Bricks Not Books

ruby_eskimo

I think the visual of seeing your money accumulate in a jar is one of the best motivators - plus you always end up having more in there than you think each time you count it 👍

I also need to get a bit better at organising my recipes from random magazines and websites.  Need to ponder the best way to bring them all together.  Dinner sounds great, love anything with chorizo 😋

LadyWithAPlan

Loving the Disneyland Paris savings jar  
I use  YNAB which are virtual jars and it’s so satisfying to see money built up but the click of cash is even better 

glad DS settled in nursery ok but ouch to those fees 

VintageHistorian

ruby_eskimo said:

I also need to get a bit better at organising my recipes from random magazines and websites.  Need to ponder the best way to bring them all together.  Dinner sounds great, love anything with chorizo 😋

I use a lovely notebook I got from an online shop called Inkpot, highly recommended as the paper is lovely quality. It's a B5 size so big but not over the top, and I've got the first half for savoury recipes and the second half for baking and desserts. My parents have an app so they photograph recipes to keep but I'm less trusting of The Cloud

LadyWithAPlan said:

glad DS settled in nursery ok but ouch to those fees 

Yes they're painful, although ultimately I worked out that the salary sacrifice brings it down to just over £550 so me and Mr VH are paying £275 each. Still a shocking amount but it could be so much worse, and we don't get charged extra for food etc, just need to send in nappies and baby wipes.

Managed to get a lot done on my Tuesday off. I forced myself to sit down and stick all the recipes in my notebook, which took nearly 2 hours but at least it's all done and there's no longer scraps of paper dotted around the house. I've also had a look to find a recipe to try, currently the top 3 contenders are chicken and chorizo traybake, youvetsi (probably with stewing steak although the recipe asks for beef rib), and mustard chicken pasta. I'm going to mull it over a bit longer.

The eBay box was decluttered and 3 things were removed as they had been listed 3 years ago and hadn't sold. They had been bought to resell so I've lost a bit of money, but only £6 in total so not a terrible amount. We then had a right faff with trying to donate things. We went to the hospice charity shop near my parents house, they refused the clothes even though it was only 3 items as they are currently overwhelmed. This hospice has multiple outlets all over the place so why they're not getting more vans out to shuffle things around I don't know, but they refused. They did take the bags of toys though.

We then tried to get to the Co-Op as we needed bread but we're unfamiliar with the area and didn't realise the car park is accessed from a different road. I ended up turning around in a very tightly parked road to get back to it and found a parking space outside a hall. Quickly ran into a nearby charity shop to give them the clothes (which they accepted) and then ran to the Co-Op before picking up DS from my parents.

Oh and we also tried to donate a bag of children's clothes hangers as they're plastic but both shops refused as they're only allowed to use approved hangers I need to email around at work to see if anyone needs/wants them, I really don't want to chuck them all in landfill.

OPs this month are already at £25, including the £7 I had from PA last month and a couple of Tilly Tidies.

I have made a lemon drizzle cake over lunchtime so that will be part of my packed lunch and Mr VH's puddings after dinner. I saw on Instagram that you can get a pack of 2 Bonne Maman mousses for 20p! If you get the Tesco magazine (free in store) it has a £1 off voucher for them (there's a code to order online), and they're currently on Clubcard offer down to £1.20, so I ordered a strawberry pack for Mr VH.

And we have laundry outside that will almost certainly be bone dry by now. It includes DS's clothes from this morning that got very wet while he had an hour playing with water. The cost of some soggy clothes is well worth the hour amusement he got out of it.

Dinner tonight is roast chicken in the slow cooker. Potatoes have already been peeled and there's Yorkies and veg in the freezer so shouldn't take too long to assemble when we get back from my parents house this afternoon.

Work is a mess at the moment, loads of people have left (Higher Education, if you know you know) but relatively quietly so no one really knows who is left and who is doing what. I'm caught between being glad I have a job (this economy ain't great) and wishing I had made an attempt to leave with the others. We must play with the cards we are dealt etc.

Have a good week everyone!

VintageHistorian

My morning to get up with DS while Mr VH has a lie in so once we were both breakfasted and dressed I took us off to a car boot sale. Came back with a Christmas mug for 20p, which I will use to decorate the bookcases, and a  vintage compilation of Wild West short illustrated stories for £1 which I'm going to give to my Dad, either for Father's Day or Christmas. Dad loved reading about cowboys when he was younger and still enjoys watching old westerns so this will be a nice random thing for him to flick through.

Also stopped off at M&S where I got some yellowsticker sweet and sour chicken and a yellowsticker cottage pie. The pie is in the freezer, the chicken is for tonight. Then we popped into Tesco to get some bits I forgot off the main shop on Thursday. DS was in a bit of a naughty mood and kept trying to grab things to through around, luckily I caught him before he grabbed the bottle of prosecco on display in M&S

Once we were home Mr VH took DS into the garden for a play with his water table. Next door, the new neighbours, are celebrating their child's birthday with a party featuring a bouncy castle in the garden. It's not a very big garden I hasted to add! DS was quite curious about it but thankfully is not yet capable of asking if he can have one for his next birthday!

I've roasted a small chicken in the slowcooker and once I've posted this I'm going to go strip the meat off it. I've got a chasseur sauce currently cooking on the hob so some of the chicken will be stirred through that, and some of it will be portioned up with some roast potatoes I did while Mr VH fed DS lunch, to make some roast dinners. Everything can then go in the freezer and we can serve up with some veggies etc for DS. He's also out of bean casserole and ratatouille so I will look at making those next weekend.

Our dinner tonight is a picky tea for Eurovision. There's duck and pancakes, macaroni cheese croquettes, the sweet and sour chicken, some mozzarella sticks, and some waffle fries. There's also a large bag of Kettle chips but now we have the waffle fries (a bit of a panic buy on my part as I couldn't find a second type of croquette in Tesco) I'm not sure whether to leave the Kettle chips for another day. Most of the items were from the freezer but some how taking them out to defrost doesn't seem to have made much space.

I do actually need to do a freezer inventory as I've got no clear idea of what we have in there. I do know that we have some portions of roast beef though so those will be dinner tomorrow night, and we have some meatballs in tomato sauce which we can have on Monday!

Right, time to deal with a chicken and possibly have another cup of tea! Have a good weekend everyone!

VintageHistorian

We have ants in our kitchen They seem to have stopped after a small massacre took place. They were coming out from under a cupboard (which had no food in it) so I'm going to take DS out for a walk this afternoon and that will give Mr VH time to take the baseboard off and sprinkle some powder, without a toddler trying to help/eat the powder/demand to be allowed to shake the bottle.

I'm happy to let them roam around outside but once things cross the threashold of my home all bets are off. Except for bees, obviously, they get shepherded back outside with care and love.

Did a £5 TT last night so we are definitely over the £30 target this month. I've got £2 sitting in PA but nothing pending, everything I've looked at the past 2 weeks has either involved a microphone (not ideal at 9pm at night) or has been training AI, and I'm pretty sure they've already nicked my books so I'm training them further. It's simply that time of year for academic research, it should start to pick up over the summer once they get all the exam marking and graduations out of the way.

This week I sold an unused bath toy that DS has already outgrown to someone at work for £5 and I've also sold a notebook I decluttered ages ago for £3, now I just need that Disney jar I've also sorted out some more toddler clothes to try and sell on, they won't get much but anything will be nice. I also have a bag of things I've tried selling before with no takers so I need to be ruthless with myself and circulate the list at work two more times then accept they need to go to the charity shop.

I have purchased DS's first Christmas stocking item. I saw on Instagram that Hallmark were selling Disney "Itty Bitty" dolls (small cute little things) with an offer of buy 1 get 2 free. DS really likes Rapunzel in Tangled, so I used the offer to get 6 Disney Princesses, the Rapunzel one is set aside for DS and the other 5 will go in my Christmas toy donation. A local homeless charity works with several others to donate new toys to families who are struggling and these will be a nice addition. I also got some more free Wibble jelly sachets so they're set aside for the food bank.

Oh and I was off work on Friday so I did the freezer review. We have a lot of roast pork with gravy portions, and 6 portions of pork normandy, so effectively I appear to have a small piglet in my freezer. I've incorporated those into the meal plan for the next 3 months. Quite low on pasta sauce options though so that's something to work on once the pork has been reduced.

Dinner tonight, if I'm not fighting a hoard of ants determined to avenge their fallen comrades, will be leftover toad in the hole with potato wedges. Enjoy the bank holiday everyone!

f0xh0les

Bicarb! Kid safe and it makes ants feet feel fizzy because of the formic acid. They won't cross the line. 
Its the warm weather,and you probably have a spill somewhere they can smell. 
Mine came in under the back door, across the laundry room, into the kitchen, up onto the counter top, and onto a wall shelf where a tiny bottle of coffee syrup has been knocked over by one of the boys.  Golden syrup was also a culprit once. So treat it as an opportunity to purge the back of the cupboard and wash the outside of sticky bottles. 
It is horrible seeing them traipsing past without a care in the world, like they own the place. 
Totally understand the fast fix though. 

beanielou

Loathe the things. 

VintageHistorian

f0xh0les said:

Bicarb! Kid safe and it makes ants feet feel fizzy because of the formic acid. They won't cross the line. 
Its the warm weather,and you probably have a spill somewhere they can smell. 

Thanks for the tip @f0@f0xh0les! DH put the regular powder down while we were out but it's good to know there's a non-poisonous equivalent. I did find one ant crawling on one of the boxes of DS's Calpol so those have been placed in a sealed tupperware box, as has a bag of raisins that Mr VH always leaves out on the side. We had rain yesterday for the first time in over a month so I think that pushed a few indoors and then others followed.

beanielou said:

Loathe the things. 

I'm the same @beanielou - I get they're an important part of the ecosystem etc but they need to remain outside! I think it's because they remind me of spiders, although if there had been a herd of them in my kitchen I would have just burned the house down and started back over

The good news though is that we haven't seen any since yesterday. Long may that continue!

VintageHistorian

Mostly popped on this afternoon as I've just been looking through my planner and remembered that back in January I said I would post my aims for the year once I had time to type them up. DS and Mr VH are both having a nap and since I'm reviewing them anyway I might as well post them here, especially as we're almost halfway through the year.

So without further adieu here are my aims for 2025, split into four categories; shop, home & garden, finances, and personal.

Shop
My only shop is possibly the most hobby-ist business in the world but it keeps me quiet and although I only get pennies from it it's still nice to know people are buying my things. My aims for this are:

• Have 1300 Instagram followers < At time of writing I am on 1174!
• Launch 2 new products < I actually launched stickers this month and have more to print!
• Publish four blog posts < My blog writing has virtually disappeared since having DS but I did manage to write and publish one last month so just 3 more to go!

Home & Garden
There's probably a lot more that could go under this but we have neither the time nor the money so it's just a few things that have bugged us for a while:

• Move DS's bedroom < Done, and every time we hear next door's kids screaming we feel relief that it won't wake him up.
• Sort out kitchen < This sounds very vague but it's mostly replacing the oven, stove top and extractor fan (all of which were in the house when we bought it), replacing a load of mastic that's coming away from the back of the worktop behind the sink, and sort out the flooring. The only reason why it hasn't been done is because I suspect we'll find some kind of bodge when we move the oven and I don't want to have to deal with it. We do need to get an electrician around to take a look first, that would be step 1.
• Get a new front door curtain < Another thing that has been here since we moved in, my MIL actually took it down and washed it for us when we first bought the place! I want to replace it with something with thermal lining. I know where we'll get it from, again it's just about sorting it out.

Finances
Speaks for itself really:

• Earn £700 from side hustles < Not sure I'll hit this but I did break £600 last year so it's worth a punt. Includes talks, cashback, selling decluttered bits etc. Currently I'm on £296!
• £400 mortgage overpayments < Gone is the day where I can aim for £1000 a year, for the moment at least. I think I'm on track for this but should review it this month just to see if I need to catch up and can afford to do so.
• Save £500 for a new laptop < This one might get parked. Partly because there isn't much wriggle room for it and partly because I do sort of have the money already. I have a "back up" account where I put the food money (and transfer it back out each week), any extra savings or bits of birthday/Christmas money that I pay in. There's about £3000 in it at the moment so I would just take the money for a laptop from there.

Personal
Obviously all the other things above are personal anyway, but this is the stuff that doesn't fit neatly into the other sections and which is mostly just for me, not for the house or DS and Mr VH etc:

• Try 3 new recipes < I have tried one, which was nice enough, now to do two more!
• Publish my ebook < I have been working on the darned thing for years. It's based on one of the history series' I have on my blog. I really must finish it and self-publish so I can move on to the others I have planned!
• Do one free Open University course < The OU has a bunch of mini online courses you can do for free and every year I browse the list and see ones I'd like to do. Never get around to it. So this year I'd like to actually dedicate time to it. Still another 6 months to complete this one!
• Bake a Victoria sponge < Haven't done this since the first year of GCSE Food Tech. I can do traybakes and loaf cakes, but I'd like to revisit the Victoria Sponge so I have something else in my cake-based arsenal.

Some of these are a bit ambitious, and quite a few require me to have a proper kick up the bum. I'm quite glad I've had a look at them now though, it's a good reminder of where I want to be in 6 months time (cooking a Victoria sponge in a new oven while new people follow me on Instragram after reading my recently self-published book XD).

Dinner tonight is honey mustard chicken thighs with tomato rice, have a good week everyone!

Watty1

I do wish you had not mentioned the OU courses as that is a rabbit hole I knew nothing about and have now fallen down