poorly small people as now there is a clever syringe and even that's not easy when baby spits it all out!

We walked through the woodland to the village because there was a Christmas bazaar happening and I found this little cross stitch kit  for 50p on the Scout stall and won biscuits and buns on the WI tombola. My favourite sort of tombola - when every number wins a prize!

We ate the buns with a cuppa when we got back to H's house and I gave our neighbour the biscuits as a thank you for feeding the cat.

The car gave a strange hiccup followed by a puff of black exhaust smoke on the M25 not far into our journey home and I had awful visions of being broken down on the side of a motorway, but luckily there were no other symptoms and we got back without anything else happening.

Thanks for lots of comments and Hello to another new follower

Back Shortly
Sue

Some books have been borrowed and read

Came home from the library last week with these that I'd reserved online.

Thankfully the weather was eventually good enough for us to walk to the library,  as I was down to my last library book although I've always got a goodly amount of TBR of my own.
Also brought home a letter about more cuts needed to library funding to balance the books. We just hope they don't feel the need to start charging for reservations or, now we are moving back to the country, cut out mobile libraries completely.

I've not done any book reviews lately but this is what's been read in the last couple of weeks.

Marlene C Miller - Called to be Amish [Non Fiction 2015]. One of my own books.
Then 4 library books
Christopher St John Sprigg - Death of An Airman [British Library Crime Classics 2016 (originally 1934)]                         
George Bellairs - Death of a Busybody [British Library Crime Classics 2016 (originally published 1943)]
  Michael Foley - Ready for Anything, Essex at War [Non Fiction 2006]
Freeman Wills Crofts - Mystery in the Channel [British library Crime Classic 2016 originally 1931]

Also now read the book on the top of the library book pile - Thread of Evidence by Bernard Knight. Like the BLCC this is also crime fiction re-published from a while back. Between 1998 and 2010 Bernard Knight wrote a series of historical crime set in Exeter during the 12th Century and then  a trilogy set in the 1950's. Rather oddly the series  of 7 (Thread of Evidence is the 2nd)set in Wales written in the 1960's are not mentioned at all on Fantastic Fiction, I wonder if he wanted to keep quiet about them as they are not as well written as he more recent titles!

Yes, I do seem to read a lot of crime fiction. Why? Probably because they always have a proper ending which you don't always get with an ordinary fiction and they rarely reduce me to a blubbering wreck! And of course authors who write crime tend to write several.



Back Very Soon
Sue

Adsense + latest doings

Do I need an extra £35 a week, well frankly ......YES
According to a box that has appeared on my dashboard page my blog now qualifies for having ads and I could earn up to £35 a week ( subject to traffic) by joining "hundreds of other bloggers making money through Adsense"
Will I be doing this...............NO, although I can see the attraction, but it's not a way I want to earn money.
Does anyone with ads actually earn that much?


When we move to the cottage we will be halfway between 2 towns for shopping, Stowmarket and Diss although we've not been to either for a while. We know both well so maybe we'll alternate. As we'd not been far this week a trip out of Ipswich to Stowmarket was taken . We parked at Asda and over the hedge there was a huge crane/ digger/machine thing just starting to demolish a lovely big house that's stood there for years, in fact while I was at Grammar school in the town it was where the headmaster lived. By the time we had walked around the town  and got back to the car the house was gone - blimey. I expect next time we go to town it will have been replaced by a dozen new houses.
 As usual we looked in all the charity shops and Col got himself another warm work shirt which he likes over a t-shirt for winter for £2.99. We walked down the street and at the menswear shop similar were on a rack in the doorway for £16. Then we  bumped into someone we knew from way back when we lived in that area.
  I found these in The Works,  to finish some Christmas cards I'm stitching..............for next year!

I'm in cross stitch mood at the moment- so getting ahead in case I don't get in the right mood again and thought £1 wasn't too much of a crime in my No/Low spend month.



November spending £527 + Shirt £3+Craft stuff £1+Pharmacy £1+Veg and Store-cupboard food £8=£540

December spending will be MUCH more as apart from the cash presents for our 3 and their OH's, 2 nephews and a niece, there will be a large electric/ gas bill because the last one was estimated low, plus  car insurance. Oh dear.

Back Soon
Sue

Bloggy stats

Every now and again I have a look at the stats just to see what's what.

Below is a weird happening in page views, I think that's what you would call a spike!




In Jan 2016 I had  71,140 page views, more than any other month


What was happening in January 2016?

Colin was diagnosed with cancer, was it this that made everyone look or was it because I posted on 29/31 days or was it because it was winter and everyone had nothing to do except peruse blogs?

Then there was that odd month with dozens of mysterious page views from Russia............ that made the Russian bit of the all time map turn green






Although  on a normal day  it looks like this


According to one bit the most page views over all time are......

30 Ways to Save £1-- Day 30 + 50p for Christmas de... 30 Nov 2013, 17 comments	1837
Green Tomato Chutney 31 Jul 2015, 17 comments	1446
The pictures that made 2015 31 Dec 2015, 64 comments	1208
Plan C 17 Oct 2016, 90 comments	1174
A favourite post from long ago in a different worl... 13 Jul 2016, 28 comments	1148

But look, what about this post with 1698 page views it ought to be in that list above

A £20 shopping list Edit | View | Share | Delete (Whoops,it's disappeared over to the right, cant get it back!) And so should this with 1773 Lots done despite the weather Edit | View | Share | Delete And on the post page number one should say 2211 not 1837 30 Ways to Save £1-- Day 30 + 50p for Christmas decorations! Local events Sue in Suffolk 17 2211 30/11/2013 Oh goodness me, there have been 16,028 comments! Sue in Suffolk 16 1773 26/03/2014

Sue in Suffolk

25

1698

20/01/2015

But enough of this fiddling about...........................

Do you know this quote................
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. ... The term was popularised in United States by Mark Twain (among others), who attributed it to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."





Back to normal soon
Sue

Still trying not to spend too much

Another viewing on Friday,  "sorry too small".........again....
Another viewing Tuesday morning will probably be the same

We had visitors on Saturday so there was a bit of extra spending for food. But what I bought will also feed us for a couple more days too, so that's OK

We took our friends over to see where the cottage is, just to make it a bit easier for them to find - it's not easily found! I rang to tell the lady who owns it that we would be walking by just to show our friends where the house was and she said she wouldn't be there but we could peer in the windows, which felt much to nosy to actually do.
So we just walked by and got all excited again about getting there as soon as we can.

Sunday was a grey dismal sort of day, we thought about walking to the library but didn't bother to go out at all. I got the tapestry glasses case finished by lining the back of the stitching with a piece of felt, then stitched myself a new scissor-keeper and made one small Christmas card from a free kit that I've had for ages. We also watched Andy Murray  play in the final to become top tennis player at the end of year - brilliant.

Got a bit worried this morning when our youngest said she would call in to see us after taking Florence for an ultra-sound, but it seems all breech babies have a scan to check for hip problems. She's  six weeks now and growing but is still a titch, just about got a small smile.

Hope everyone is surviving the varying weather in other parts of the country........ windy weather that caused so much damage in Somerset, Devon and Dorset, floods and snow up north, we've missed most of it so far.

Welcome to some new followers and thank you for comments

Milk, Fruit and veg plus some other things for meals with visitors and store-cupboard items £17.50
running total now £527 ish and still several days left until the end of the month - bother.

Back shortly
Sue