Coffee and chocolate

Hovel_lady

I agree that house guests come under "entertainment" even if they aren't entertaining :rotfl:

Happy birthday to whoever it is :bdaycake:

miggy

Thank you! We often have lunch out when these friends are with us so that definitely counts as 'entertaining' in my book.

I remembered I have some Clubcard vouchers unspent so I put those towards the birthday shopping, so then I have the remains of the budgetted food money to go towards the weekend, and no risk of going overdue on the vouchers either. (I know :money: says to use vouchers towards the special offers but there's never been anything I want so I think a nice meal with family is a very good way to spend them).

Just outside the supermarket I found a discarded till receipt with 152 unclaimed clubcard points, so that made me a happy bunny.

It's been a good birthday and now I'm going to start a list elsewhere to help me steer my way through the next couple of days.

miggy

I missed my vitamins for a couple of days, will be spending some time today visiting Mum and have friends coming tomorrow though the house isn't ready and guess what? Slump.

On the positive side the bank balance is still looking healthy (i.e. not OD) so I bought some cheerful lunch (£2.50) and made myself a cappuccino and am now nearly ready to go out. Oh, and my favourite shampoo is on BOGOF again. Having decided I can't afford it at full price I got some of that and moisturiser so I have really indulged a bit. I'm thankful for being able to. I know I need to look after myself though and I think this helps.

P.S. What happened to summer? It's sunny and 13C here... and blowing a gale.

miggy

I haven't got much done - I am a classic last-minute person - but I have attacked the cobwebs, got cold-weather clothes out of the loft and painted a door. DS2 has inflated the camping mattress so we know it will be fit to sleep on, no holes or owt. Dh did a mound of ironing and some of it has even been put away.

I've come over all tired so that's all for now.

miggy

Quite a day and item one deserves a post all to itself:

:j:j DD has passed her driving test! :j:j

:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T

:D:D

miggy

And as for the rest of the day: I attacked the jobs to be done before our friends' arrival:

• Waltzed around a bit more with the feather duster, scaring spiders.
• Coloured my hair (self esteem )
• Painted a piece of floor (long story but it looks better for it) and neatened up the bathroom paint so that it actually looks pretty good if you don't look too closely.
• Celebrated with DD :T:T:T
• Hoovered the stairs and noticed a mark on the carpet so I got busy with the spray shampoo, then of course noticed some smaller marks so I cleaned up the lot then sat back and thought: Uh oh. Now the stairs have lots of little clean splodges. I hope they'll blend in better when they dry. (Which they did, but not much).
• Did four loads of washing so naturally there is still some drying on a rack but the idea was to get everything I could out of the way and leave the weekend clear.
• Decided to do a very big lasagne to feed nine of us on Sunday.
• Hoovered everywhere I could upstairs.
• Did a mammoth clear and clean in our room ready for guests to use - DS1 decided he wasn't likely to be in and would we like to borrow his room, which we gratefully accepted, and stashed loads of stuff there so ours would be okay for guests.
• Answered rather a lot of phone calls: Pensions Department wanting an appointment with Mum, and an old lady who got our number mixed up with her daughter's (I got the daughter's number and rang her. Not the first time this has happened and I had visions of a confused elderly lady in trouble, but it turns out she is in a care home so all I need do in future is ring her daughter etc.) I think there were more calls but this morning was a long time ago.
• DH got in early and helped by hoovering downstairs, organising tea and so forth. :A
• I put an excess of jackets on pegs in hall where they don't really belong but at least they look orderly.
• At the end of this I thought about the amount of activity and what I'd eaten (two marmites on toasts for breakfast, two belgian buns and a chunk of ham (!) for lunch, a kitkat midafternoon and two chunks of chocolate later on, plus about six coffees). Then I weighed myself and had lost 1.5lbs since this morning.

This is not the end of the tale. The phone rang - again - at about 6 as I was faffing about on some job and DH was catching his breath so he answered it. It was our friends, calling from their car - stuck in a massive traffic jam and no way forward, so they had decided all they could do was go home again.

Sooooo... I have moved the clutter back into our nice tidy room (but tidily )and we are chilling in our nice tidy house and wondering what to do with our nice clear weekend! :rotfl:

And the moral of the story, dear reader, is...

...a diet of carbs and coffee suits me fine.

miggy

I meant to record a few MS thoughts too, and forgot.

Today has been a NSD which is just as well after treating myself yesterday. Food-wise, I had spent £9.50 in Clubcard vouchers the other day for the birthday meal, and still owed the food money £14 as I'd borrowed from it to pay DS2's pocket money. I also missed my piano lesson this week which was £10 not spent, so despite my spending yesterday we are still within budget. I'm also delighted that we had saved the food shopping to do first thing on Saturday so there hasn't been any difficulty with overbuying for guests who couldn't get to us. On the minus side, I had to throw out a pint of milk that was off, and no time to make scones.

I was looking at the clutter on my dressing table and wondering whether I could cut back on it in some way. I know there's a thread on these boards about not buying toiletries until the present ones are used up. I've got several lots of hand cream on the go, but only a couple too many really as I keep one in the kitchen, one in the bathroon etc. Ditto skin cleanser - it works better for me to have them in the room where I will use them and particularly with me keeping odd hours I can't always get to one central one. I donated a packet of baby wipes to DD but I suspect there are more lurking. Hair products are mostly under control but there are some colours I ought not to keep because for one reason or another I didn't like them - throw away? Give away? I don't know. Makeup isn't a problem as there isn't that much. That's without delving into the depths of drawers. I try to have one of what I need fairly near the surface with the idea that I'll use it up - so why isn't there more space? I think the answer is I can't see the wood for the trees: I need to get rid in order to be able to have a more effective use of what I keep.

And I have too many clothes for the amount of space available. This is more a problem in cold weather when clothes are necessarily thicker and layered. I don't know what I'll do about that but I do know it's the first outing for snug boots tonight and I'm as warm as toast (my first boyfirend - at the age of six - used to say that).

That's not counting papers that need to be sorted but I won't go there now!

Hovel_lady

miggy wrote: »

Quite a day and item one deserves a post all to itself:

:j:j DD has passed her driving test! :j:j

:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T

:D:D

Well done miggy's DD :T:j:T:j:T

miggy

A lazy day today and a bit of spending though most of it was planned and we think we are still within the food budget for the week (I mucked it up by paying DS2's pocket money out of it then using a debit card to pay for some groceries and forgetting exactly what that came to). Anyway what's done is done.

We went out this afternoon - and a grey, drizzly, light-deprived afternoon it was too - and DH did some clothes shopping which needed to be done, and cleverly got some absolute bargains. I treated myself to hairclips and a mug (justified after the amount of broken mugs recently!) and spent £4.24. We got the food shopping for the rest of the weekend and part-filled the car at a cheap place. It's not worth filling it fuller on the grounds that our next car may appear bargainaciously at any moment.

I am all wrapped up for winter but haven't put the heating on yet. DH and I found a big door curtain on Ebay that we both like. It's from a shop so we should be able to get one quite easily but the door in question needs a lot of fabric - with postage we'll be spending almost exactly £100 which DS2 is convinced is a scandal. I think it will be money well spent but we had better do it soon or we'll find other things to spend on - like DH's tooth that broke this evening!

I'm off now, going to put together a Cottage Pie for tomorrow, the lasagne idea having been voted out.

chevalier

don't forget about charity shops and freecycle to find curtains in/on as a way to save money. Or a heavy fleece might work tacked above the door?

well done to your daughter for passing her test nice one
chev