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.
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 :-)
