The Prepping Thread - A Newer Beginning ;)

grace68

we have a smart meter, the only problem i can see with them is depending on type you have can restrict you changing supplier as certain suppliers only recognise some of the meters. 

pelirocco

mothernerd said:

I was worried as I spent most of this month's food budget on meat and cheese (mostly to go in the freezer) as another layer of EU protection goes in October which means more paperwork and our gubbernment couldn't organise a raffle or write a simple form to save their lives (and seem to have no interest in whether anyone outside their immediate circle lives or dies - sorry if that's too political, willing to delete if it offends people).  

I made one or two small spaces in the freezer and can fit lots of meat and cheese in a small space - with unpack it and put it in labelled bags and take it out as I need it. Mum's fridge freezer is full as she dictated a shopping list several weeks ago predicated on her making fish pie (haddock, salmon and prawns which I am not allowed to use - don't think she's ever costed her dishes) meat and potato pie and a meat pie. Now ten years ago she could do all that regularly but in the last five years its been a once a week or more like once a month event. However I'm picking my battles carefully and will just wait for the penny to drop (and work my way slowly through the mountain of frozen fish I'm allowed to eat).

She's feeling better for which I am grateful. Her appetite was reduced and then she got the idea that I was using her money to buy all manner of exotic foodstuffs which I was hoarding in my room and that she was 'living on jam and bread' (and tinned soups, rice pudding, fruit, tuna, many different fresh fruits to tempt her to eat, marmalade which I ordered as I'd seen the jar was nearly empty - maybe she thinks there's a SM fairy who fills the cupboards. Despite all the money I'm allegedly spending, her bank balance is still going up.

So trying to restock the cupboards (and the bottom of two wardrobes in my room and the soupery in her room) without a litany of complaints. I'm still in limbo land - living at mum's bungalow. She's decided she 'can manage' and I should go back to my home except the last two times she's been really ill were in the middle of the night - I had to get her back to her bed and her legs kept going from under her. As we got to her bedroom door I felt my own knee crack, wondered briefly what would happen if we both went on the floor and decided it wasn't an option. 

At the same time as saying she wants me to go home, she locks the doors at teatime (back to the routine she had for her partner who had dementia - he's been dead more than 2 years and was in a care home for the last 18 months of his life), I didn't get to go to my house at all in July and only got as far as town twice and in May when I went to vote and told her I would be staying to wait for a workman she had DS2 and DS1 phoning and messaging at 6 pm because she didn't know where I was.

So I've told her that for the time being I will continue to sleep at her house (I use a CPAP machine and don't want to lug it back and forth) will stay if she's unwell, if she has an appointment or we are expecting a delivery but will try to go home (or shopping or even just for a walk) for at least a few hours on some days (my aim is 2 but struggling to do it once a week atm). I really enjoy the days I 'escape'. I knew I would probably be here longer than the original 3 month lock down but local lock down and then being in the highest tier extended it. My first low point was in October last year when I was hoping to do the 2 days to myself bit - at some points I haven't been allowed to go inside my house (mixing 2 households) or even just to sit in my own back yard (DS3 would sit inside the kitchen door and chat to me).

I had a meeting with the Practice Nurse a couple of weeks ago for my diabetic review but managed to squeeze in most of a mental health review (not the formal list but lots of issues came out whilst discussing my eating habits and my bandaged up ankle (mum wanted a birthday card with both 21st and grand-daughter on it, so what should have been a brief shopping trip - out of the taxi to get some diy items, straight across to the SM to spend a 10 pound survey voucher and taxi back - became twice as long as I had to go in the opposite direction and barely able to walk.

So the appointment let me vent. I accept that nothing about the way I look, anything I say or do or even who I am, will ever be good enough/ right for mum but I like me, so that's okay. I will continue to do what needs to be done for mum but will prioritise my own mental health. Sorry for taking up so much of your time (it wasn't meant to be a therapy session).

Several years ago I stocked mum up with soup for the winter. She can manage to heat a can of soup unless she's really ill so has one most days (with me doing a proper meal for her other meal). I ordered 10 - 12 of each of the varieties she likes and stored them in the bottom of one of the floor to ceiling cupboards in her spare room (now her bedroom), henceforth known as the soupery. She has very little kitchen space (mainly because she insisted on bringing far too many pots and useless gadgets from the 'hovel') so each week I fill the allocated 6 soup spaces with a variety. Despite everyone's scorn, the system worked very well so the second year I extended it to include items she used a lot with a long shelf life - beetroot, branston, cooking sauces, horlicks, tinned fruit (including prunes and grapefruit to top her porridge) and rice pudding.

Mum has no immune system and mine is compromised so from September to March we catch anything going, take a long time to get over it and mum suffers more than the average person (not sure sometimes if we have flu mitigated by the flu jab or just coughs/ colds/ sore throats which leave us as limp as dishrags) so the soupery is invaluable for when one or other of us is unwell (we have food deliveries but I used to top up with small shops and odd items mum wanted from different places). We both have a history of falls when it snows, so not needing to go out if that happens was part of my strategy.

Last year the autumn stock up was running out and I reordered (only about 3 months soups as different things needed in summer) in late January or early February. When I moved in the week before official lock down, I brought anything my son and his gf wouldn't use from my home stocks (mainly tinned pulses) and lots of herbs, spices and condiments - mum is a jar of cooking sauce person and lacked many things I use regularly. I did two mini shops after the hordes had been and gone (Morries on Wednesday afternoon, Little Arseda on the Friday) and those supplies saw us through the first six weeks before we were able to get a delivery (mum is clinically highly vulnerable but it was weeks before we got the letter) including a few bits for Easter. 

I had a polytunnel delivered on the Friday and set off growing what I could initially using any seeds I had and the limited amount of garden space mum allowed me. I ordered some veg plants to cover gaps that I hadn't had seeds for (or they hadn't taken). I did quite well despite mum pulling up parsnips and beetroot when they were only an inch long (weeds), throwing away peppers that were going wrinkly - hadn't swelled to their final size and casting aspersions on some of my other crops (what part of 40 week growing season did she not understand - I made her go and apologise to those cabbages when they grew). Most of all it gave me somewhere to go and helped me keep sane.

I've done a lot more this year (mum has conceded the back yard to me) but without a polytunnel and I have spent a lot of time building the structure of the garden (digging borders out until they were flat, adding a layer of stones to bring them to the height of the flags, installing a variety of raised beds and containers and then filling and planting). Most of my seeds were grown on my bedroom windowsill and potted on into the bottom halves of 2 l plastic bottles and in recent weeks I've harvested broad beans and dwarf beans, the first bed of plum tomatoes, courgettes and ridge cucumbers (lots more to come), potatoes (main crop is planted in 2 small filing cabinets behind the shed) and broccoli tops. Cabbages and other brassicas are coming along fine (I gave them most space last year as they were next to no effort - hm cardboard cabbage collars) and I haves a few more things I want to set off/ put in the spaces left by harvesting. I could do more with more time or money (mum's cousin made me 3 raised beds and I was promised his grandson to help with the heavy digging for a small monetary reward but mum decided i could manage so I've just plodded on (DS2 helped with tidying for several hours last Saturday - he can do in minutes what takes me hours spaced over several days)

So I will keep doing what I can despite opposition/ obstruction and visitations of idiots (mum's partners relatives) - some of them are not all bad just collectively a pain, insisting that all of life is a risk (not their lives they're gambling with), they don't need to wear masks and believe everything they read in 'the paper that supported Hitler'.

Has your mum been investigated for Dementia  ?

pelirocco

MingVase said:

Just off the phone to husband's cousin - she's just had it Daz and said it was just like a bad cold, runny nose sore eyes etc. Only lasted 5 days.

Toonie, our apple tree has so far given us 4 full carrier bags of lovely apples!  One freezer is full of crumbles

I'm 4 weeks on from diagnosis  ,still struggling with energy and can get breathless
Double jabbed ,really wasn't pleasant 

C_J

We have been ignoring the frequent telephone calls and postcards which exhort us to have a smart meter installed too. There was a very interesting discussion about them on our local BBC radio station last week, outlining the pros and cons. 

The pros appeared to be only that you get a little gadget to put on your counter top which  tells you how much electricity you are using (and supposedly scares you into using less).

The negatives were that the signal it uses to send a meter reading back every 30 minutes relies on a SIM card to do this, and if you live in a rural area with poor phone signal (as we do) then there can be blips in the service and the meter readings are inaccurate (they hinted that the inaccuracies were not in your favour). Another point they made was that apparently there is now an increase in crime - it is possible for others to hack into this SIM card and see how much energy a property is using, so when usage stays at nil or very low for a few days, it’s likely there is nobody home and the property is ripe for burgling. That’s worrying.

Si_Clist

MingVase said:

... They can't make you have them.

Indeed they can't.  All they can do is keep making it more and more expensive to not have one.

Thanks for that @euronorris.  All those arguments against have been around for quite a while now, but the more I looked into them, the less convincing some of them were AFAIC.  Our biggest objections are still that we don't like being squeezed into a corner by an energy company so we have to have something which will be of no benefit whatsoever to us, which will save them and Powergen money, and which is being paid for by all of us via a stealth charge on our fuel bills whether our meters are dumb or smart. 

Seeing as how we're both still capable of reading the meters and of understanding that if we turn something off we'll use less power and get a (slightly) smaller bill, we certainly don't need a box of tricks to tell us that.  However, if when we need to renew our contract(s) we'll actually save money by having one because not having one costs us more, we'll reluctantly go for it

Toonie

As my DP used to do a lot of camping and hiking we have a variety of stoves with different methods of fuel. We have camping gas stove, an alcohol stove (trangia), and one for twig burning (I think it's a petromax). He also used to teach how to make your own alcohol stove with pop cans (lots of instructions).

If you're feeling up for a little DIY you can make a hobo stove (if you have a few more tools) https://youtu.be/1tPIRSVasTM

maryb

We reluctantly agreed to a smart meter even though I told them it wouldn't work because our meters are in the cellar which has a solid reinforced concrete roof (reinforced to use as bomb shelter in the war)  Oh yes it will said the call centre chap who is paid according to how many he can get signed up.  Our tariff is subject to a smart meter but if they try and cant fit one we still get  the cheap tariff

So chap from utility company comes to fit the smart meter and can't do it because UK power networks need to come and do something

UK Power Networks come to do the 'something'  but can't do it because they think the fuse board may have an asbestos backing

Specialist surveyor comes to take samples.  We wait to hear if it is asbestos or not.  Visit no 4 will be UK Power Networks with or without specialist asbestos removers

Then visit 5 will be the utility company coming back to fit the smart meter.  (Assuming they are not one of the companies that will go bust this week.  I suspect not - they're Pure Planet which BP has a 24% minority stake in so they are probably well financed and BP would have managed their forward purchases)

And then it won't work as a smart meter because it's in the cellar!  But it all makes work for the working man to do oo oo!

At least it will definitely be a second generation smart meter

mothernerd

pelirocco said:

mothernerd said:

I was worried as I spent most of this month's food budget on meat and cheese (mostly to go in the freezer) as another layer of EU protection goes in October which means more paperwork and our gubbernment couldn't organise a raffle or write a simple form to save their lives (and seem to have no interest in whether anyone outside their immediate circle lives or dies - sorry if that's too political, willing to delete if it offends people).  

I made one or two small spaces in the freezer and can fit lots of meat and cheese in a small space - with unpack it and put it in labelled bags and take it out as I need it. Mum's fridge freezer is full as she dictated a shopping list several weeks ago predicated on her making fish pie (haddock, salmon and prawns which I am not allowed to use - don't think she's ever costed her dishes) meat and potato pie and a meat pie. Now ten years ago she could do all that regularly but in the last five years its been a once a week or more like once a month event. However I'm picking my battles carefully and will just wait for the penny to drop (and work my way slowly through the mountain of frozen fish I'm allowed to eat).

She's feeling better for which I am grateful. Her appetite was reduced and then she got the idea that I was using her money to buy all manner of exotic foodstuffs which I was hoarding in my room and that she was 'living on jam and bread' (and tinned soups, rice pudding, fruit, tuna, many different fresh fruits to tempt her to eat, marmalade which I ordered as I'd seen the jar was nearly empty - maybe she thinks there's a SM fairy who fills the cupboards. Despite all the money I'm allegedly spending, her bank balance is still going up.

So trying to restock the cupboards (and the bottom of two wardrobes in my room and the soupery in her room) without a litany of complaints. I'm still in limbo land - living at mum's bungalow. She's decided she 'can manage' and I should go back to my home except the last two times she's been really ill were in the middle of the night - I had to get her back to her bed and her legs kept going from under her. As we got to her bedroom door I felt my own knee crack, wondered briefly what would happen if we both went on the floor and decided it wasn't an option. 

At the same time as saying she wants me to go home, she locks the doors at teatime (back to can manage to heat a can of soup unless she's really ill so has one most days (with me doing a proper meal for her other meal). I ordered 10 - 12 of each of the varieties she likes and stored them in the bottom of one of the floor to ceiling cupboards in her spare room (now her bedroom), henceforth known as the soupery. She has very little kitchen space (mainly because she insisted on bringing far too many pots and useless gadgets from the 'hovel') so each week I fill the allocated 6 soup spaces with a variety. Despite everyone's scorn, the system worked very well so the second year I extended it to include items she used a lot with a long shelf life - beetroot, branston, cooking sauces, tinned grapefruit and prunes to go on her porridge). 

I've done a lot more growing this year (mum has conceded the back yard to me) but without a polytunnel and I have spent a lot of time building the structure of the garden.

So I will keep doing what I can despite opposition/ obstruction and visitations of idiots (mum's partners relatives) - some of them are not all bad just collectively a pain, insisting that all of life is a risk (not their lives they're gambling with), they don't need to wear masks and believe everything they read in 'the paper that supported Hitler'.

Has your mum been investigated for Dementia  ?

I'm monitoring her. She makes frequent mistakes but it's often using the wrong word, mishearing stuff or not being able to think of the words for the thing she wants to stay. We both have hearing problems, initially only in one ear. It's been that way since childhood and brain has become adept at untangling the rhythm of a garbled phrase (often shouted from upstairs or a few rooms away) until they make sense. I often say "It's a good job I know what you mean" and she agrees". I may check back later to see if she meant what she actually said or usually a similar word she has substituted.

It's difficult living with someone else and this is not something either of us would have chosen (not at that stage yet). I love her but we are very different people. She has no understanding of mental health problems, addiction or even much knowledge about nutrition, childcare or basic cooking (she has learnt to cook a little since we all left home but throughout our childhood she insisted that sausages were supposed to be black and pink striped). She treats babies as living dolls but loses interest when they start 'answering back' (ie when they can talk). She has adapted a bit - I told her not to shout No repeatedly at a 'great-grandchild' (child was deliberately putting her hand near the fireguard just to make her do it). I think 'No' should only be an emergency word so that the child responds immediately. So when the child tried to eat a dog biscuit mum shouted 'No', I told her the biscuit wouldn't harm the child and if she didn't like it she would spit it out or not do it again and when the child's mum told her it was for 'dog-dog' she immediately handed it over.

She ceded a lot of things to her partner's family. When they moved to the bungalow she was really ill (nearly killed herself looking after him) and couldn't be bothered with lots of detail. They were around a lot because he needed things doing for him (only two visit since he died). They had several nurses visiting and she didn't have a clue what their respective roles were (all 'the nurse' or 'the social worker' and I haven't even met most of them).

Since I took over, I've improved her diet (mum thinks a spoonful of peas on the side of the plate for colour is enough veg and is suspicious of any cooking that isn't white), started taking her to the monthly classic cinema club at the library (tried to get her interested in U3A but no dice) and restarted going on little coach holidays (stopped many years ago when her partner refused to move out of sight of the place the coach would come to pick them up again - this was before his dementia diagnosis but was the start of that).

A lot of that was put on hold by COVID, she couldn't have visitors (I did put a visitors chair outside the front window, left drinks and snacks out and we would open the window and draw back the blinds so that we could see and hear each other. DS2 has come less frequently since he moved in with his gf (now about 15 miles away) and we didn't see DS1, his wife and my grandpuppy for over a year. She has been fairly ill recently, so much so that I even put off taking her for her regular blood tests for several weeks (going to an appointment wipes her out for the rest of the day and sometimes the day after).

Now she's feeling better (quite perky) whilst I have whatever she had. I'm physically ill but don't realise until I try to do things, my mental health is a bit up and down - just need to keep track and do things I enjoy and the laptop is even ropier than I am (trying to postpone buying a replacement). She's trying to take back 'control' but it's so long since she was in control of anything that she's falling back on old routines. Washing has to be done on certain days, bathroom cleaned on Tuesday (cleaner wasn't allowed to come - she said I could do the cleaning but she 'wouldn't pay me). I struggle with my own housework (fail often - use a pack of wipes when I'm really bad and do a bit in the bathroom every time I go to the toilet, I even worked out which parts of the bathroom I can reach whilst sitting on the toilet).

My brother was recently hospitalised as an emergency and has finally given up smoking (he stopped drinking more than 20 years ago) so now her attention has turned to me. She commented every time I ate a biscuit or a packet of crisps, so I started eating them in my room (and my consumption went up as her comments increased). Then she started counting how many 'meals' I had had. One day I had a handful of breaded mushrooms and a large salad. I finished putting the salad together and the mushrooms still weren't fully cooked so I ate the salad and went back for them - that was 2 meals according to mum. We got DS2's fridge -freezer when he moved in with his gf but it had to go in the room I'm using. I use it for things I eat - my morning yoghurts - and for double ups of frequently used items (veg, bacon,cheese) as it's much better than mum's and keeps things a long while.

She's always been too interested in our lives. I've had to take my house key back off her at least twice because she would knock with one hand and already be opening the door with the other. She's also visited me in my place of work when I was younger. She has a totally imaginary version of me and I don't live up to it. Basically the more she comments and tries to take over, the more I retreat into my shell. If I'm in my room she doesn't know what I'm doing (she assumes I'm not dressed and am 'playing on the computer') and I often go out the back way and work in the garden and she doesn't notice.

Sorry I bet you wish you hadn't asked. I don't think she's ever had to develop any inner resources. I don't think her mind is going yet but will keep monitoring, raising food stocks and other preps where possible and when in doubt, fall back on my very dark sense of humour and laugh about it. 

MingVase

This week's preps were more coffee beans, more cat kibble, more tealights and matches. Next will be wool and more knitting. Time to get things sorted now everybody - things will only get worse from here on, prices up and availability down.

euronorris

Yep, and my family just pointed out the CO2 shortage impacting on food (and other things). It's going to be an interesting winter.