And now we go again...

EssexHebridean

LaPlan - you can be in no doubt that I am IMMEDIATELY going to investigate the hedgehog thing!!! 

Thanks all on the holiday thing. I have already booked some extra days - including some in the hope that aiming to get to Lincoln on a non-Friday might trick the weather into being decent as it won't realise my cunning plan. Of course far more likely is that I am just dooming the team to yet more grotty weather! (Sorry Reds!) 

Money shuffling done this morning (and MrEH has been paid) with just the "spare" £500 to be shovelled across to the Savings For Solar pot when I remember, and my own little N@t10nwide Reg Saver to be fed as well - that can't happen until tomorrow anyway.

I have made the decision that the weather has officially defeated me for tomorrow unless things change a huge amount on the forecast during the day today. I'm just not prepared to undertake a 260 mile round trip when realistically it looks like I may only see one slot of flying - it's too much diesel cost. 

MSE Stuff:
- Money shuffle dealt with - my savings pots have all been fed.
- Ordered more magnesium tablets and also ordered Turmeric to try for joints. (As in, knees, hips and ankles, not smoking, although I imagine it would create some pretty smoke?) Wowee that stuff is pricey. Chose the one with the relevant black pepper extract which improves absorption though - will give one pack a try (about 3 months worth) and see if I notice any difference.   
- MrEH will transfer me his share of the Hidden London tour money tomorrow so I'll be able to clear that off the card then.
- My payslip has (finally) landed so Madam Boss will be able to transfer me the odd outstanding amount of money. Oddly enough both mine AND Mr EH's pay is the same this month as last. 
- Cashed out £12.89 from Prolific - not my best month but could be worse, and I am fairly back into the swing of doing it now. There is still £2.odd pending as well which should get me off to a start for March. I'll strip that out of my PP later and send it to my newly christened "tech replacement pot" (which used to be called the Gym Neutral Fund).
- Remembered to order the repeat prescription for my HRT - everything else needs to have a medication review first so I need to organise that. Ideally before my current pre-pay cert runs out.
- Had a chat with MrEH this morning about minimising travel spending on the weeks when I have booked random days holiday. 
- Weather has warmed up a bit which means gas use is down today so far - if it stays a bit warmer tomorrow when MrEH is WFH it will also improve electricity use.  This months use will bite into our credit a little, but not that much. 
- I need to meal plan and sort a shopping list as I will probably head to Lil's tomorrow, with associated swerve in to BeeAndEmm to make sure those logs haven't been reduced any further. 

I'm currently ideally lining up a nice pottering/do very little sort of day for tomorrow. That has a habit of not materialising though, so time will tell. 

Oh - and it's proving ludicrously difficult to get anyone to come and even quote for our garden job!  I think I've sent 5 enquiries through ch3ck@trade - one company was interested and arranged a visit to quote, but then came back and said actually no they couldn't do that day so could be rearrange - for a day I have already told them we were unavailable. I ended up telling them not to bother as I could see it just being an ongoing issue actually getting the job done. 

redofromstart

I got excited about the return of our hedgehogs as a delivery driver left a parcel in the hedgehog box, fresh droppings in so I left some food in the box, and was pleased to see it was going every night. Then I caught tiny cat (kitten sized) winding her way out cheerfully munching the biscuits, like something out of the crystal maze as you have to go in narrow hole and round the narrow bend to keep the food safe from other animals. 

foxgloves

Re compost - I will be buying a dozen bags of the 'L*vingt*n' peat-free same as last year. I have tried various peat-free ones & have found them variable. One organic brand I always used to like seems to have gone all wood-based for its compost recipe & I found that some seedlings struggled to get established in it at potting-on time. I seem to get on better with the 'green waste' based ones, although as these can involve composted council green waste, you can get odds & sods of stuff in there which has obviously got in with soil around the roots of the plants. I have also found the occasional piece of glass, but I am usually wearing gardening gloves so it hasn't been a problem.  I have had long conversations with my best friend about peat-free composts. She is a bit more resistant to it than me, but knows she will need to get used to it & is doing so. We have come to the conclusion that while it is fine as a growing medium, it does behave a bit differently & so we need to remember this with everyday things like watering, etc. 
F

jwil

Hope you get your quiet day tomorrow.

I feel your pain with getting tradespeople!

PennysIntoPounds

But what did you end up having for dinner?! I've been wondering since you mentioned your sad lack of egg chip and beans on my diary 😂 

EssexHebridean

😂😂 PiP it was indeed my planned pasta bake - roasted cauliflower mixed with pasta and small chunks of chorizo, cheese sauce, and finished off in the combi microwave for quickness. It was utterly delicious I am pleased to say! 

Redo I can imagine HRH having done something very similar had we had a hedgehog house. She was pretty easy to please on the food front generally although favourite treats were peas (preferably thrown for her to catch) and small pieces of prawn cracker. She’d cheerfully root out food for herself if nothing was on offer from us too, and woe betide the person who left the lid off the butter dish… she would undoubtedly have helped herself to anything left in a cosy - and dry - little space! 

Jwil - it’s beyond ridiculous. I just checked my email this morning and I’ve still got nothing. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Foxgloves thanks for that - it is really good to get comparisons from people who’ve used different options and so have been able to compare properly. I think the one we had last year was a wood based one and as I mentioned previously we definitely didn’t find it so good for seeds in particular. What I may yet do this year is to mix and match a bit trying different brands and see if anything seems to give outstanding or very poor results - at least then that would inform future choices. 

We ventured out first thing this morning for MrEH to get his paper but just walked a relatively short loop as it really was quite damp and unpleasant. There was a nasty chilly wind too which wasn’t encouraging us to stay out longer! Porridge for breakfast when we got back was really very welcome! 

I’m going to make a start on putting together a list of meals that we can use as meal plan inspiration for the rest of March I think - this will be informed by things we already have in the freezer, plus the bits I intend to buy at the farmers market in a couple of weeks, along with other things which will need main ingredients purchased. I’ve planned this way before once or twice and it works well for us when looking at a longer timeframe. I am using the cooked ham from the freezer as the backbone for the week to come - it’s a decent sized piece (I should really have cut it in two before freezing - hey ho) and will do a fair few meals plus probably some lunches as well. The bits for tonight’s curry plate are defrosting in the fridge already - literally no actual cooking to do for that at all, just reheating which will be an absolute treat this evening! 

MSE stuff: 
- Council tax money has gone to the mortgage 
- £14 reduction in water DD from this month has been shuffled to the mortgage OP pot

- Mortgage is now below £110k - hurrah! Interest still to go on for this month but we’re far enough below that I’m happy to declare us as there! 

- shopping done - Lil’s. £25.02 which included a couple of bags of bread flour plus a pack each of spinach & tomato gnocchi from their Italian specials. At 99p a pack that will be a couple of tasty meals based on those - and I suspect it will be nicer than T’s ordinary stuff which is now £1.85 a pack! 

- a bit of number crunching on the budget for March - notably working out what I expect in the way of Oyster and car feeds, noting where “spare” money has gone, and anything we need to be planning ahead for. 
- The holiday fund is back to having enough in it to pay the cottage balance and we are now into saving for spending money, diesel etc. just one more thing to book ahead of going - the Travelodge for the way up as they keep messing with the pricing there. We may yet explore another option on that side of things. 

- popped to BeeAndEmm to check log prices and they had the Cruc1@ls yogurt mint sauce in so I nabbed a couple of bottles of that.
- checked the price of the bagged logs while I was in there - they haven’t dropped any further so for now they can keep them!
- we must remember to go and get a couple of bags of coal tomorrow - we will just scrap through this evening but that’s it! 

- took the plunge and squeezed the contents of freezer 2 into freezer 1 - freezer 2 is now switched off so that will be an energy saving. 

Right - time to go and get logs in I think, then make the fire up ready for later. 

PennysIntoPounds

That's fantastic you've got under 110k on the mortgage, well done 🍻

And of equal importance, congratulations on your dinners 😁

kayannie

themadvix said:

@kayannie what size bag is that please?

Sorry @themadvix, I've not seen your question until tonight.  From memory it is 50 litres but I will check tomorrow & let you know if different. KA

EssexHebridean

Morning all! Hopefully everyone had a lovely weekend and is now enjoying some sunshine on this monday morning? It's actually glorious here - we had a frost overnight but not a heavy one, and we've now got deep blue skies and sunshine which feels like an absolute tonic! 

I reckon I can stick my hands up and say that the weekend involved Getting Things Done! Notably yesterday in fact - and mostly garden related.
- the first lot of veg seeds are sewn - 3 different tomatoes, yellow courgettes and Hungarian Black chillis are all indoors on the window sill along with some flower seeds as well (sweet peas, nasturtiums, larkspur and calendula to get us underway) Those all sewn into halved loo roll inners which we've found make decent little planting modules
- a trough sewn with half cut & come again salad leaves and half Spinach, and a round pot with small round carrots are in the mini greenhouse outside. 
- We popped to the orange DIY place yesterday morning as we realised we were going to reluctantly have to buy plant labels (having wracked our brains there was nothing we had already that we could use instead, annoyingly) and wanted to look at the planters they have with a view to what might work long term for our herbs etc - nothing in particular there but we did find a rather lovely yellow bush rose, and a nice sturdy little Heuchera "Silverberry" as well both in the clearance section and down to half price. So £11.50 spent there including the labels.
- MrEH popped out in the afternoon to go and grab 3 bags of compost - we went with the L3vingt0n peat free in the end and it seems to be fairly decent although quite fibrous so we'll see how that works out. Also a pack of seed trays without holes in the bottom to use with our propagator lids where we are planting into individual pots or toilet roll inners -£18 there. 
- The section we were talking about turning into a planting bed in the front garden has now been stripped of the slate topping and the weed membrane, and dug over, and the rose and heuchera are in. It was a devil to dig as unsurprisingly there was a lot of old slate, gravel etc to deal with, all combined with the delightful heavy clay! Anyway, all dug over now, a good half a bag of compost dug through as well, and a few decent handfuls in the bottom of both planting holes as well. 
- Some planning done on what else we'd like to get in at the front - a nice variegated sage for definite  I think which will be practical AND pretty, and plenty of autumn flowering bulbs to go in round the edges we think. Hopefully some of the stuff we have sewn will come up and be suitable to go in there as well. We'd like a loosely cottage-gardeney sort of feel to it - neither of us are fans of very structured, planned gardens, or indeed masses of weeding! 

MSE Stuff:
- Remaining shopping was done on Saturday morning - just tomatoes and bananas as planned. £1.88
- Popped for a couple of bags of fuel for the fire as well - that will come from our "fuel fund" pot which will now be fairly well depleted. We shouldn't need anything more now this winter though. 
- Decision made to drop the Octopus DD by £20 a month to start eating into credit a bit more, with that £20 drop being diverted to the fuel fund as an additional payment ready for buying logs/fuel at some stage in the summer. 
- I will do some number crunching at some stage regarding whether we want to jump out of our Octopus fix for electric at least - as there will of course be a drop in the unit rates. with the SC increasing though it's not quite so clear cut. It won't be worth changing the gas anyway as of course we are (hopefully!) entering the time of year when we use relatively little anyway - so we may as well hang on to the lower SC there I think)
- "free" pots for planting thanks to the loo roll inners, and a pack of extremely old peat pots which were bought probably about 20 years back when A's were selling them off dirt cheap - I think we paid 10p a pack and we've been working through the supplies gradually ever since!  I think we still have a few more packs. 
- the ham I got out of the freezer provided me with lunch on Saturday, us both with lunch yesterday, and will feed us both for both lunch and tea today - sandwiches for one, and in a omelette for the other. I decided to use it now on the basis that I reckon the offer will be back on over Easter so I will be able to replace it. We might both have grown curly tails and be oinking by the end of the week, mind you! 
- Tea last night was a budget friendly one as well, using YS'd chicken goujons from the freezer with HM wedges. 
- I think we did decently enough on both the Friday and Saturday savings sessions, albeit both were only half an hour of course. Quite nice to just sit for a while with a single light on, reading. 
- Washing was hung out for long enough yesterday morning to get the worst of the moisture out of it. I'm hoping to be able to do the same with bedding tomorrow as well.
- Claimed my free sausage roll in Gr3ggs on Saturday and ended up giving my referral code to the lady who served me as well as when I used to code she said she was thinking about switching to the octopods - will be handy if she uses it and she did seem keen, so fingers crossed! 
- Got out on the bike for free exercise on Saturday as well - it was a lovely day and the showers had mostly dried up so it was nice to be out there! 
- A further £100.30 sent to the mortgage this morning from the OP pot. My aim is that there will be end of month surplus for a further £110 to be sent across there. 

Plans:
- my car will need feeding tomorrow on my way home as I have changed plans to make a trip to Lincoln this Thursday. 
- MrEH hopes his Oyster will not now need a feed until Thursday - would be useful if so! His car should go through this week without needing more diesel.
- My Lincoln trip will see me wanting some food at lunchtime, but currently that and the fuel will be the only spend.
- MrEH has a rugby match on Friday evening - I will probably go along with the camera as it's the Old Boys team playing and should be a laugh. If I'm lucky I might get fed afterwards - depends how much pizza gets ordered! 
- Will probably see if Neil can take my car for its MoT next week, now. 

There - that's a decent little round up and start to the week, isn't it! 

LadyWithAPlan

The BritishHedgehogs.org.uk has loads info  

so mse gettting referral money in from your  Greggs server ! Go you !