Cheery's country living adventure

South_coast

I quite enjoy being blown about by the wind - I find it quite exhilarating! I can see how it wouldn't be very practical for gardening though 😀

rtandon27

Oh the wind - it's been driving me mad today! - I'd pinned up the triffid yesterday to the wire on the wall - the wind has undone all that and I'll need to redo next week!  The bin of weedy bits has been upended all over the garden & bits of plastic sheeting from the farmyard are strewn all over our bit of the hedgerow!!! 

I'm firmly ensconced inside & will ignore the mess until tomorrow - it will drive our very tidy (elderly) neighbours mad, but sometimes it's fun to wind them up - ROFL - they are the only neighbours we have & after 2 months of lockdown we are wickedly enjoying it!

rtandon27

Cheery & Co. - popping in to report on the latest additions to the nursery that has sprung up in our front garden - Mrs. Short-tail pheasant & Mrs. Long-tail pheasant suddenly showed up this evening with 4 little fluffy babies! - Mr. Pheasant did his usual pacing in the barnyard while they foraged for scraps under the bird feeder 😍

Cheery_Daff

Oooh, pheasant babies!! 💜💜 we have a Mr Pheasant who has made our place his territory, but no sign of a Mrs yet...

Cheery_Daff

Morning chums! 

Back at work today after four days off. I have very much been enjoying this glorious weather, spending most of my time outside. It's great. We've been working to create our new veg patch from what was essentially a bit of field (masquerading as part of the garden, but you couldn't really have called it 'lawn') and it's been rather hard work. We're edging the beds with stones too (mostly just because we have plenty of them) so that's lots of fetching and carrying. 

Not much grass left to lift now - should be done before the weekend if I get out there each evening. And by the end of the weekend we'll have hopefully edged the beds and started putting mulch down. 

Nothing else to report really. Did a murder mystery for a friend's birthday the other night - lots of fun (although it did go on rather a while). Going to organise a much shorter, simpler one for my nephews soon (although I'll be buying it rather than writing the story!)

Not been anywhere, not done anything other than gardening. I think me and Mr Cheery might take a trip to a different local town at the weekend (we have three towns fairly close to us - the one we use most often is about 7-8 miles away, the other ones about 10). Just for variety really - I think we'll have a bit of a walk round the outskirts and get a takeaway cuppa. Feels like an outlandish adventure!

Right, can't really put off work any longer... 

rtandon27

Cheery_Daff said:

...Just for variety really - I think we'll have a bit of a walk round the outskirts and get a takeaway cuppa. Feels like an outlandish adventure!...

A bit of decadence is good for the spirit Cheery!😁☕🍰

Cheery_Daff

Morning chums

Well we didn't get our planned outing yesterday - Rusty chicken was poorly (although she seems to have made a miraculous recovery after the feeding of some grapes...). However I did venture forth by myself (!) for a trip to a different local town than the one we usually go to, and goodness me it was exciting driving in a different direction! I only went to M0rr1sons but that's the first time I've been in a big supermarket myself since all this started. There was a queue, but not too many people in there, so pretty easy to keep my distance. I was pleased I'd taken a list though, so didn't need to mess about going back and forth as I remembered things. 

Not much else to report. Rejoined Slimming World -  I always have mixed feelings about this but I've demonstrated time and time again that I do this better when I have some structure and other people around. For some reason I have it in my head that this makes me a 'bad person', that I've 'failed' if I need to go back to Slimming World, but I need to get over that and just see it as a tool. Every time I've gone, I've lost at least a stone, sometimes more. Then I get complacent (or bored), think I'll be ok on my own, leave, and then end up going back several months later to lose the same stone again - as in this case. 

Anyway, no point trying to overanalyse (not here, anyway) - it is what it is. I can't fit into a lot of my clothes, and I feel puffed out and stiff and lacking in energy and that's the end of it. SW is a tool that I've used before that works, so there we are. (I don't know why I'm feeling the need to justify it - probably just because I myself feel like I 'should' be able to lose weight without it!) 

They're running online meetings at the minute so it was just £16.25 for the month including the joining fee. Did a nice stock up of fruit and veg yesterday, cooked a nice tea last night, defrosted the freezer, and I'm ready to get started. 

A day of gardening I think today! The sun is shining and there's not too much of a breeze. Oh, and before I go out I MUST order a new pair of rigger boots. I wear them all the time at home, they're so easy to slip on to go into the garden (and much less unwieldy than wellies in this weather). Mine were £5 from a charity shop and have been great - but the sole has disintegrated so much that the metal plate fell out yesterday, and now it's just flapping on and off (and I can't glue it back on as the rubber is literally disintegrating into pieces when you touch it). 

Right, just waffling now. Last day of the month so YNAB later I think and we'll see how May has gone. I actually put some diesel in the car yesterday! I'd coincidentally filled them both just before lockdown - it's taken us 2 months to use half a tank of one of them (not been anywhere other than vets and supermarket and chemist, but all of those things are a 16 mile round trip so it adds up I suppose). Could have managed without filling, but diesel was so much cheaper in the other town!

Moneyfordreams

I feel the same about slimming clubs, every year I lose and gain the same 10lbs. Mostly SW but last summer I gave WW a whirl. After what is a lifetime of dieting with these groups I'm trying the calorie deficit on fitbit as like you said it all gets a bit boring. I'm not being as strict as usual, so if I eat more crisps I have to walk more steps     

Cheery_Daff

Glad it's not just me!

I'm determined not to fall into old patterns this time, and am trying out some new recipes (and filling the freezer too). Last night I had green lentils with aubergine & halloumi & spinach, and this evening I've just had pasta and veg with a creamy cheesy sauce made from boiled up canellini beans, garlic, stock & sweet potato, mixed with some quark. Surprisingly tasty! And I made plenty so that can go in the newly defrosted freezer too. 

Right, back out in the garden I reckon.

Cheery_Daff

Morning MSE chums

How are we all? I am having a completely dozy one this morning - ended up in the loft at 8am looking for a particular photograph, then once I'd found it spent a while reliving various aspects of my youth over a cup of tea - and completely forgot I was meant to be on a work video call at 9am I was hosting it too, so nobody else could get in   Fortunately I've been forgiven but I've clearly got out of the habit of having to do specific things at 9am

We had our first visitors yesterday. Gosh it was good to see actual real faces again. Glad they came yesterday too as the weather was glorious. We set up two separate bbq stations and two separate picnic blankets, and they brought their own food. We are lucky enough to have a separate toilet just inside the back door, so we left the back door open, and we never use that loo anyway, so all good. They stayed a couple of hours and we just lay around in the garden. 

In other exciting news - we have a date for our new hens! Just over 3 weeks to go, all being well. We want to get the new roof on the chicken run - of course we could have been doing it in all this nice weather, but I confess we rather forgot about it because it's still in the car from when we collected it rather a long time ago... 

Veg patch is cleared now - it's taken us pretty much the whole of May But it's done, and about half of the beds are edged with stone, and I've started adding mulch too. I've planted some potatoes that were sprouting in the kitchen - can't imagine they'll do too well but if I'd thrown them in the compost they would have just sprouted there instead... Everything else remains in the greenhouse for now, although I'll probably start the process of acclimatising some of it to outside now it's not scorching. Some of it is still really tiny though! 

Right, best something useful...