Put away your purse & become debt-averse

joedenise

Many thanks foxgloves. I'll give it a go with the cotton I've got. I've only got white but that'll be OK. I'm sure they'll last better than shop bought ones!

Onebrokelady

foxgloves wrote: »

Lol, I have not seen his new girlfriend since the hockey puck muffins were proffered. I think she may have dumped him!

Quick you need to bake something nice so he can lure her back :rotfl:

Onebrokelady

Well done on using so much of your stash, I did some sorting of my wardrobe floor today and I have a big bag of different wool in there,I'm not going to use it so I'm going to donate it to my local wool shop,they collect wool to be knitted up to help refugees,I would rather they make use of it than it sits in my wardrobe for the next god knows how many years
I'm not in a knitting mood at the moment apart from a hankering to trynsocks which I still haven't done,I'm busy decluttering the house so haven't had time to have a go yet,I'm thinking I might wait until my daughter is on maternity leave because she can then teach me

Lucifa73

Hi Foxgloves. :hello:

I subbed to your diary a few weeks ago and have been avidly reading through in my lunch breaks at work. I love the 'voice' of your posts and the touch of humour you bring to everything. I was saddened to hear of your loss late last year but admired the great attitude you showed in such difficult circumstances. All in all you have left me with a strong desire to become a frugal home cook, a deft gardener and a yarn-stash buster extraordinaire. Not sure how all that fits in with a full time job and managing 2 juniors and a kid-ult... but I shall be making a plan in my beloved bullet journal hybrid type journal.

If you don't mind I shall continue to follow and be inspired by you.
Luc x

foxgloves

Aww, Lucifa, what a lovely thing to say. A couple of decades ago, if anyone had told me I'd EVER inspire anybody where living a frugal lifestyle is concerned, I'd have laughed myself onto the floor! I was the world's worst fritterer! When I was a student, my Mum used to say 'You can't spend what you haven't got' & I used to look at her as though she was a sandwich short of a picnic, because I still had cheques left! Oh dear, well we can't go back can we? So I have had to learn from my thoroughly silly behaviour & just feel secure in the knowledge that I will never go back to how I used to be!
Thanks for reading x

foxgloves

And now for today's update, which is something of nothing really, as Friday is my big cleaning day & nobody wants to read about that! I'm typing as speedily as I can with my poorly hand (- prescription painkillers though - oh my days, they get into the little grey cells, don't they?!) because I've got 2 trays of rolls & a loaf proving which are ready to go in the oven as soon as it's hot enough.
I had a good sort through the pantry & freezer today & set about writing next week's meal plans. I texted my suggestions to mr f, as like our cat, he is always happy to look at anything foodie. Also, it gives him a chance to say if there is anything on there he really doesn't fancy, or there's something he's particularly like to make when it's one of his cooking nights. Anyway, I decided on (Sun) roast pork, apple sauce (still heaps of it in the freezer from last year's apple glut) with roast veg & the last of the braised red cabbage, (Mon) Hot pork cobs with apple sauce & chunky home made coleslaw, (Tues)) Pork stir-fry with noodles, (Weds) Home made spicy chickpea burgers in buns with salad, (Thurs) Salmon with Cranks' macro-rice, (Fri) Tuna wedge melt & salad. Anyway, within two minutes, I got a text back which just said 'Nom', so I'm going with that & wrote the shopping list too while I was on a roll. We've gone over budget a bit this month, but I also seem to have slightly more in our account than I expected at this stage, so we can accomodate a modest overspend.......not that shopping for the above will be very expensive, as we have a fair bit in stock for these meals already. mr f takes buying a roasting joint very seriously. His theory is that even when joints, hams or chickens are all priced the same - as in a set price for 'large' or 'medium', etc, that he can pick out the biggest & therefore the most bargainaceous one available because the cooking times cited on the label are longer. Now I like a bargain as much as the next person, but there are limits to how much time I am prepared to spend bent double with my head in a display of large chilly pork lumps, examining labels in forensic detail! Not so my Beloved, who I am sure believes his system to be arcane Meat Knowledge accessible only to the Wise Few.........
I must go & check the oven temperature now & bake today's bread.
Take care all, & keep your mitts on your pennies.
Love F x

joedenise

I have to admit I'm like MrF as I always look for the heaviest joint for the price, particularly with chicken.

Denise

foxgloves

Lol, well it's not just him then, Denise! I am the picky one with fruit & veg though. If a recipe states '1 leek', I'm perfectly happy to buy just the one. Also, I don't like bananas once they've started getting brown spots, so as I'm the only one in our house who eats them, I will stand in the supermarket or at our local market stall choosing just 2 green ones, which I like to be a particular size as well. Mr f is very good at looking at price per kilo & working out which is the best deal. In fact, the weird thing is that he's done this as long as we've been together, which means he was doing it while he was still extremely spendy & very much pre-LBM. Perhaps it was kind of a maths thing. After all, in retrospect, it seems anomalous working out you can shave 10p off some onions, while at the same time frittering money away like wonno on CDs, films, beer, takeaways, going out, CDs, beer, audio-visual tech, beer, CDs, etc. But I suppose the truth is that I was frittering too & was not even a*sed about saving 10p off my onions, so I was no better & stand well to talk!

foxgloves

So....we'd done the grocery shopping, had lunch & I was wondering what to do next, when mr f announced I could have his time till 2.30pm if there was any grunt work he could usefully do in the garden. I worked out this gave me 1 hour & 12 mins of free willing labour & was halfway down the garden 30 seconds later before he decided he'd rather shoot some aliens instead. He removed 3 brambles, dug up & moved a shrub, divided up 2 winter irises, fixed the bird feeder pole, tipped out a large broken terracotta pot & came up with a way of mending it, removed a length of nasty wire fence left by previous owner under hedge (I hate it as it prevents hedgehogs getting in & out), re-sited & re-built our groundfeeder bird table & loaded all the stuff from my garden clearing last week into the council garden waste bin. Brilliant stuff..... all the more so because it also facilitated a bit of shopping from home:
I'm redeveloping a corner into a winter garden in memory of my Mum, but I don't simultaneously wish to redevelop my shockingly spendy pre-LBM garden centre habit. So the midwinter fire shrub was moved into this new area for a bit of structure (free) & as my 2 winter irises easily divided into 6 new plants, I was able to put 3 into the new bed, 2 elsewhere to fill gaps & still pot one up nicely to give as a gift. I was glad the terracotta pot can be repaired for free, but sad to find the lovely hebe Mum bought me years ago had become a straggly unrescuable mess. I have taken a few cuttings though, to see if I can get some new ones going. I was thinking I might need to buy something pretty & spring flowering to put in its mended pot, but a perfect free solution then presented itself when I came across a dwarf lilac I'd forgotten about in a far too small v grotty pot, so no spends necessary there either, as I can prune & transfer it. The grotty pot will be fine for growing a few first earlies or some baby beets up in the veggie garden.
Although I've transplanted a few self-sown freebies when I've come across them, I've not yet done my annual trek around the garden with my trowel & shuttle trays in search of lovely self-sown plant babies. That's defo on my job list for the week ahead. I love seeing what nature has provided for free & it's a great way to fill up gaps without racing off to the garden centre to melt some plastic.
Once this morning's thick fog had lifted, it really did feel like Spring today, though it's chillier tonight & I think I'm feeling too stingey to light the fire.
Am hoping for a productive, non-spendy week in which I also hope to see a few ongoing issues resolved.
Let's see what we can achieve!
F x

Onebrokelady

I too have a lovely Hebe that's gone all straggly,parts of it have died and I don't know why,how do you take cutting from these,I might have a go and see if I can save some of it,the bits that are still alive did flower so I'm also wondering if it just needs pruning but I don't want to kill it completely

I love the idea of your winter garden in memory of your mum,it sounds lovely,my mum has a little area in her garden planted in memeroy of my sister,it's full of all the things she liked and looks lovely, by brothers ashes are also buried in my mums garden and they planted a tree there,it's got bird feeders hanging in it and at Christmas she puts light on it for him:)