22 Foxhole East

f0xh0les

Been busy over here in LeShire.


Pinned the curtains so the thermal bits are hidden - will quickly hem them the next time the sewing machine is out. Fixed the stupid curtain pull system - one tiny wheel had let its string slip. 2 second fix, 2 minute take down, 25 minutes to get the bl**dy thing back up again.

While I was in the curtain mood, I found DS2 his curtains, ordered them and will pay for them when the cc bill arrives. After all, I might as well get some M&S vouchers for buying them on the card.

Diet going well - 3lbs down so far.

Cold here today.

House looking tidier, the lists are made and things are being struck off all over the place.

Going to go get the free fire surround out of DHs car boot - if you can call putting 5 seats down flat a boot. Really it is like having a van. That is why it is a skip on wheels.

Some total !!!!! has scuffed up the one corner of my car that had not been scuffed up by the other total !!!!!s that have hit all the other 3 corners in the 4 years we have been in Leicester. Outside the house. I heard it happen, this morning as I lay in my bed just before 5, I heard this scraaaape and thought oops, someone got a bit too close to one of the parked cars...... little did I know some twit had managed to not pull out of the parking space in front of my car, and decided to take my paintwork with them. Oh well, nobody has died, but honestly, rude person with a white car - no note, nothing. The really annoying thing is, I had left loads of room for them to get out. Pfffft! Whatever. I do not give a monkey's about the beauty of my car, it is cheap, well maintained, and runs reliably. It is used to ferry kids about. It does not need to look good, but it would be nice if people stopped hitting it!! !!!!!!. It is just rude.

Anyway, this fire surround is not going to get itself out of the car......

EatingTheElephant

:j:beer: huge congratulations on the new mortgage figure

f0xh0les

Been quite a productive morning so far.

Vegetable stew for supper made and cooling, and an apple crumble made for their pudding tonight. Just a reheat and serve, stew is always better after being reheated.

Lots of things out of the fridge now, so it needs a good clean.Pantry has been labelled too now. All the spices (well nearly all the spices I ran out of jars) labelled and I managed to combine a few opened packets of the same thing, which will stop DH buying new as he can now not only see what he has, he can see how much he has left.

Blimey its cold today. My feet are freezing after having stood in our kitchen for 2hours. Nice hot cup of tea in hand now with James O'Brien and mystery hour keeping me amused. Did consider sticking my feet in it but managed to resist the urge. So I am now the proud owner of a tidy kitchen, with a well ordered pantry, a full freezer, and coming up to the weekend. The first week of school over, it is a hurdle all of its own, but we have not yet had the fun of the first homework. I don't think it is going to be pretty.

Weightloss is continuing. DH has bought tickets to a football match for him and DS3 on Sunday, which I think he is daft for doing, as the train fares alone are nearly £100, and they won't be home until after 10pm with school the next day. Oh well, his money, his choice. Will have to do something nice with the others on that day, it will involve cost, but nothing like the cost he is going to be paying out.

Still have not painted the fire surround, despite having all the things ready here, I won't do it with the kids around as they will end up covered in paint - voice of experience - even if told not to touch it, so it will have to be tomorrow now as it will not dry in time.
No after school clubs again today - so far I will have one on Monday, one on Tuesday, two on Wednesday, and two on Friday, but DS1 has not had notification of study sessions coming up to the dreaded GCSEs, which he has not bothered to study for or revise for. I asked him every day over the holidays (well, not Christmas day) to look at bbc bitesize or similar, even for 15 minutes a day, and I got the 'ok mum, I'll do that now' and off up the stairs and when asked later, or the next day how it was going you get the 'oh, I forgot'. I am being verbally appeased. I can't do it for him, he has to do it himself. This parenting thing can be hard, but sometimes you have to step back and let them fail. Having said that he will probably just ace the bl00dy things now. Sometimes failure teaches you more than an easy success. Kids eh?

Right, got some good YS bargains from Mr Ts - bags of frozen roasting veg for 15p, boxes of oven bake wontons + dipping sauce for 20 a box - 1p each! qu0rn burgers for 4p a box. All happily residing in the freezer to make other cheap meals go further. Money looking good this month, so the renovation budget can start growing. It is so hard not to overpay the mortgage though.... the house needs fixing though.

f0xh0les

What will happen in 2019
The wall between the dining room and the kitchen is coming down - it is a chimney and so runs up 2 floors. Will make the huge bathroom upstairs even bigger and mean that the bathroom can be completed in one go.
The bathroom upstairs needs a refit and the shower needs to be made watertight. New shower and cubicle needed which will probably necessitate new tiling, and definitely need new flooring. A new radiator to be put in - there is one in there now, but it does not work .

The outside of the house needs repainting
Woodworm erradication on ground floor
Damp proof course on ground floor
Bigger radiator in living room
And after that, new carpets for the top two floors at least.

Plus the usual woodchip/anaglypta eradication, chimney opening up, new sofas - my sofas are older than 2 of my children, and DS3 is going to be 11 next month!!! They have provided good service but it is time for them to go.

So I have a lot of things to save for, and there will not be any credit going on, so I am aiming at £600 savings a month minimum and am well on target for this month already.

wishingthemortgaheaway

Arghhhh woodworm, we have that too.
Thankfully it's not going to be as expensive to fix as we'd thought. But is still going to lead to quite an excessive amount of disruption.

Oh the joy of joys of owning a house.

f0xh0les

I was just stood in the kitchen making the tea after having eaten the tea, if you see what I mean, and I noticed one of the half size mugs I have has a chip on the bottom. Oh dear, methought, then I realised it is older than DS3 who is 11 in 3 weeks time. So really it has done jolly good service, and I really got my money's worth out of it.

One of the pug-ugly mugs has smashed too! yippee! DH was making the tea last week, he stood up and took my cup and muttered, 'ok, I'm a rabbit, and you are an ugly dog in a hat' - he was talking about the pictures on the front of the cups, so we got the right tea, but still, that is verging on fighting talk.....
Car insurance paperwork came today, which was handy as it runs out at midnight tomorrow. Leaving it a tad late! 10 days for it to come since taking payment. Anyway, both cars - mine is 10 this year, DH's is 15 - for £523 and then £48 for autoa1d insurance for the both of us breakdown for any car we happen to be a driver or passenger in. Totally forgot to go through a cashback site. Which was stupid, but after 4 hours of comparing, and then multicar-ing, it was forgivable. I have forgiven me, anyway.

DH is off tomorrow to Wembley to see my beloved Tottenham, and is taking DS3 with him, ridiculous prices, but he is claiming it is a birthday present. Utter nonsense. The kids have no homework, as all the teachers have said they did not have time this week to print any........ as the kids have been making papier mache.............. erm....... yeah, right... moving swiftly on......
Bought a family organiser/planner/wall calendar thing, reduced as it is 2 weeks into January. Filling up nicely already.

The mantlepiece has been painted white. I somehow managed to get a few specks on DHs bike, not sure how as it was actually in another room, but DH is adamant it was me, and after about 20 seconds of finger rubbing it is all fine again. DH is now all huffy as I have damaged his prize steed... (twit), anyway, it is now upstairs (the fireplace, not the bike) in DS2s room along with his new black velvet curtains, which he is delighted with. As he has decided to go live in his cave and only appear for meals, I figured I might as well make it as comfy and pleasant for him as possible. Teenagers!

So tomorrow I get to drive them off to the train station, and I might go to the others' favourite doughnut shop on the way back, and buy them something nice, as they are not getting spent a ridiculous amount of money on them, and I might get to see them for a cup of tea. It is a bit like trying to lure an escaped hamster out from under the sofa with a peanut, getting a teenager out of their rooms, with the promise of a tasty morsel.

Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of my grandfather's death. He died when I was 14, I remember I was only back at school for a week before we were back on a flight back to his house to bury him - I had left him just before as we went over for Christmas and New Year, well, us kids stayed for that time, my parents rocked up the day before Christmas Eve and left on Boxing Day...as was their way, leaving us behind until the day before school started. It made me glad my kids have not yet lost anyone close to them, well, Lawrence the hamster and two cats do count, but not quite the same as a grandparent.

Funny the things you remember - Inspector Morse was on tv when my Dad took the phone call that my grandad had died, and then he sent me to bed and so I missed the last 10 minutes of it. Every time I watch it now I wonder if it was that episode that was on at the time. No idea.

Funny how life works out, innit?

f0xh0les

Oooh, I have too many stressy people in my house right now! DH is now back to teaching full time, and there are more students, and less teaching staff (sound familiar anyone?) so he is grumpy, and claiming being contaminated by dirty student germs as he has started sneezing. Joy!
DS1 is not happy as he is being victimised by a few idiots in his class. He did not think he was being bullied. He just thinks they are idiots taking his coat and pencil case. I told him it was the same thing. 16 year old boys coming up to exams -it must be a pressure cooker of hormones and nonsense. He asked if you could be bullied for being clever. Well, I am glad he has made it to the last 4 months of secondary school before having to ask these questions. The teachers have noticed it and are asking him if he is ok. If they notice it enough to ask if he is ok, then they have noticed it is a problem. So I told him if the teacher asks again if he is ok, just to say no he is not ok - so do something about it. Exams start after Easter so lessons should pretty much stop from April and these are not the kids that are going to voluntarily rock up to study sessions.

DS3 has won a competition - well, I have entered a competition on his behalf, and I probably entered DS4 as well to be fair, but DS3 has come up trumps and I have a rather large box here from the match attax people full of their goodies. So as long as they share, I will have a happy couple of kids, but there may be a stroppy DS4 tantrum on the horizon.

Supper tonight is a vegetable fried rice with (ys) tofu and cashews, and (ys) sweet and sour dimsum type filo dumplings, and an apple crumble and custard.... and if they don't like it, nobody died from missing one meal - said in my best Mum voice

Today has been an assault on the laundry pile - lots had been done, but it had not been folded, and returned to owners, and it was becoming a mountain. So it is all neatly in piles and waiting for the owners to collect. I cannot believe DS4 has been taking his laundry, walking out of the kitchen and hiding it between the dining table and the bookcase behind the sofa. No wonder the little sw1ne has been complaining he has not got anything to wear!! He has not been taking his clothes upstairs!

Found a ys roll of birthday wrap in Pr1mark yesterday, and a ys cafe message board - down to £3, so it has the week's menus on it now and everyone knows what is going on. How organised is that!

I now have an after school club or study session for at least one child every day Mon-Sat. So petrol will start disappearing again. I have done the last 2 weeks on half a tank, it will be empty by next weekend. All the backwards and forwards is so boring.

The stamp survey I do is showing no signs of slowing down. I have 6 to post in the next 5 days. I seem to remember the last time I did this - about 3 years ago - they told me I was going off for 6 months, and I was back on full time in about 2 weeks. We will see. The stamps are coming in handy for postcard competition entries with the large box of postcards I got from the school fair for 30p. Well it beats paying £2 for a mobile entry.

And apart from the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry, I am not doing too much else today,except for being quite cold - it snowed here for about half an hour at dark o'clock this morning, then it all went away, so I am hoping it returns, but after I get back from maths club and then it will all be a massive rush and panic to get the supper on the table. So. everything is back to normal, and back into the swing of the school run and clubs routine.

f0xh0les

Oh, and I did not go to the kids favourite doughnut shop last weekend after taking DH and DS3 off to the train station - I made them cakes instead, and they loved it. and it saved me at least £10 and the trimmings from the individual chocolate bundts became a base for a death by chocolate dessert, so a two-fer with no outlay and very happy kids.

ChasingSunshine

I'm sorry just had to laugh at DS4 dedication to avoiding carrying the laundry upstairs. Obviously not as entertaining when you are wondering where all his clothes are gone but suppose the more surprising thing is he was the only one!

f0xh0les

Hmm, little darling is now complaining he cannot fit all his clothes into his drawers. Bet I could!

They are delighted with the massive football card advent calendar with 24 packs of cards, 2 x tins of special cards, international cards, and the starter album with 20 extra packs of cards. Happy Thursday boys!

It is to be -4 to-5 degrees tonight. Brrrr, I have got a hot water bottle on the sofa already and it is lovely. Will break out the posh hot chocolate powder DH got me for Christmas, and I might even have a go at the mulled wine. I know how to have a good time!