Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

foxgloves

Greetings Very Hot People,

A better night on the whole as we moved the new fan upstairs because it is more powerful than our old one. I also implemented a very low-tech (& free) solution of putting a bowl next to the bed containing an ice pack & a hand towel. Then I just had to reach down for it when I needed cooling off. I haven't achieved much. I have maintained my 3-tasks list, but it seems pretty clear from the weather forecast that Saturday is going to be the last of these horribly hot days for a while, so with temperatures then looking set to fall to within very much my acceptable summer tolerance level of 21 - 24 degrees, I thought I may as well save more energetic jobs until then. I don't envy poor old Mr F today, who left the house at 7.30a.m, had done a full day's work including 2 meetings in his stupidly hot windowless office & is now driving across to a neighbouring county for a twilight training course.

Anyway, has there been anything of a budget-friendly nature?

*A no-spend day for starters. Mr F took plenty of provisions, water & coffee with him & I haven't been to any physical or online shops.

*Realised that because of the 27th being a Saturday that tomorrow is pay-day so will therefore be Big Budget Day. I shall set myself up in front of a fan & crack on with that tomorrow.

*Used 6 cans of grey water on the front courtyard plants. They are all flowering their socks off, especially the mesembryanthemums which take me straight back to the 1970s! They are so psychedelic & cheery (free seed too!)

*Removed lots of duckweed from our pond, rescuing tadpoles & water boatmen as I went along. It will be much easier for wildlife (& Ash) to drink from it now.

*Garden pickings: Spring onions, rhubarb.

*Did a few surveys.

*Made tomorrow's packed lunch & breakfast.

*Easy-peasy cheapo nosebag tonight as I've defrosted the rest of the pinto bean chilli I made a few weeks ago. It will just need heating up & topping with cheese as we both like it served simply with crusty bread.

*Cut up a large cardboard box to make 2 free moisture mats for the worm composter & also ripped some up for the compost bins as it's easy to forget how much 'brown' stuff is needed to balance all the 'greens' (grass cuttings, weeds, top-growth, etc)

*Entered a competition.

Intend to sit somewhere cool now with my book & will knit later. I'd have liked to cut out a new dress this afternoon but I need to be at the dining table for that & it is just way too hot in the conservatory for any length of time atm. I will do it next week along with all those other jobs I am going to do when the temperature drops. Mr F will be late so will have to explain to the cats that while I will be serving up their fishy stink tonight, they WON'T be getting a 2nd dinner when he gets home, despite the fact that they will be pestering for this the minute he walks through the door.

Right, off to investigate whether it is now bearable to sit outside.

Hope you are all drinking plenty of fluids & are hanging in there until Sunday.

F x

PennysIntoPounds

Glad the headache did one, maybe a blessing in disguise to not have to do dentist on such a hot day!

Excellent work looking at the car financials 🥂

Glad I'm sitting down to hear Soot didn't want his breakfast, thank goodness order was quickly restored

thriftmonster

His Cattiness has spent a lot of time splodged over my desk in the line of the fan. I have a L*dl dupe of a Dys0n Blade fan which is brill and about 25% of the cost

The other thing that works is prawn ice pops -half defrosted savers prawns that work like cat ice lollies in the middle of the day

moginstein

Thanks for mentioning the wormery moisture mats, I have a wormery but didn't know about that. They get newspaper (I pick up a copy of the Metro from the train station when wandering past) and shredded receipts, but I'm going to treat them to a layer of cardboard on top, I'll see if my Am@z*n box is in the recycling bin later, and fish it out!
My wormery was homemade, but I do like to say thanks to the little guys, they do such a good job making compost (and I do treat them to Waitrose used coffee grounds, which helps keep the stinky cabbage smell down ;-)

foxgloves

@PennysIntoPounds - Thanks - Re car prices, I'm glad I thought to look before we cancelled our original order because whichever way I work out the sums, it seems to be a difference of between £3 - £4K & that's a chunk of money.

@thriftmonster - Prawn ice-pops? Oh my goodness, Ash would be all over those! Soot had a pouch of cod soup for his lunch today for some extra hydration. Haven't seen Ash since breakfast time. There's a jungle-house a couple of doors down from us (garden has been left to grow over the windows, etc, looks derelict, though it is owned) & I think he has some kind of den in there for the summer. He certainly comes home looking like Georgie Grub!

@moginstein - Nearly 3 decades ago when I bought my worm composter, I used to pay £5 each for the moisture mats to go on top - then I read that using a circle of thick cardboard is fine…& free. Since then, I've just cut out a couple of appropriately sized circles every time we have a large box. Completely sustainable as they eventually eat them anyway.

moginstein

@foxgloves, I'm assuming you have a circular wormery then. Mine is made from rectangular plastic storage boxes, so I guess that a cardboard rectangle will work, and be easier to cut! Could I trouble you to ask how much gap there is at the edge? Is it just enough to make it easier to lift up?

Great to hear what you are up to, and the updates of the adventures of Soot and Ash.

foxgloves

Oh, I am so looking forward to the end of this silly heat…….OK, hands up who actually got the promised thunderstorm last night? By early evening, there were actually FIVE flood alerts for our county because of the expected downpours accompanying the storms. Nothing. Not a sausage. Think Michael Fish must have contributed our local forecast! This morning, there was the teensiest shower. There can't have been more than about 73 raindrops over our entire garden. Rubbish!

And again, she gets off on a rant before saying 'Hello'….. Good afternoon Diary Readers, I shall move onto today's money-saving efforts now:

*It's Big Budget Day so I have been busy with all that. Reconciled June's budget & sent a grocery underspend of £7-97 to the Grocery Underspend Pot. It's a new pot for this year & has over £40 in it, so I'm just leaving it there & it will come in useful for something, maybe towards Christmas, a pantry stock-up or even just a bulk-buy of some decent ground coffee at some point if we see an outstanding offer. I declined to order a fish box as we still have sufficient left in the freezer from the last one so I used some of that saving to boost July's grocery budget to assist with it being a pesky 5-week month. Paid into all our general savings & also 6 of our Savings Pots, which of course operate more as sinking funds than savings but they are an important part of our budgeting system & very much help to keep us on track so I assess the contents of all 10 of them every Big Budget Day.

*Watered the veg first thing.

*Baked a crusty loaf so that we have bread for the weekend.

*Wrote a list for our trip to the Blue & Yellow Swedish Emporium tomorrow as I want to keep us focused & it not to turn into a bit of a meander around convincing ourselves that we need various gubbins. We are primarily going for a couple of replacement shed storage units & some more of their lidded glass food containers as we are finding we really prefer these to our old plastic ones.

*Shall try to knit as much of this slow-coach sock as possible later tonight. I want to get onto other knitting projects I have lined up.

Right, that's it for today - off to fetch another glass of water. Next week's temperatures look just right for me & I plan to have a catch-up on jobs.

Cheers,

F x

Makingabobor2

Yes, I agree, I am so looking forward to better temperatures next week. Got so much to do in the garden, and just can't stand it out there when its hot.

Stay cool. x

teapot2

Raises hand to report THE loudest and most spectacular thunderstorm I've ever seen starting about 3am today. I woke up thinking there was someone in the room who had switched on the big ceiling lights it was so bright. Went on for ages accompanied by lashing rain then another heavy shower mid morning. Needless to say I didn't need to water the pots this morning.

Makingabobor2

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82048860#Comment_82048860

Ooh wow, I wouldn't have liked that. There's been to many lightening strikes recently, it scares the living daylights out of me. We had nothing here in the East Mids, but it is noticeably less humid today, although still too hot.