Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

I've enjoyed reading everyone's comments. Interesting that others also had similar  experiences re being able to read at a very young age.
Hello Friday Frugalistas, I'm chatting to you in the last of the sun from my pondside bench after a useful day on the whole. Mr F's day off so he volunteered to go & get the grocery shopping while I stayed home to answer any builder queries. Building work has concentrated on drainage today. Another problem found (our house is 86 years old), which means we will need to pay a bit extra to have the defect put right [edited to say that I've just found out that it will cost us under £200, so that's a relief] & it does need doing. Drainage/sewers are important because when those sort of defects go bad, we can literally end up in the manure, so we feel pleased its been spotted.
 Meanwhile, I've got on with changing bed linen, potting up echium blue bedder & cerinthe & deciding which tomato plant babies look too feeble to make it (composted). Moved baby peppers to greenhouse, still cloched & will be bubble wrapped at night. 
Also turned 500g of Mr F's February find of 1.5kg pork mince for £5 into 2 big pork & apple burgers which will feed us tonight in buns with coleslaw & salad, plus a cottage pie base for the freezer. 
Mr F has been doing well with his Waitr*se loyalty card app offers. He gets sent a selection each week based on what we buy (we generally shop around) & can choose two of them. This week, he chose £4 off a box of 40 cat meat pouches (Soot & Ash's foetid gunk of choice), which meant we got them for £9. 
Well, I must go & shut the greenhouse & shed for the evening & as it's not my cooking night, I think a few chapters of my book are in order.
Ohhhh, I can hear Mr F vacuuming up builder dust.....either that or a be-whiskered friend has been over-exhuberant in the cat litter.
Enjoy your Friday nights, m'dears,
F x

Paspatur

Another one here who could read and write (and count) before I started school
I came home at the end of the first week and said I wouldn't be going back because they never gave me a reading book and expected me to just play
When we eventually got on to alphabet/reading the teacher held up cards with a letter, I put my hand up and answered ess (s) and the teacher told me I was wrong it was SSS (phonetic)
I remember wondering on my way home from school who the idiot was; my dad who taught me to read and write or the teacher
Halfway through the 3 minute walk I decided it was the teacher
Also remember reading cornflake packets etc. we had to earn our pocket money and I remember getting told off for stopping to read everything in the pantry when I was supposed to be cleaning the shelves
Foxgloves I nearly fainted when you said you used 500g of mince for 2 burgers!
Then I saw the cottage pie bit
My mum used to use 340g of mince to feed 8 of us, padded out with mash and mealie pudding or dumplings or pastry squares

ladyholly

I cant remember if I could read when i went to school but as it was a private school it probably didnt matter either way. I only went there because our village school was so bad that my mum went out cleaning to pay for my sister and I to go there. This was in the 1950s when few mothers worked and as far as I know she was the only one on the RAF camp we lived on.

I didnt teach my DD to read before school but she new all the letters and the phonetic sounds and she learned very quickly. Unfortunately because we moved when she was just 6 she changed school where they gave her a reading book of between 40 and 50 pages and then proceeded to hear her read twice a week and just one page at a time. Strangely enough she was bored stupid and had long read the whole book at home but that experience put her off reading for a long time although she does read as much as she has time for now.

foxgloves

@, Ladyholly. It seems there are many memories around the subject of learning to read, not all positive with regards to process, but producing a good outcome in the love of books.
F

foxgloves

Sunday Savers, hello! Am on garden bench watching a funny little mini-beast doing laps of the pond & the lovely Mr F has just brought me a coffee & biscuit. Not a no-spend day as we popped out to the village garden centre to buy compost. I also bought 6 back- up 🍅 plants, as mine have suffered from transplant shock & I'm not confident they will all put on the necessary growth. I usually have 6 in my greenhouse border & 6 outside in bottomless pots. If I end up having extras, it's not a problem to plant them out somewhere in the garden. 
Other garden jobs today: Potted up chard into modules & cut the rest for salad, potted up the rest of the echium blue bedder & cosmos, also lollo rosso lettuce. Planted out autumn sown sweetpeas as no frost forecast imminently & they've been hardening off for quite a while & top-dressed grape vine with last of the worm compost.
Other jobs: Did a load of laundry, fetched all my home made plant labels down to greenhouse (cut from empty spread tubs), as supplies were running down.
Energy saving: Two baths from one tub of hot water, thermostat turned down at 10am as I knew we'd be out, then in the garden. No point paying to heat an empty house in April. Weather looks warmer over the coming week so I think the heating will now hardly come on. Pegged out laundry & it dried for free, even big bath towels. 
Mr F has spent the best part of 4 hrs trying to get a refund or replacement on a faulty gizmo - a saga with which I won't bore you - but he seems to have managed it & new gizmo promised for next week, no charge. He's roasting a chicken tonight - I've earmarked that for an additional 3 main meals plus stock.
Well, it's chilling down now so I will finish my coffee & put the plant babies to bed.
Peace,
F x

foxgloves

@Paspatur Oh my goodness, those would have been meatloaves not burgers, lol. Yes, I made a substantial cottage pie base too. My old fashioned cookery teacher made us write down meat portion sizes - I can't remember them all, just that red meat was 4oz (Mr F was horrified when I told him this!) & for dishes using mince, we were to use 2oz mince per person because those sort of dishes were always bulked out with other cheaper ingredients. Plates & portions were smaller then too, weren't they?
I don't cook as though we're down to our last brass farthing because we're not, but I know we could pull our horns in a good bit should further economies be needed & I wouldn't hesitate to do it.
F x

Paspatur

@Foxgloves thinking back to going to the butcher as a child we were on 3oz for red meat and 1 1/2 oz for mince Slightly more if my dad was at sea
But bear in mind we also had home made soup twice a day 6 days a week so never a one course meal
And fish came free so no portion control on that
A third helping of smoked haddock fishcakes for anyone? Or more Cullen Skink?

QueenJess

I'm going to have to start getting some of my sweet peas outside relatively soon.  I only sowed them a few weeks ago, but some of them are getting unwieldy and are trying to attack the other smaller ones Hopefully the frosts are pretty much at an end so I can start planting out.  I still have some seeds left to sow, but have very little window sill left!

maryb

Love the reading reminiscences.  I was the opposite.  Late to read then suddenly got it and overtook the rest of the class.  Interestingly my daughter was exactly the same and - little historical factoid - George Eliot was also very slow to learn to read.  Teachers used to be told when they were training that there is a thing called reading readiness.  They ignore that in practice.  I found they only like clever children in theory.  Treating them as individuals is more work.  Also clever children don’t like pointless work so they often get a reputation for being lazy

foxgloves

@Paspatur - Must admit that the thought of serving up 3.5oz of meat onto Mr F's plate would be most amusing. Might try it one day just to see his face. Nobody would think he was vegetarian for over a decade - he gets the red mist whenever he passes a butcher's shop!
@QueenJess - Re sweet-peas, you can pinch them out if they are getting lanky (you've probably done this). I don't think mine liked being planted out the day before blustery drying winds, but I have stood some small panes of reclaimed glass in front of them for a bit of protection, so they will hopefully be OK.
@maryb - Yes, in my professional capacity I worked in a field with strong links to education & I agree that children reach readiness to read in their own time. Children are motivated by a wide variety of reading material & unfortunately, most reading schemes are formulaic & don't reflect a particularly eclectic range of plot or characters. The 'Reading with real books' movement which was around in the 1980s fell by the wayside because while the greater choice was doubtless of more interest to children, the lack of a graded scheme meant that teachers were less able to assess individual reading levels. Reading scheme books are often dull as ditch water, but their formulaic nature facilitates the ability to grade progress much more easily.
F