Lovely sunny Sunday at the end of the year

We should have been out for lunch today but our host was poorly so it's been put off for a while. But we had to go out anyway across to Mid Suffolk to return part of Father-in-laws wheelchair that had been left in our jeep on Christmas Day. Luckily he hadn't been anywhere to need it between then and now as he gets around the house OK with a couple of sticks. Of course as we were passing a place that has a small regular Sunday Boot Sale we stopped for a quick look.

Him Outside found 3 new hosepipe connection thingys for £1 and I bought a bundle of new Christmas  and Birthday cards for 40p.

 I've decided to have a huge clear out of my card making stuff in the spring, there is so much that I know I will never use. I'm far from being good at card making and I'm not often happy with my results, on the other hand I love fishing through boxes in charity shops and car boot sales to find cards for a few pence. So it seems silly to keep so many odds and ends just-in-case. I shall keep all my cross stitch threads, aida and charts and all my card blanks, peel off labels, 3D decoupage sheets and themed craft papers, but there are lots of odd toppers, kits and bits that need a new home. Maybe we will do a boot sale ourselves again next year after all.

Thank you for lots of interesting comments after my blog yesterday about our simple living plans for 2014 here on the Suffolk smallholding. It's a shame that there always seems to be someone who wants to make us feel guilty for choosing to live the way we do. I have to say it wasn't always a choice. Our income when we first married was the below average wage of a council road-man who worked overtime in winter on the gritting lorry and in summer on the tar and chippings lorry to make enough to pay the mortgage and  have a weeks camping holiday with our two small children.
When we decided to save for a smallholding we moved house 4 times, each time working long hours to do up, decorate, improve, repair so we could sell at a profit to go up the housing ladder. For a year we lived in a caravan ( with 2 under 5s) fixing a house that had been declared unfit for human habitation. Now we choose to live simply so that Him Outside doesn't have to do a job that had changed so much so that it was just driving miles and miles around Suffolk every week which he didn't enjoy. We still work - cleaning toilets on Bank Holidays wouldn't be everyone's idea of fun!

Apart from filling in the birthdays etc in my new kitchen diary and drawing lines in the back of an A4 paper pad ready to fill in all the expenditure in 2014, I've also prepared the garden growing plan for next year. It's just lots of oblongs for all the beds at the moment but Him Outside will look back at the old plans and work out whats going where. He will pencil them in as a reminder  and then write them in with the date when the beds are filled.

We try to leave a gap of a few years between growing the same family of veg in the same beds and use compost on some of the beds each year. Somewhere around the house we have these plans going right back to 1993! Although we have managed to squeeze in more beds than we had then.

Well, while I've been fiddling about on the computer  the sun has gone and evening is closing in. I see there is a new Miss Marple on TV tonight so that's what we will watch after the Countryfile Weather forecast  for the week. What happened to the dire warnings from the Daily Express for the longest, coldest winter since heavens knows when?  Today we had the first frost hard enough to freeze all the outdoor chicken drinkers and we are nearly at the end of the year.

Back Tomorrow - Keeeeeep Frugalling!

PS Welcome to 2 new followers recently, hope you enjoy my ramblings from Suffolk.