Early Spring Cleaning

I'm sure you're nothing like me. I'm sure that you don't have to wade through half full bags of raisins, a packet of sushi rice you bought 2 years ago, and various bottles, jars and packets spilling contents, every time you try to find out whether you have a can of tomatoes in the provisions cupboard, only to finally find way at the back of the cupboard 6 tins of out of date tomatoes.

I'm sure you're nothing like me, and that your cupboard is perfectly organised, all food in-date, packets emptied into storage jars, and that you know where everything is.

That's why I'm going to try to be more like you, and I've just spent the last 2 hours cleaning out my kitchen cupboards.

I want to try to do a food menu and budget each week, and I just could not get my head around that when my cupboards were in such a mess.

Can't post a boring picture of tins of peas, so here's a picture of the rhododendrons just coming into flower in my garden.

More Snow on the Way

More snow on the way for us, yipee! I love snow. We don't get it often enough, and even although it becomes a bit of a nuisance, it is lovely for a while. Here is a picture taken Up North at Christmas of just the biggest icicle I've ever seen.

Over on Luisa's blog: http://www.danceinmygarden.blogspot.com/ she is donating her first etsy sale of the year to Haiti. Please buy if you can. I'm afraid that I can't at the moment but what I am doing is looking out everything I can think of and donating that to Oxfam in the hope that they can make a few pounds for Haiti or another very worthwhile cause.

Little House on the Prairie

Galloping horses on the end of the bed, covered wagons on the pillowcases. I'm sure to dream of Little House on the Prairie tonight, which along with "The Waltons" was my favourite TV show
when I was little.

New orange penguins from the charity shop on the bedside table. "Why?", my daughter asks, "do you always buy orange penguins?" "Because I love them", I say, and that is good enough reason for me.

It has been a very difficult, sicky week, with my entire family sick with a stomach bug. I feel as though the washing machine has been going non-stop for days now, but at least now I have matching pillowcases, lol.

New Big Granny

Like many people, worldwide it seems, I've had a particularly nasty tummy bug this week, so haven't been at my most productive to say the least.

Have finally finished the big granny square, except for a couple of stray loose ends to weave in. Its an addictive pattern and very easy. You start off small, and just keep going, adding rounds until the square is big enough. Calling it a pattern is a bit grand: if you can do a little granny square, you can do this. By the end of this, my big granny measures about 5 feet across, and is taking just over a 50g ball of wool for each new round. What I like about patterns like this which change colour every round, or in the case of the ripple or vintage stripe: change each row, is how the colours interact.

And no, the unmatched pillowcase is not a homage to 1980's "pairs" of unmatched socks, one blue, one red. It is simply the fact that I am now completely out of clean bedlinen, having changed all 4 beds I'd guess maybe 2 billion times this week, lol.

Toxic Information and Penguin Birthday Parties

There's just too much bad news around. I don't think that in itself is a new thing. Bad news has always sold newspapers. When did I change from being someone who bought a paper every week or so, and listened to the news if it happened to be on while I was in the room, to being the person I am now.

I read four national news sites and one local site, sometimes "checking the news" every few hours, or even more. Sometimes if I'm crocheting or browsing the web in a room with a television, I leave the news programme on, and it spins round and I realise I'm listening to the same news as an hour ago. I think that it is the result of September 11th - the images of that horrible day are seered into the minds of so many. And I think because of that I have to "check the news" just in case I need "to do something". You see, at 3am, that "do something" becomes "fleeing the city with my children" or some other unlikely scenario, that plays itself over and over in my head. I wasn't even there and that is the long term effect on me: I hate to think of the trauma of people who were directly involved.

There are several things I've seen or heard in news programmes or seen on news websites, or even read in fiction books that have stayed in my head for a long time, some maybe forever, and they're not very positive. I could really have lived my life without seeing or hearing them. I'm not going to give examples or go into detail because then they would be in your head, but I'm sure you have your own examples.

I'm not advocating an ostrich stick your head in the sand approach either. It is impossible not to hear of any big events, but so many of the news items we hear about, I can personally do nothing about.

I don't want to get philosophical about the reasons : I've just come to the realisation that there is too much bad news getting into my head, so I'm going to try to stop watching TV news and browsing newspaper websites, and buying those paperbacks in the supermarket which always have a gruesome death or incident on the back cover to draw you in. That should save me: I would guess - yikes £100 a year - considering all the times I'm buying my groceries and I just have to have a book, and they're cheap so might as well get two. I'm not an unhappy person, but surely all this bad news must take its toll - no more.

So in a completely unrelated kind of way, here's a picture of two gorrillas turning up for the baby penguin's party on the back of reindeers :) Otherwise known as : Don't buy lots of expensive toys - a box of plastic animals can have hours of fun playing with children of all ages.

Another great way I have found of keeping a toddler busy for free, is to let them play in the sink. All little kids love this, and will happily splash around in a bubble enfested sink with whisks and measuring spoons and funnels for ages, whilst Mummy sits with her feet up on a chair watching, eating a big cream bun and drinking a coffee (in my dreams). Just make sure they can't turn the hot tap on and don't take your eye off them in case they fall in and drown, or more likely: try to eat the bubbles. Health and Safety advice courtesy of my dad who always likes to remind us of all eventualities.

Frugal Living - Cleaning Cloths

What am I doing? I thought, as I made a list of things to buy at the supermarket, including cleaning cloths, and a list of things to do, including taking old clothes to supermarket rag bank.


When did I become so susceptible to marketing that I would throw away old clothes which could be easily turned into cleaning cloths. Then I would waste time and money buying packaged cleaning cloths from the supermarket. And, if I'm being honest with myself, although I think I reuse them by throwing them in the washing machine, they fall to bits after a couple of washes and get thrown away. I buy about one packet of cloths a month, so that's about £25 a year I can save: not much in the grand scheme of things, but every little counts.


And then I read the packaging on the ready made cloths : "Made in China" and I got really annoyed with myself for buying these. I've nothing against the Chinese - the ones I know through work are hard working, decent people, just trying to make a living for themselves and their families. But what am I doing spending my money and time buying something which has been shipped from the other side of the planet when I already have a free solution in my own home. I should know better than that.

So, I've spent the last couple of hours, whilst watching TV, sorting through the clothes I was going to put in the clothing bank. Anything which looks new and good enough to wear, goes to the charity shop, hoping that it will be of use to someone. Anything else: stained, torn, or too many washes, gets put into the rag recycling.



Many of us will remember our mothers and grandmothers having a rag bag for cloths. Ours was in the bottom of the clothes drying cupboard and contained a not very exotic mixture of old pants, vests and shirts which had seen better days. A call for a cloth resulted in someone running upstairs, fishing about behind the boiler, and then trying to rip something resembling a cloth from an old piece of clothing. If you were lucky, you would find something which had been ripped up a bit before since it was difficult to start a new tear.


I've folded my new cloths up nice and neatly (won't stay like that for long, lol) and put them in a little basket under the sink. Now when I reach for a cloth, I'm reminded of clothes my kids used to wear, which is nice.

I realise that it is a bit obsessive to cut them up like this, and it is something my mother would never have done. However in our house, laundry just doesn't seem to be the organised affair you see on TV, and I don't want to see my kids wearing something I previously used as a wash cloth and then threw in the laundry. Best to cut them up to look more like cloths, and less like clothes.

Frugal 2010

Like many families, we're worried about the credit crunch and what it might mean for us. Already hubby has lost his job, but thankfully found another. I work for a large corporation and know due to past experience that the axe can fall with little warning.

We're very fortunate to both have jobs at the moment, and I know that a lot of others are not so lucky, but it doesn't pay to be complacent.

Because of this, we've decided to try to live as frugally as possible this year.