Dusty's Frugal Fortnights Return!

annieb64 · 15 June 2022 at 8:08AM

My youngest daughter loved Beatrix Potter books. Whenever we had a day trip to the Lake District she'd insist we visited her house. Good thing we were NT members!

The other book she loved was The Velveteen Rabbit only when she was very small she thought it was called The Ovaltine Rabbit so we still call it by that name.

dustydigger · 15 June 2022 at 5:54PM

When I was living in Africa there was no library nor bookshop anywhere.At one point I was looking after DD1,aged 2,and my husbands daughter and half sister,aged 7 and 6. I only had what I regarded as a reference book,the Oxford book of Nursery Rhymes. by the reknowned scholars Peter and Iona Opie. They had pretty much collected every nursey rhyme in England,from a period of several centuries.. A wonderful source. I firmly believe that teaching your kids nursery rhymes developes so many language skills

Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they're four years old, they're usually among the best readers by the time they're eight.

I sang to my little ones every day,and we built up a huge collection of rhymes. A regular thing we did was sit in a group and each person would start a rhyme of their choice and we would join in. We'd go round the group till someone couldnt remember one,and will sit it out. I always won,obviously

Then I would tell them all those wonderful fairy tales. Cinderella,Three Bears,Billy Goats Gruff,Gingerbread Man,etc etc etc.You can imagine how useful all that was to the 1st and 2nd grade girls,they were soon far ahead of all their classes..

I kept up the tradition with all my kids,and later with grandkids.

Glad to say all my children and grandkids are readers to this day.

Family favourites were Each Peach Pear Plum.Green Eggs and Ham, the Narnia books,Where the Wild Things Are.

For myself my all time favourite childrens books besides the above are unashamedly old books which probably no child has read for decades!

e.g. ANY Moomin s book, Little Women,Swallows and Amazons,The Borrowers,Winnie the Pooh,Robinson Crusoe, E Nesbitt books,Kim,King Solomon's Mines,HeidiSecret Garden,Ballet Shoes, Weirdstone of Brisingamen,Carbonel,Treasure Island. I've read all these numerous times over the decades.And I have read all of them in the last 6 years except Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. Its definitely time for a reread of those.

Oops! Got on my hobby horse and rode off in all directions.

I am actually doing an ongoing long term challenge. There is a book list of ''1001 childrens'books you must read before you grow up'' I have read 339 so far, Many are American,oe expensive or hard to get,so I am aiming at reading about 400 in all.

Its no use,I cant resist an interesting book list

.

dustydigger · 15 June 2022 at 7:39PM

Just had DS2,his partner and GD6 for two hours, Better late than never I'll report my day

Well I got to the hospital apptmnt. Nearly a disaster from the start. Most buses go to the main bus station,a 15 mins walk to where I get the connecting bus to S Shields,but there is one bus that goes a different route,puts me off only a few minutes walk to my bus. I was walking from home to the bus stop,and paused to get my purse and bus pass out - and the bus came a minute early,and it sailed by. Had to wait a few minutes for a bus to the bus station,and had the 15 minute walk to do after all. Knee was killing me,I was already limping within 2 or 3 minutes. went as fast as I could and the last passenger was just getting on the bus! Phew!.Nasty shock though,as I assumed since it was before 9.30 I would pay 50p as we do in County Durham. But no,I had to pay full fare.No cheap scheme in that area Altogether I spent £5.70,and my Mrs Scrooge nature was not amused. Especially as one of the fares,£2 10,was handed over at 9.27. would have been free after 9.30.

I had 15 minutes sitting in the sun in the hospital grounds reading my book. I took an old favourite comfort reading book,!!!!!! Francis' To The Hilt. Then when I went in I hardly sat down when I was called through,weighed and BP taken as usual. Pleasantly surprised that after all the hassle getting there my BP was only 132/80,thougth it would have bust the machine :)I saw the doc straight after,very nice lady who was a little unhappy as to why already at 10 am she'd had 2 customers who had come all the way to Tyneside instead of Sunderland. She said she would arrange a scan at Sunderland as soon as possible. I just looked at her and dryly asked if I had come all that way just to have my BP and weight taken? She was very pleasant and we both ruefully laughed.I was out again by 10.15

I have to wait to hear about the scan..So no further forward,but I think the huge spike was caused by that terrible time a while ago,when I had an ear infection,scabby mouth,a rash all over my head,a terrible water infection and all my joints suffering from inflamation causing awful pain.I ts my premise that all that caused the massive spike shown on the CA19-9 test. I'll stick to that view till proved wrong.

dustydigger · 15 June 2022 at 8:05PM

At last I get round to the quiz results! How did you do? Have you read some of the books? Did you know all the authors

The first list was the most famous work,the second a lesser known one.Did you match them all up right?

Group 1 Group 2 author

A - Pride and Prejudice Mansfield Park Jane Austen

B - Brideshead Revisited Decline and Fall Evelyn Waugh

C - Heart of Darkness Lord Jim Joseph Conrad

D - Animal Farm Road to Wigan Pier George Orwell

E - Gulliver's Travels A Modest Proposal Jonathan Swift

F - Eye of the Needle Pillars of the Earth Ken Follett

G - Passage to India Howard's End E M Forster

H - Middlemarch Mill on the Floss George Eliot

I - Tess of the Durbervilles Mayor of Casterbridge Thomas Hardy

weenancyinAmerica · 15 June 2022 at 9:29PM

Dustydigger - I am doing family history research for someone in your area - right now we are working mainly in Allendale, Sunderland, Walsend, Gateshead, Hexham, and Stanhope. Working on records in the 1600s and 1700s mostly.

Frustrating when you are sent all over for tests. We are trying to get an appointment for my roommate that isn't 30 or 40 miles away, when there are several places nearby she has used before. Sometimes I think they look at the county we live in and then see how far they can try to make you go so you will just give up.

MrsCD · 15 June 2022 at 10:18PM

We had to take my very poorly dad to Sunderland hospital a few weeks ago for a covid test and blood test, then he had to go back the next day. It takes us 45/50 minutes in the car to get there. Just not possible for him to go on public transport, so patient transport has to be booked if he's there all day, and they take even longer to get there!
We as a family love books. Our daughters have read since they were very young, and I worked my way through the school 'age appropriate' books each year at school. DH has his own 'library'!
Books I loved...
I loved all the Enid Blyton books, and the Biggles books for boys, then read Paul Gallico's Thomasina in my teens, and then all the classic children's books with our girls. Nowadays I read cozy mysteries and Christian fiction because there's never any bad language or other stuff I don't like to read.
Quiz...5 totally correct and 2 half right!

dustydigger · 16 June 2022 at 9:26AM

weenancyinAmerica said:

Dustydigger - I am doing family history research for someone in your area - right now we are working mainly in Allendale, Sunderland, Walsend, Gateshead, Hexham, and Stanhope. Working on records in the 1600s and 1700s mostly.

Family history research is great fun.but its frustrating when you get stuck in a bloodline and cant progress.....regress? we are trying to go back in time....... some of my lines go back to Ireland,and all the national records were damaged or destroyed in 1923,and I got stuck around 1800. Same with Scotland,got back to my umpteenth great grandpa born 1795 and got stuck,no parish records

The most frustrating is my great grandmother;s line. I know an ancestor came in to Durham from Yorkshire in the early 1500s,there are records in Newcastle Central library of him taking one of his children to be christened in 1561. That new young queen,Elizabeth I,had insisted that parish records must be keptof all births,so he took baby Joan to the Newton Aycliffe church.I was able to follow down the line till the Interegnum,when all was chaos. I get to a gap of one generation,no documentary evidence,and it is a fairly uncommon name ,and after that I can trace everyone down to me clearly. I am pretty sure which is the so I go back to 1702,then a gap,then back in records to 1561.Very annoying

dustydigger · 16 June 2022 at 11:21AM

MrsCD said:

We had to take my very poorly dad to Sunderland hospital a few weeks ago for a covid test and blood test, then he had to go back the next day. It takes us 45/50 minutes in the car to get there. Just not possible for him to go on public transport, so patient transport has to be booked if he's there all day, and they take even longer to get there!
We as a family love books. Our daughters have read since they were very young, and I worked my way through the school 'age appropriate' books each year at school. DH has his own 'library'!
Books I loved...
I loved all the Enid Blyton books, and the Biggles books for boys, then read Paul Gallico's Thomasina in my teens, and then all the classic children's books with our girls. Nowadays I read cozy mysteries and Christian fiction because there's never any bad language or other stuff I don't like to read.
Quiz...5 totally correct and 2 half right!

I only once had to use hospital transport. They collected me around 7.30 am to take me to Queen Elizabeth hospital and then we trailed all round Seaham and Sunderland picking up more people and it took forever to get there. Then we had to wait all day till the final person was sorted,and we left around 5.30pm,and first on was last off,it was after 7 before Im got home.

also there seems to be a crisis in the ambulance service,I dont want to be a burden if I can manage it.But like you and wee Nancy I dont appreciate being sent far far away!

Well done on the quiz! For some unknown reason I always have to think a lot about E M Forster and Evelyn Waugh,who wrote what. No idea why. Perhaps because in my 20s I read an awful lot of early 20th century fiction - Waugh,Forsyer,Arnold Bennett,D H Lawrence,etc. - and my admittedly faulty brain just lumped Waugh and Forster together!

Paul Gallico is such an interesting author,now sadly hardly known. I like him for his sympathy for humanity.And his orinality. No formulaic stuff for Gallico. Who would imagine that one author would pen such a variety of titles as Thomasina,The Poseidon Adventure,Mrs 'Arris Goes to Paris, and the Snow Goose? Still enjoyable now,and as you say,clean. I have just about given up entirely on crime fiction for that reason.

And I still havent got over the shock

of after 18 years of delightful books the women in Nora Roberts' Montana Sky were flinging four letter words around like confetti!

dustydigger · 16 June 2022 at 3:43PM

Been suffering all morning.Too much walking Monday and Wednesday,today I am crippled. The knee was burning like a furnace and I am back to walking with a stick in the house,not done that for a long time. It was a bit of a struggle cooking and Mr Dusty was wondering where his dinner was,as I was running late. He's eating right now.

Did wash the bedding this morning shouldnt take long to dry. Mr Dusty will do the ironing for me,praise the Lord.

Otherwise I have just sat with my leg up,chatting here on MSE,and reading the !!!!!! Francis book I took with me yesterday. 30 pages left.it was just as enjoyable as ever..

Thats me done for the day,I think I'll go and lie on the bed. The whole family is coming on Saturday,got to tidy up the messy house and stock up on snacks.Forgot it was Father's Day weekend..Here's hoping I'll be fitter tomorrow.