Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

foxgloves

Hello Sunday Savers,
Fab sunshine & blue sky now - naturally this would be the case as we were out gardening in persistent rain this morning & my hair now looks as though I should be affixing number plates to a broomstick.
Just a very few things today to show I have been keeping the budget faith:
*Another good free bend & stretch session this morning as Mr F helped me with wrestling brambles & alkanet out of one of the big flower beds I need to sort out since neighbour put the new fence in last year. Got all the perniciously spready stuff into the council garden waste wheelie - nobody can say we don't make full use of our subscription to that! While he was cavemanning his way through the worst offenders, I also got on with a bit more weeding at the front of the bed & made a small start on dividing up Mum's lovely pink primroses for some free plants & splashes of colour elsewhere,
*Mr F announced that we were about to run out of bread so took some emergency bread rolls out of the freezer & baked a wholemeal loaf.
*Made tomorrow's packed lunch & breakfast (porridge pot).
*Did a YouGov survey. Only £2.40 away from cash out now. Which pot will be the lucky recipient? I think I will get there first as achieving the last few quid on these things can be notoriously drawn out (though this site isn't the worst offender for this imo). Signed into a survey on another site but more info was required than I was prepared to share (through access to one of my other ITC/social media accounts) so I cancelled & submitted this as a concern instead, as I thought the reason given for needing to sign into the survey through one of these other accounts seemed particularly feeble.
*Chatted through our diaries for the week ahead over lunch. Nothing ominous (probably famous last words) & the 10 mins or so it takes helps me with planning & being organised.
It's not my cooking night, so I intend to do nothing more taxing for the rest of today than knitting, reading, having a lovely bubble bath & watching celeb types trying to bake on GBBO.
Really hoping for some dry days or even parts of days for cracking on with all that needs doing in the garden. I think the rain & general sogginess is just holding people back now. Seeds coming up in the greenhouse & more to sow this week. I think I will get out there even if it is raining - I'm not made of sugar, am I? 

@themadvix - Re the soup recipe - You're welcome. It's a really tasty, easily freezable use of a courgette glut.
@EssexHebridean - It was! Film was 'The Abyss' - Swedish - on the Flicks of Net. Suffice to say I shall be staying well away from the sink-holey road in our town, lol!

OK, that's me - off to put my feet up & read some more Icelandic crime.
F x

Sun_Addict

Funnily enough I made courgette soup today. I also rejected a PA survey that wanted me to have an MRI scan of my brain as part of the survey. No thanks 😬

PennysIntoPounds

Isn't it interesting how we all have an innate human line of 'no ta, too creepy' even when rewards are offered in something we'd usually do, like surveys. I wonder if that domestic version of the uncanny valley effect has increased or decreased in the population overall since it became so standard for online life to be a normal part of life

Sorry for ponderings on your diary @foxgloves 😁  What is ITC an abbreviation for in your usage?

joedenise

I wonder if it was the same survey that I actually did @Sun_Addict!  In fact it said at the beginning of the survey about the MRI scan of the brain being part of the survey but then added a bit which said that this was no longer a requirement since Covid!  It was quite a fun survey as it turned out and earned me £3 for about 25 minutes work!

I also wondered what ITC meant?

foxgloves

Typo! Should have been 'ICT'.
F

2Scratters

Well my money saving/resourcefulness has been in action this weekend.
Finally made the butter from 2 Ltrs of cream and redecorated the kitchen corner I was using with the butter milk. I had in my  wisdom and never done before, used my machine  without its cover on!!   I ended up with 600 mls of buttermilk now stored in the cleaned out bottle it came from. Not sure would have been the best total. The butter weighed in at 1040 grams. Happy with that.
Had an early morning thought the other day (does any one else have ideas spring into their head before being awake?) and remembered to apply it.
 I have a very expensive phone cover (from those days where you still spend too much) it was purchased at a good price - but still expensive. I had broken the hard plastic insert where the phone sits by dropping it too many times. The cover I now used is the more flexible rubbery type cover, any how yesterday I glued it into the cover after removing the previous one. UHU is still a go to glue which was in the everything drawer and it has stuck nicely. One happy scratter here 

We did the plastic count for the week too.  OMG we have more than doubled what we did last year. I'm not sure why that is. The only thing I can think of is we also now remove soft plastic that we collect and take to Morries when I need to go there so we are more aware. I would have thought that the week was less than normal as we hadn't been shopping either so less packing again. We are sadly in a mess country wise and globally and it is very sad.
I have an issue with the adverts on TV about cruise ships going to north & south pole trips. Stay away you are adding to the problem and we know that "ships" have been found to be lazy about their refuse and where it ends up.

Was very impressed and proud of my DS the other day as we were talking about his daughters upcoming birthday. I said I would buy tea in the way of a takeaway. He then came up with the idea of him getting the items needed from Iceland and putting it all together. I had said I would buy a cake for her then changed my mind and said I would bake one instead. Candles also to be used from home stock. Yay go us!!

2 Scratters xx

marionmgcars

my plastic use was up too, disappointing, but think I’m in the same camp as 2Scratters , and am more conscious of it all now.  Just done my menu plan for eating out of freezer and hopefully Olio for second week.  Food prices still seem to have doubled from a few years ago 🤷🏻.  Hopefully it makes shoppers more aware of what they are buying, and will waste less.  It certainly has with me.  

badmemory

I would love tyo know what people are eating if they believe food prices are going up by the cost of living or less.  Year on year I am looking at over 20%.  Milk has not gone up but all that means is that the farmers are getting right royally ********* & will eventually stop bothering to produce.  "Fortunately" the supermarkets are making bigger profits.  Interest that.  Sorry leaving hobbyhorse now.

foxgloves

@badmemory - Yes, we've been saying exactly the same here at Foxgloves Manor. Firmly believe that there has been a lot of price-gouging going on. I think big food conglomerates, for whom vast shareholder profits are the key motivator, have seized the opportunities provided for them by Covid & a period of extremely high inflation to sneak plenty of extra price increases under the radar. Much easier to do when shoppers are being told on a daily basis how high inflation is & are expecting prices to rise accordingly. 

@marionmgcars &@2Scratters - We hadn't taken part in the Plastic Count before & have found it eye-opening....& not in a good way. I think we would have done a lot worse were it not for the fact that I tend to favour toiletries in tins & glass jars and we use the eco-refill shop regularly for cleaning products. We 'threw away' (there is no 'away', of course) 88 pieces of plastic over the course of the week. Most categories were very low or we didn't have any of that particular type of plastic at all, but the worse offenders were cat food (35 pouches, 2 lick-e-lick wrappers & a treat bag) and snack bags/packets/wrappers (crisps & some teeny tiny mini-egg bags - but each bag is a piece of plastic). Even so, our score would have been higher had we not been actively trying to reduce our purchasing of packaging over the last 2 or 3 years. What shocked me more than our 88 pieces of the stuff was the additional info emailed out with our 'Plastic Footprint' about what happens to our plastic waste - only a miserable 10% of it is recycled in the UK & 69% is incinerated!! I can't help but think that is very polluting in terms of air quality. You only have to think how horrid & chemically a domestic bonfire smells it we accidentally burn a piece of plastic. Ah well, some food for thought there, & we will defo take part next year to see if anything has improved.

F x

foxgloves

And now for today's post before I go & fetch the laundry in. I always underestimate how long it takes when the whirlygig is full.
No gardening today. I really did have a head full of unrealistic expectations this morning as to what exactly I was going to achieve, but I tuned into Reality FM around mid-morning & decided that tomorrow & Wednesday will be productive outdoor days. A few budget-helping positives anyway:
*Realised that we had accidentally eaten the 2 bread rolls I'd intended for tonight's hot pork cobs & apple sauce, so decided to bake another batch.
*Pulled the first of this year's rhubarb & baked rhubarb & cinnamon muffins while the oven was still nice & hot.
*Did 3 loads of laundry & pegged everything out for free drying.
*Investigated Saturday's roast pork leftovers & divvied it up for aforementioned hot pork cobs & apple sauce tonight (I only need to prep some stir-fry garlicky greens to go with those) & some cut into strips for a stir-fry & noodles tomorrow. The remaining chunk was cut up & added to a box of veg/gravy leftovers for the next Epic Man Stew (which I think he'll be constructing sooner rather than later, having seen the state of the grocery budget!)
*Made tomorrow's packed lunch & breakfast.
*Did my regular Monday morning budget updates & transferred the necessary funds to where they needed to be.
*Decided to move some money from the Dentist/Optician savings pot to the Meow Fund. My course of dental implants is finished, we have just had & paid for our new glasses, so I felt we could afford to take a bit more time with building this pot up. I moved £131 to the Meow Fund to make it up to £500. This is the maximum 'holding' we agreed for that Pot atm (it will probably increase as the cats get older) so I can now stop paying into that until we have to use any of it. In addition to the Meow Fund, the Tech Replacement & Appliances Replacement pots are also at their agreed maximum & we are only £200 away from reaching our current agreed maximum in the Car Maintenance Pot. I like it when several of the pots 'fill up' as it means that on Big Budget Day when I am allocating funds, I can concentrate on the others.
*Checked baby veg seedlings & gave some of them a drink of seaweed solution. 
*Did a survey - hardly any around today, but tbh, I haven't been devoting much time to looking.
*Progressed knitting over my lunch hour.
Right, I must go & fetch the laundry in now as it's starting to look rather grey & it will soon be damping down for the night. Hope a good proportion of it is dry so that any heated airer use is minimal. We all want to see those energy use figures coming down now.
F x