Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

ladyholly

The marmalade looks lovely. Shame I dont live nearer. I wish I could write so beautifully. My dad always described mine as looking as though a spider had crawled across the page - he wasn't wrong.

KajiKita

Very Country Life, on the dresser with a casserole in a complimentary colour and fabulous handwriting on the labels! 😊❤️🤩 Living the dream Foxgloves, living the dream … ❤️

KK

badmemory

ladyholly said:

The marmalade looks lovely. Shame I dont live nearer. I wish I could write so beautifully. My dad always described mine as looking as though a spider had crawled across the page - he wasn't wrong.

They always used to say how lovely my mothers writing was & what a mess mine looked.  But no-one ever handed mine over to ask what it said.  My mother's looked lovely but was illegible.

rtandon27

What a lovely bit of sunshine in a bottle!  I'd be well pleased to be on the receiving end of a lovely gift such as that!

Humdinger1

I'm on all fours with Paddington Bear on the glorious smell of gently bubbling marmalade! DH has just made a year's supply too @foxgloves.  Adoring your diary as ever...did I see you reproaching yourself upthread for possibly boring writing? Never! Not even close; the beauty of an ordered life streams from your pages.  Love Humdinger xx 

foxgloves

Good Morning Campers! (or should that be Happy Lunchtime?)
Thanks for all your nice comments. Marmalade-making is an annual thing here. I always make it with proper Seville oranges, which have a very short season & so it's worth making a decent amount as I know several people who like it. I still miss being able to give Dad his annual supply of jars though, also my lovely friend who died the same year as my Dad, as she also liked a jar or two for her toast.  I used to make pink grapefruit marmalade too & may resurrect that at some point. I used to make a very large batch of it mostly for my Mum to sell on her church craft stall, but stopped when people started placing orders for 10 jars at a time. I mean, it was lovely that they liked it, but that wasn't a viable amount for me to be making, especially from my own funds & hand-cutting all the peels was very time consuming. Oh look, here I go digressing again.......
Back to today's budget-friendly doings:
*Marmalade all put away in the pantry. Love to see full shelves in there.
*Nobbled Mr F while he was drinking his pre-driving to work coffee & we chose next week's meals from our January master plan.
*Wrote grocery shopping list.
*Did belated Monday morning budget updates, reconciled my credit card statement against payments & receipts then did my regular mid-month budget check-in. No nasty surprises - figures only out by 91p & that was in our favour.
*More use-it-up nosebag tonight as I have defrosted the box of falafel I made for festive snacks, which didn't get eaten. I am going to do a round-up of suitable veg, a chilli, etc, as well as some rather elderly bulghur to make a spicy pilaf to go with them. Mr F can have the rest of them in a wrap for his packed lunch tomorrow.
*Decluttering going quite well - snipped a useful set of buttons off a an old cardi before it went in the bin & added them to my button jar. Am also part-way through decluttering my desk drawers where I found another notebook - barely used - I binned the few handwritten poems it contained from the early 1990s - no way are THEY going to add anything meaningful to the national poetic canon - & that means plenty of blank pages left to press into use as my everyday notebook. I honestly thought I'd be buying a new one after finishing my current one, but that's 2 replacements I have now shopped from home in the last week. 
*This afternoon has been set aside for another knitting splurge on my shawl. I didn't get as far with it yesterday as I'd intended as I'd forgotten I'd left it immediately before 2 of the more fusspot complicated rows. 
*Mr F is all for bumping our city centre trip for yet another week, which is fine by me. He has obviously taken on board what I was saying about wanting to buy the few packets of seed we need sooner rather than later, as various varieties do start to run out, & a big garden centre visit will also mean we can price up one or two items we will need to budget in for the alterations we are going to make on our vegetable plot this Spring. 2 positives there - I can't do city centre spending if I am not actually there & doing some practical pricing up of materials for our garden project will obviously help me budget a realistic amount of money.
OK, I can hear Soot thundering up the stairs to tell me it is past his lunch time, so I shall sign out & go & feed them (& me!)
Love F x

EssexHebridean

Oh heck you have reminded me that "go to the farm shop to buy seville oranges" absolutely MUST go on our list of things we need to do at the weekend. I might try and factor that in for very first thing on saturday morning depending on how MrEH's timings with his planned rugby match work out. That way it leaves us free to do batch 1 on sunday. 

foxgloves

@EssexHebridean - I do wonder if the very short Seville orange season is getting earlier? I used to make my marmalade around the first week of Feb, then the end of Jan & now the oranges seem to appear in WaitbL00m in the first half of the month. I don't mind as long as I get some, but this defo used to be a task I did in February.
Hope you get yours & happy jamming!
F x

Makingabobor2

Sounds like another very productive day. Something very theraputic about finding notebooks.  I have had a not so good day, so reading your thread has cheered me no end. 

foxgloves

@Makingabobor2 - Glad to have provided a little cheer & hope you have a better day today. Not sure I'll be as productive today because I'd planned a session in the garden this morning, but there's been a big frost overnight so everywhere's frozen again - Mr F is just scraping the car. I think I might postpone it until the weekend & progress indoor tasks instead.
F x