22 Foxhole East

f0xh0les

Well it sounds like step-gran will be released back into the wild just after lunch.

She has no idea what is wrong with her, or what tests they are doing, they just keep taking blood. Whether that means she is not taking in what they are telling her, or if they are just treating it as 'getting old' I don't know.

What I do know is that her cupboards and freezer is full and apart from milk, she has everything she needs. I know this because I filled the things up while I was there.

Can't believe I have already been back a week.

Right, second cup of coffee (I allow myself 2 a day) drunk. The kids are refusing to get dressed, so they can play in their pjs until football. No time to get in and out of town for new football boots for DS3, so he can play in his old ones for today.

More furniture moving, it takes a while going up to the top floor with bits of sofa! each bit weighs a tonne

Have a lovely weekend, whatever it is that you are doing.
Football is back, for those of us who love it, even if your team has not made one single signing in the transfer window (!!)

f0xh0les

The kids came home from Friday football camp with loads of LCFC stuff, soft tablet cases, scarves ,badges, calendars, etc. Shame my boys are Tottenham fans.

I have now allowed them to support any team in the place we are currently living, as long as their hearts belong to Tottenham. They just want to be like all their little friends.

Step Gran is back at home, the ambulance men delivered her back, and she is exhausted, and said she will not be going into hospital again.
The hospital have told her it was just a virus. Which is medical speak for 'dunno'.
So she will either live or not. Either way she will be doing it in her own home. I have the feeling that from now on she will juts get more and more tired, unitl she slows down so much she just stops. As long as she is not in pain then I will just let her, it is what she wants.

DH has just come home, and has gone straight to bed!! at 4pm on a Friday. Hope he recovers or it is going to be a washout of a weekend.

Either way he will not interfere with my plans.

greent

f0xh0les wrote: »

I kind of treat this as therapy.

DH says I need professional help:rotfl:

Noooooooo - no need for profressionals, tell him - rabbiting away on here is free - much more :money:

f0xh0les wrote: »

Really looking forward to freecycled/ fakebook apple season. I will take more this year as it really helped with pudding planning and it was lovely and FREE! Not sure how much of a harvest there will be between our Beast from the East late snows and the hot summer, but the apple tree on the railway embankment is laden.
.

Apples here aren't doing so well, but our 2 pear trees and the one randomly next to a path by school are all overladen - pear and blackberry makes a nice crumble, too

f0xh0les wrote: »

Wish this weight loss would hurry up and occur.
Been exceptionally motivated and so far there has been no movement on the scale, plus have raised my exercise level. I am lacking in patience, good job I have motivation.

Onwards!!

If weight's not shifting, what about inches? - I sometimes find inches wiggle off better than the lbs. Personally, I'm more inspired by fitting into smaller clothes than what I weigh (although smaller clothes and less stones would be super nice!)

f0xh0les

Well it is 9.30 and I took DS4 down to kids Parkrun this morning. Ended up running further than he did (2k course) as he stopped running after the 1st kilometer, and I had already run the length of the park to get to the other side to clap him, and then the width of the park to wait for him coming round, and he nev er appeared, so had to run back half the length of the park to find him, then run the last km with him.
He has no concept of pace. So, 15 odd minutes of exercise, happy DS4. DH is taking DS3 on a free 6km bike ride this afternoon, so I thought DS4 would feel left out if I did not do something with him.

Plus I am up and awake at ridiculous o'clock of the morning, so might as well do something other than wait for DH to end his love affair with the duvet.

So today should not be spendy at all. Weather is drizzly but warm (yuck).

I need another lovely cup of coffee after my impromptu parkfun as a reward for being fabulous and according to DS4, the best mum ever for taking him to stuff. Undeserved, I feel, but hey, I'll take it.

f0xh0les

Took the sofa bed apart and got DS1 to help me up the stairs with it. It was L shaped, so broke it down to one I, and one square. One is now in my bedroom as a chaise longue type thing, it looks fab.

The other is the pull out bit, which will make a square bed, 5' square, which should fit DS4s bedroom alcove, and enable him to see the moon and stars out of his roof window when he is in bed. I have plans to mount it on a base of 1 x 4 cube unit shelving, so there is some storage, and maybe some kind of thin shelving attached to the wall behind the bed, plus a headboard.

It all fits, so it is just making it look good that is my brief .

Then lunch at 12, football at 1, back home by 3.15, then, well, everything else.

I found some white cardboard while tidying up at the weekend, and I used it to hide the cables going into the mains fuse box (which is directly under my tv on the shelves I put up in the chimney alcove. It has been bugging me for ages that the wiring just looks awful, but with a few snips of the scissors, a false back was made for the shelf, and all the wires are now out of sight, and as it was white cardboard, on a white wall, unless you are actually looking for it, you would not know. Plus DH did not notice, and he was sat right in front of it 'borrowing' the football off the internet.
So I will do the same on the bottom shelf when I come across either some more cardboard, or hardboard. No more wires ! Marvellous. A daft sounding idea that works perfectly.

In other news, now that there is no sofa bed in the back room, it still looks like a bomb has hit it. I need to get in there and sort it out but I can't think how the room will work. It is the way through from the front of the house to the kitchen, so there must be a clear walkway along the right hand side of the room, which is also where an enormous radiator is. The far wall has a sliding patio door in the left hand corner, and the kitchen door in the right hand corner. One wall has the fireplace, which is enormous and hideously ugly, but I have a cast iron fireplace to put in there which should bizarrely give me more room.
But how the room is going to work I don't know. I can't even picture it in my head, and it is the room where the kids play on the xbox and computer, and has become the dumping ground of the house.

Right. up to the top floor to sort out this bed situation

f0xh0les

Today turned into a £12 spend day and also £10 for the football camp for the week.

Because.... I found Almond Dream ice cream for 99p a tub in Her0n instead of £4.99 a tub in Waitr0se. BUT, the vanilla we tried first was Vanilla, the second one we opened after supper was definitely caramel without the caramel swirl, so I suspect a quality control issue - in case anyone g/f finds any, it may not be what it first appears to be. Be careful! Also Almond Dream coconut and Almond Dream rice and quinoa drink are 3for £1 or 40p each regularly in Her0n.

The kids are going bonkers over it, mint choc chip, vanilla and undercover caramel for 99p. What is not to like?

More movement made on the DS4 bed. He is in it tonight, it is not 100% finished but is good enough for him to be in.
Exercised for 1 hour walking round in circles while the boys played football- somewhere between 5 and 7km - I lost count of how many laps I did.

chumpy45

Fab inventions with both the white cardboard wire covering and the bed. Really admire your creativity. I recently bought some flat pack garden furniture (in a sale of course) which said "2 people - 30 mins" on the box. It took three of us almost 3 hours to complete it and that included putting one seat back on back to front and being unable to get it off again lol. I don't think I could run to remodelling a sofabed. Hats off to you:T

f0xh0les

To be honest, if I could have sold it I would have, it cost £400 4 years ago when we moved to Sheffield, and the sister-in-laws decided 7 days after we moved into an unfurnished house was a great time to come and visit, in the snow, and we had nowhere to stick her. Then Dh's uncle keeled over and died about 3weeks later and we had in-laws staying with us, so it was a good thing we had it, although m-i-l whined the entire time it was too hard.

But the kids have managed to split the seams in two places by using it as a trampoline. So resale value has gone from £250 down to very little, but it is nothing that a few screws wont fit back together if we need it to be a sofabed again.

DH is still utterly unconvinced about the whole thing - well, not the whole thing, he loves the bit in our bedroom, he is unconvinced about DH's bed, but then he has not gone up to look at it, and is rarely on the top floor so I could kit it out in tigerskin print flock and it would take him 4 months to notice.

But anything that makes a boy happy to be in his bedroom and go to bed, and keep it tidy, is surely a good thing?

More clearing up of tools and moving stuff down to the ground floor - there is very little left to do on the top two floors except the bathroom, just two sets of blinds and the odd flat pack shelf unit needed.

The back room is still a total mess. Honestly it looks like a squat. Actually, a squat might be offended to be likened to that mess.

DH is a crafty type. In that he does painting and sewing and costume making and makes moulds and sculpts things, but all this takes an enormous (to me) amount of bits and things and tools and stuff. Which he is awful at putting away, he just lets it drop wherever he stops using it and leaves it there.

Which leads to a very messy 'his side of the room' and leaves me trying to find some sort of storage solution that does not look awful - a work in progress, that one.

Every day it gets a little better - nothing more is coming into the house, and stuff is leaving or being moulded into a semblance of order. I will get there. but it is boring.

And on that note, time to get on with it.

in_need_of_direction

I wish I had your tenacity and determination

f0xh0les

You are very kind. I do not work, so I cannot get away from the mess. If I had a job or a social life that did not involve car parks, kids sports or squirrels, I would probably ignore it and book a nice holiday somewhere...