Get a grip woman!

beanielou

What a pain about the train tickets.

Suffolk_lass

It might be me @beanielou - they emailed me for the reference from the email and I don't have one. So I checked PayPal and the transaction isn't there. So I logged in to Greater Anglia (my local rail company) and it was not there. I clicked on past bookings and there it is, 1st December. I checked and I did go to London for a former colleague's retirement do. So I emailed back and told them I thought I might be having a poor old thing moment and apologised!

So I have now booked an evening out ticket. It is a first class off-peak return for £25 (single is never less than £16) and there is timing flexibility. Hopefully a bit of a bargain.

Supposed to be warm and lovely here today but cold and overcast at the moment!

Suffolk_lass

Oh good grief! I am supposed to be inspecting and moving some bees today. Everyone round here is reporting grumpy bees, because it is cold and horrible here in the east. So I am not going to. I just need to know what I am planning tomorrow before we start, and get DH to write it down as I go.

In other news, I have resisted the urge to shop (no butter) as I remembered I froze some. So a quick freezer dive later I am sorted. Shopping from my freezer!

Beans are all planted and covered in plastic in the greenhouse, and I took half a dozen small squashes round to my (widowed) neighbour. His youngest son likes cucumbers but gave strict instructions not to bring courgettes, so four cucumbers, a tromboncino (shh, climbing courgette-like squash) and a crown Prince pumpkin popped in his greenhouse while he is out. Just the butternuts to go, but they are all in trays of six until I've got more room to pot them on.

This year it is mostly purple with three purple dwarf beans, two purple climbing beans, a borlotti climber (red and cream) and two different runners. I need to finish some weeding including my double size sink, so I can refresh the compost and get more salad seeds planted.

rtandon27

Suffolk_lass said:

...In other news, I have resisted the urge to shop (no butter) as I remembered I froze some. So a quick freezer dive later I am sorted. Shopping from my freezer!

Shopping from home - that's a positive result SL! - can I borrow you to sharpen up OH's training?  

We currently have frozen butter and fridge butter after picking up some fresh to make a treat to donate to the church tea party last Sunday.  OH did not want to part with any of the frozen posh fermented stuff as he thinks it is best saved for savoury meals rather than sweet treats.

ATM we also have a freezer full of fish as OH insisted on picking up a load of yellow stickered bargains - this leaves little room for anything else & is making meal planning a PITA!!!  I keep explaining to him that we are NOT having oven fish and wedges every day no matter how good the bargain!  I feel further training in the bargain shopping department is required - LOL

Suffolk_lass

@rtandon27 lol - it's me here. I have never been any good at sticking to lists. Only when I click and collect - but even then, I have to go in because savers bleach, dishwasher tablets and the inevitable thing I forgot to order, all need me to pop in. My chest freezer is mostly bread, meat and the odd ice cream and big pots of ready made soup or curry - and I confess to offers and YS! I picked up 3 whole chickens for £10 when that offer came back, adding to the two already in there  (who knew!?).

Still no bees here yet but I think we know what we want to do

Watty1

Loved all the bee updates. I have often thought about keeping bees but really have too much to do at the moment so do so via my imagination and your diary.

Crazycatlady2

We have bees in our garden In a bird box on side of garage…hubby said they been there for weeks but I only just noticed 🤷‍♀️

Suffolk_lass

Crazycatlady2 said:

We have bees in our garden In a bird box on side of garage…hubby said they been there for weeks but I only just noticed 🤷‍♀️

Are they bumble bees? they often like to be in trees or enclosed bird boxes. If they are, this is lovely. The nest will only be there for the summer. We had them under the ply sheet my husband's motorbike stands on in the cart lodge a year or two back, and other in the roof of the pig shed (different sort)

Suffolk_lass

Having a coffee and some toast after an over-active guard bee took exception to me weeding creeping thistles out of what used to be a lawn.

I don't think I mentioned it but I finally ordered 500L of heating oil and it was delivered this morning. £284.03 or 54.1ppl. 11 months ago we paid £525.53 or 46ppl more. I bought 500L because I was not sure if we were below 200 litres to be able to fit in 1000 - the indicator is flashing red but it is showing 10% gradations it has one bar, which I think means between 10% and 20% (20% is 240 litres out of a 1200L tank). Also, if we were to move...

I also added up the electricity unit total and it was just under 1078 KWH per month, averaged across the last year, up to the end of April. I know, that is way more than most but we run an electric aga in winter and that is between 4-5000 units less than the corresponding previous year, and does not really take the new solar panels into consideration yet.

The "savings" are due to a number of measures.

• I wash our clothes cold unless they are really soiled 
• I turn off and unplug things
• I do fewer, bigger loads in the WM
• I lit fires instead of running the little convector heater in the lounge
• I took control of the little oil filled radiators in the bathroom and study (and mostly turned them off
• All lighting is low voltage
• We did not switch on the aga until later, due to the warm autumn
• I turned the aga down so the heat was up to the minimum ideal, not in the middle between the two lines
• We have only been away a few times, so DS leaving things on, freezer doors open, has been less

Time to go and do more outside now

EssexHebridean

That's a cracking saving on energy use SL - I do all our washing at 30 these days aside from towels and bedding, but I've thought for a while I'm tempted to turn down further for general clothing washes. Our machine has an eco setting and that appears to be a cold wash - I might be tempted to run that on a day when I can watch the monitor at some stage and see what the actual cost of that one is. when we move the machine will be plugged in via a smart plug but for now I'm stuck with being unable to easily monitor costs on that or the dishwasher due to the plugs being (very) concealed. 

Also fascinated by the bee chat - but like Foxgloves I'm inclined to feel it's all a lot more work (and far more technical) than would be for us - I'll just enjoy your accounts from afar! 

Glad you discovered what had gone on with the train tickets!