Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

themadvix

Soot sounds so much like my Ginger cat - always, always on the look out for food! A particular favourite with Ginger cat is oil - I have to watch very carefully when I'm bread making as he'll be up on the board licking the olive oil (used for non-stick purposes rather than flour), meaning I have to wash the board and start again! Christmas 2020 when we were (naturally) at home, we decided to cook fish-based scotch eggs as a starter, including deep frying them. We made them the night before and left the pan of hot fat to cool on the side (I should point out at this point that we have a high-level hook and eye lock on our kitchen door to keep greedy cats out of the kitchen, so no shenanigans happened overnight). The pan was still there the next morning (Christmas Day) and we were in and out of the kitchen prepping lunch, etc. After a while we noticed that Ginger cat wasn't around - he was drinking the leftover fishy-flavoured oil straight from the pan - and by the looks of it, had been for a while. His mane (he's quite long haired) was soaked in fat and he was looking rather queasy. He managed to keep it all down (I didn't trust to this and kept following him around with a towel in the hope he'd at least be sick on that) but he definitely wasn't feeling at his best for a couple of days! Silly creature! (He also eats plastic bags and cost the insurance company a fortune when he ate some plastic covered wire!)

EssexHebridean

The cat tales are making me chuckle - and I love the idea of crickets being a sort of cat biscuit substitute due to the crunch! I don't recall HRH ever eating anything wildly unexpected although she was most partial to spiders - and when she ate a bigger one used to make me shriek in horror by wandering round for a while afterwards with random legs hanging out of her mouth! Ugh! 

As for bookmarked threads, I can't imagine life without them now - such a handy way of knowing when someone's diary has updates! I was delighted to realise a while back that they have also been retained through all the various forum upgrades and changes over the years - I still have bookmarked diaries from several former DFW'ers who are no longer with us, sadly, as well as a good number who no longer post for other reasons but were a real backbone of this place back in the day.

foxgloves

@themadvix - Eeeew, to drinking the fishy oil. They are little devils, aren't they?
@EssexHebridean - I have now book-marked the few I most often read, but will add others. Yes, I sometimes wonder what some of the past diary-world stalwarts are doing now. Sadly some no longer with us, others hopefully still working on the debt-free lifestyle or have achieved it.
F

foxgloves

Afternoon Sunbeams,
Had intended pretty much to do nothing after getting back from town this morning, but have actually been quite gently productive. Today's budget-helping postives:
*Decided to pay only £1 parking & to speed-shop around town.
*Rest of this week's grocery shopping done at local market. I estimate an overspend of about £7, which I am ok with, as we did buy a fair few preserving ingredients this week plus a sack of onions from local farm stall today.
*Deliberately avoided our fave coffee shop a) because we only had an hour's parking & b) because we are also going out tomorrow & that will defo require a caffiene stop.
*Called into the shop you wear on your feet in winter to look for my hair colour & night moisturiser - both were on offer so yay to that!
*Today's garden pickings: 650g french beans, 5 courgettes & blackberries.
*Blanched & froze the prepped beans already in the fridge & prepped & bagged today's for Sunday lunch & next week.
*Triage of the veg baskets revealed 4 courgettes which had gone past their best. Chopped them up for the compost, then as I already had bean trimmings, coffee grounds & a bag of shredded bank statements, I decided this would be a good time to sort out the worm composter & start a new layer. As I hadn't yet harvested any compost this year & the worms have been very gobbly, I expected this to be a quick task as they'd all be in the top layer, which simply gets moved to down to become the bottom layer. Wrong!! Because of the hot weather, only the foolhardy sun-seekers were in the top layer. All the others were in the middle & bottom layer, so I had to tip both trays of finished compost out into the wheelbarrow, then retrieve our wiggly friends to add back to the new layer. Now done. A full trug's worth of very rich compost awaiting use & everyone settling into their new home.
*Laundered 2 more pillows to make best use of the hot weather for free line-drying.
*Mr F has volunteered for veg/garden watering tonight. We decided that we will stop feeding veg from today. It's now just a case of waiting for courgettes & beans (which have been hugely productive this year) gradually to stop producing - they are already slowing down - & for chillies & tomatoes to ripen. Veg garden shut-down has thus officially started at Foxgloves Manor.
*Intend to progress 3rd crochet cat blanket tonight, as the sooner it replaces that orange fleece on the landing, the better my eyeballs will feel!
*Must make a list of the key items we want to look at when we visit the Swedish Emporium tomorrow so we can be more focused than the aimless wandering around that the place seems to reduce everyone to. Must also remember to put M&S vouchers in my purse as Mr F is apparently looking for a specific pair of jeans (& I'm quite sure based on past form that no other pair will do).
*Did 2 surveys & can see another one has just popped up so will investigate that before signing out.
Excitement here this morning when we got up to find a 2nd overnight incidents of garden damage. Next door had also been experiencing it & had managed to catch the nocturnal visitor on CCTV......a badger! We are so excited. Both we & our neighbours have very wildlife-friendly gardens so it shows that creatures will visit if we provide the resources they need - ponds in both of our cases & lots of windfall pears from our tree atm. I apologised to Ash, whom I had been blaming for twice digging up the same plant.
Right, time to look at that survey, then that shady reading bench is beckoning.
And another glass of water.
Take care, frugalistas
F x

Sun_Addict

How exciting to catch the badger on camera. Quite a few have been sighted locally by people walking their dogs late at night and have posted photos to the local FB group. I’m never up and about late enough to see anything nocturnal 😆

Humdinger1

Loving the cat stories...may I add a dog story? A colleague made 150 cup cakes for a village event.  Didn't shut the dog out properly; when she came back, the dog had eaten THE LOT! Dog was OK in the end but it was a horrible few days.  Love Humdinger xx 

Cheery_Daff

Goah, 150 cupcakes?! That's pretty impressive! 😱😱

Exciting to have a badger in your garden 😊 We used to see them often when we lived in a city, but rarely see them now - but then we're deep in dairy country in a cull zone so I generally prefer it if they keep their head down 🙄 Lovely to have one messing about in the garden, even if it is causing rather a mess!

scandimore

We've had badgers in our garden before, one time it was two of them having a fight. It sounded awful, worse than cats fighting. They caused a lot of damage to our raspberry canes by stomping through them and scratched the bark of the apple tree off but was great seeing one so close up! Only seen them on the roadsides around here otherwise, sadly deceased. Hope Ash accepted your apology Foxgloves! 

EssexHebridean

I’ve got badger envy - I’ve still never seen a live one! I did disturb our resident Mr Fox when I came back along the alley earlier mind you - it was questionable which of us was taken more by surprise! 

foxgloves

@Humdinger1 - 150 cupcakes is a huge quantity. What a baddie!

Thanks everyone for your comments. Yes, we are very excited about the badger. In fact, you'd have laughed at me a little while ago.......I tend to tune out noise a lot of the time as there is always someone on our street madly power-tooling something or other. Anyway, Mr F just yelled me from outside in the garden ...."Foxgloves, FOXGLOVES, QUICK, get out here! Quick, come on!" Well, I though perhaps the badger had decided to put in an unexpected day-time appearance, so I jumped up & went rushing out so swiftly, I almost turned my ankle, to find him pointing at a noisy thing in the sky. No, not a flying badger, a Wellington bomber (apparently), followed shortly afterwards by the Lancaster bomber. They must have been on their way back from some of other event or practising for Battle of Britain Sunday, I should think. Anyway, he was very chuffed to have them fly low over our garden, though less impressed that his camera was, as in all these occasions, packed away upstairs in its case in the Man Cave!
A bit of free entertainment for him anyway.
F