Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

Evening Snowdrops!
Busy morning. Had intended to get my final batch of marmalade made but decided first thing that I couldn't live with my atrocious roots any longer, so I plopped the big bowl of orange peel & juice I prepped yesterday for soaking overnight into my witchy jam cauldron, got it simmering, then set about my hair with some much needed colour. While it was cooking (my hair, not the fruit), I got all the jars washed & into the oven to sterilise. By the time I emerged from over the bath with hair I was happy to live with, the peel was nicely cooked & ready for jamming, so I got on with that. Lovely fragrant simmering orange smell all over the house, which felt very seasonal. Bottled, labelled, pots washed, etc, etc.
The sun put in a small effort here at least, so decided to have just half an hour in the garden, as I wanted to start chopping up some big apple tree boughs which the workmen needed to remove last week & get them into our council garden waste bin. It's collection day on Fri & I can't bear paying for this service, then not using it, so I decided to go hard at it for just 30 mins & after that, I had completely filled 3 trugs. While I was out there, I noticed that a hellebore I bought years ago from a nurseryman on our local market is flowering really well.....it's a lovely dark red one. I was so pleased to see it, as it is only the 2nd time it has flowered in all the years I'e had it. Isn't it funny how sometimes the tiniest things cheer one up? A productive morning, anyway.
Then, as my dear old Grandad would have said "After the Lord Mayor's Show comes the muck cart" because I'd lined up this afternoon to further a family history project I've been working on and I swear the absolute MINUTE I got my bottom onto my desk chair, & fetched all my notes out, the bloody internet crashed & it was an outage which lasted all afternoon. Well bah to that! Sulked for a while, then used my time to write some cards & wrap a few gifts for a couple of February birthdays - actually the gifts look nice in their recycled wrapping & bag plus home made tag & a bow I salvaged off something else.
I do go on, don't I? Defo time to read my magazine now.
Stay warm all of you,
F x

Blackcats

Ah Foxgloves - how astute to recognise that I would be one of those girls that really, really disliked PE. I hated getting changed into the aertex t shirt (which we'd embroidered with our initials), the wrap around skirt, huuuge bottle green pants and thick socks and plimsolls. You've mentioned that you are well endowed in the chest department -well I was the opposite so it was always a race to get dressed and undressed as quickly as possible. We didn't have any showers just got dressed again into our uniform to continue other lessons so it obviously worked in my favour not to buildup a sweat during netball.
Goalkeeper was the least energetic position - limited in the areas you were allowed in, no pressure to score and just a requirement to wave arms around in front of the attacking player.
I've also got a horrible feeling that PE kit only went home to be washed when we broke up for holidays. It must have been pretty revolting by that time. Still we had our Mum roll on deodorant to prevent smelly armpits, so no worries about not showering and wearing the kit for several weeks without washing.:eek:

foxgloves

I've only just got in, but had to pop on here to tell you that I have today bought an item of almost unimaginable levels of glamour. Rest assured that I WILL be returning to bore you with this tomorrow, as well as to discuss school PE knickers with Blackcats.
Night night,
F x

maryb

Ha! we would have loved wrap around skirts. Convent school modesty dictated knee length divided skirts ie culottes, but with pleats so it looked like a skirt because nice Catholic girls never wore trousers. Because of the crotch, you couldn't even roll over the waistband

Foxgloves, you cheer me up too. One thing you wrote I found really helpful. I think it was along the lines of you used to spend more for eco stuff in the spendy years because it was part of how you saw yourself, but you've managed to distance yourself from that - because the greenest way is actually to use less and waste nothing. I was struggling with green guilt at the time and it really helped, so thank you

Blackcats

Ah Mary B - I went to a convent too which I'd always assumed was the reason for the large green pants. Obviously it was a highly progressive establishment and also PE wasn't taught by the nuns. The culottes sound like they would definitely protect the catholic values. We had a very strict rule about socks at my school - they had to be brown not black because Catholic girls didn't wear black socks.

maryb

We had to wear stockings from the age of 11! (this was before tights had been invented which shows you how old I am!) And they were expensive in 1965 so we had to darn them and be inspected on Monday mornings. Brown gloves in winter, white gloves in summer regardless of the heat because we were young ladies. Hats went without saying

foxgloves

Hi Blackcats & Maryb,
I didn't got to a convent school. I went to a large comprehensive school. It was 1975 when I moved up from primary school. In some ways, the comp was progressive - for example both boys & girls did woodwork & metalwork as well as both needlework & home economics. Mr F is a good few years younger than me, but he didn't get to do any cookery at his comp, as it was a subject just for girls there. However, I think my comp was pretty regressive on the PE front. Oh, those PE knickers - horrid navy blue.....a colour I still loathe for clothing even today....& so big, I'm sure they were practically visible from space. So it was horrid pants plus a red aertex polo shirt type thing for gym, then for games & athletics, we had a wrap-around navy skirt, which like the shirts, had to be embroidered with our initials. Even in the depths of winter there were no tracksuits, hoodies or any form of long sleeved tops. As so many girls are turned off fitness activity by school PE lessons & go on to become women who hats exercise (me!), I think a more progressive approach would have been to concentrate on fitness. I enjoyed keep fit/dance to music (which we hardly ever did) & would also have enjoyed power walking. There was no walking activity at all. There was cross country but you had to run. I didn't like anything else. I suppose hockey was the least worst of the sports on offer. I think taking girls who are going through puberty & becoming self-conscious & making them wear yukky pants & tiny little skirts (what my Dad would have described as a 'pelmet') to do enforced activity in which they have no interest & zero choice is a really regressive approach.
As for showers, we had to have them. The problem was that you had no time to get a proper shower then get dried & dressed & get to next lesson without being late, so most of us used to run through still in our PE kit just to get our hair wet so we looked like we'd had a proper wash. A PE teacher once caught me doing that & said 'You can't shower in your clothes' & made me strip off & run through again so I was late for my next lesson & got in trouble. One term, we had a teacher who would make us all line up in a row in our towels, then when she gave the signal we had to hang our towel on a hook & run right through the showers, collect our towel then on the way out she would actually touch us all the way down our backs to see if we were wet. If not, we had to repeat the process. I suspect there was rather more in that for her than for us. She wouldn't get away with it now!
Uuurgh! I honestly do look back at every PE lesson as an absolute, utter waste of my time. I'd have got much fitter power-walking the cross country route & would not have become such a fitness dodger in adulthood.
So it's a massive bah to massive PE knickers from me!
F x

foxgloves

MaryB I'm glad you found my thinking on green products helpful. Yes, I would like to be able to buy the entire range of some of these very attractive brands of ethical cleaning products & I have bought them in the past when I was spendy. However, the price differential once I started budgeting is just too great. I think that reducing the number of products we buy is the most important thing & those we do buy, trying to get them in containers which can be re-used or recycled. I mentioned that I brought back lots of cleaning products when we cleared Mum's house last year & I've recently finished the last multi-purpose spray. Well, what a horrible un-green container that was - I shan't name it but it was a very mainstream spray cleaner from one of the big companies. I felt really angry with the sheer lack of effort concerning recycling/sustainability issues. I bet it's a company which pretend to be green & talks a lot of 'greenwash' on its website. The actual bottle was a kind of plastic our council recycling collection will take. However there was also a shrink wrap with all the branding on (rather than printing the bottle itself), a plastic trigger nozzle gun (made from 2 types of plastic), the tube going down into the bottle, the cap/neck bit affixing the gun to the bottle & for some reason ANOTHER piece of transparent moulded plastic fitted over that. So one I'd pulled it all apart which was very difficult, I'd actually got a whole pile of different plastic components & the only recyclable part was the bottle. No company should still be producing containers as p*sstakingly awful & unsustainable as this! I'd never buy this kind of container myself. I'm sure that reducing products is the way ahead for most people as it is easy to do & saves money. And I think that a single bottle of a mainstream multi-purpose product against say 5 or 6 ethical products all in different bottles would hold up quite well in terms of sustainability. Also, using as little product as we can to get the job done. I'd buy the ethical ranges if they were more affordable but until that price gap closes quite a lot, I will have to leave them in the shop & do it my way.
F x

foxgloves

Oh.....I've just realised I haven't told you all about yesterday's 'glamour purchase', lol.....will try to remember next time.
F x

maryb

I find big name cleaning sprays set me coughing really badly, God knows what's in them, so I use Ecover general purpose cleaner which doesn't work out too expensive. But the big name spray bottles are good for refilling with the diluted Ecover . The spray mechanism seems to work better and last longer than the plant mister spray bottles I've tried.