Even sunbeams get the blues

My day did not start well. I got a phone call from my Dad to say he and my Stepmum have separated. I only spoke to them on Saturday! Amazing what can happen in a couple of days. He said it was mutual so hopefully it will be quite amicable. My little brother seems ok, a little shaken but alright. He's a year older than I was when my Mum and Dad split up.

This will be my 3rd familial divorce. Mum/Dad, Mum/Stepdad, Dad/Stepmum. Not a great history really. It got me thinking about the divorce rate in my family and it goes like this.
Mum and Dad followed by them both splitting from a following marriage. My Nana and Grandad on my Mum's side have been divorced for longer than I've been alive. About 4 years ago my Grandparents on my Dad's side separated but have not divorced yet. My Uncle on my Dad's side split with his wife before Christmas. On my Mum's side one of my Aunts got divorced years ago, the other has just filed for it. My uncle on my Mum's side is still happily married. One of my Cousins has just filed for divorce.

It's not a happy list is it? Now I certainly don't believe in staying in a relationship that is making you unhappy. I certainly don't believe in staying "for the sake of the children". That's a sure fire way to make everyone unhappy.

However I can't help thinking that the ease of divorce makes people either jump into marriage when their not ready or giving up too easily.

So it's not been the best of days for me. I was supposed to be going to a couple of friends' dance performance this evening but I'm not feeling all that sociable really. Me and Spadger will be sitting down and watching the first season of Being Human on the projector. I could really do with George the werewolf's sense of humor. I leave you with a quote from Disney's Stitch. Things are never as bad as they first seem.

"This is my family. I found it all on my own. It's little, and broken, but still good. Yeah - still good."

In the kitchen with bruises

Ah a post not dedicated to snow. What an oddity. The snow has pretty much gone now. There are a few piles, the remains of dead snowmen, lying around but that is it. So there was no snowman competition on my Birthday. However I had a great day. I went pattern and fabric shopping in the morning and got the most amazing pattern ever!

Then in the afternoon my friends came over and brought cakes and scones and we had tea and chatted. It's been ages since we all got together and it was lovely! On the evening 2 of them came with us to the local alternative night. I got to wear my corset for the first time. Man they are hard to dance in. You don't notice how hard you breathe when dancing till you can't. I woke up this morning with bruises from it. I guess when corsets where around the most strenuous thing most folk did was play the harpsichord. At least as tight laced as I was anyhoo.

Today I am making cake. It's tradition at my workplace that you bring cakes in on your birthday for everyone. Now I don't buy cakes so I must make them. I'm planning pumpkin muffins, rainbow sponge cakes and maybe some biscuits. I also want to get some sewing done today as I don't think I've done any in a while.

4:33
Ah as always when I try to do a lot of baking at once it's all gone a bit wrong. The sponge cakes I decided to make as a loaf so it's easier to transport. This is in the oven now but it is not cooking in the middle. My bread needs to go in the oven in 10 mins and there isn't enough room for it all if the sponge doesn't cook. Eep. Ah well. I'm feeling quite relaxed about it still.

I have been experimenting. Now as I'm sure I've mentioned before I am a recipe type of gal. However of late I have been learning to experiment. Today I cooked 3/4 of a pound of shredded pumpkin. Once I'd drained all the water out of it this became only 3 and 1/4 ounces!!!! My recipe called for half a pound. SO I scrapped that recipe and adapted another. I have a batch waiting to go in the oven (when I find room!). They should be banana, cherry, pecan muffins. instead thy are pumpkin, sultana and pumpkin seed muffins. Don't tell anyone, but I'm quite excited to see how they turn out. Once I've got all the above either in or out of the oven depending where it is at I think I'll make some plain chocolate biscuits and then that should do.

8:07
Rainbow sponge cake, check. Pumpkin muffins, check. (well only 7 came out of the tins without breaking. So gone wrong cake for us) Chocolate chip cookies, check. Bread buns for the week, check. So after all that I decided I wanted to make the butter this week. I will never volunteer for this again!!!! My arms are blood read and I am knackered. However I made butter and that does give me a sense of accomplishment. When I make the scones later I will feel really proud of myself. I think Spadger can do it until he makes me a churn though. I'm too tired to do any sewing now. So I'm going to wait for my tea (yeah we're a bit late tonight), maybe watch the latest episode of QI on the iPlayer and then make the scones. All in all it's been quite a nice weekend. I will share pics of all I bought on Saturday with you this week some time.

Opera rocks

More on that later :o) Needless to say it was fab!

The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age

It's my birthday tomorrow and for the first time ever my thoughts are a bit mixed. I love birthdays and don't think I'll ever want to stop celebrating them. I don't subscribe to the idea that getting older is a bad thing, in fact I think it's ridiculous. My birthday has always been a little bit of a let down since I left tiny childhood however. With it falling so close to Christmas I always fell into that danger period where I was offered the choice of a bigger present combining the 2 celebrations if I wanted. Invariably this means getting that present at Christmas so your birthday is a bit sparse. As I got older I discovered that my birthday falls between the payday before Christmas and the next one for most people. So everyone is skint and all partied out by the time my birthday comes around.

For my 3 years at university my birthday was great. It fell after we had all returned for the second term and all our loan cheques had cleared by that point so we all had money. Plus at uni all my friends were up for whatever crazy fancy dress scheme we could come up with.

Now I have a different dilemma. What do you do for presents when you now live in a way that means you don't want new or useless stuff? I don't feel I can ask for anything that is a true frippery anymore when there is more important stuff. Things like jewellery are pointless as I never go anywhere to wear the nice pieces I already own. I make clothes now. I have no interest in the latest CD/DVD/computer game. So what do I want? I've asked Spadger to get me some notions. Things like zips and thread and stuff like that. For all the ideas I have for sewing I never seem to have the "bits and pieces". Not the most exciting present but one I will actually use. This should help me transform my gigantic fabric stash into useful stuff.

I think presents are the last real hurdle between me and a truly frugal, "simple" life. I love opening gifts and really like it when people have put thought into it (see my glee over tea towels this Christmas hehehe). But when you have decided that you don't need anything it doesn't always mean that you have stopped wanting stuff. I think Birthdays may always be the time when I want to fall off the lack of consumption wagon.

So the plan for this birthday is simple. The local alternative night actually falls on my birthday this year with it being a Saturday so we're going out for a dance. I finally get to wear my corset out! A good nights dancing after a day spent in fabric shops seems like a great day to me :o)

Always plan ahead. It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.

So we are almost half a month into the new year and big changes are afoot already. Spadger is totally fed up with his job to the point where he won't be in it for much longer. At the very least he will be demoted. In today's financial climate what could possibly make someone want to leave a fairly stable, relatively well paid job? Dissatisfaction is the simple answer. I am not exactly thrilled with my job but I've had worse so can manage for the moment. So with a very real possibility of a drop in income we need to reassess our current budget. Now when we first got together I pretty much supported us and we managed on very little money. Over the years we have gotten better off and, while we have never lived to excess, we have been able to live better and more to our principles. We are now faced with the challenge of staying with those principles without feeling like we are going without.

Enter the might entity that is menu planning. It is a concept I have come across many times in my ready of many frugal and green blogs. The general idea is to have a rotating menu set over several weeks. You can then bulk buy things and also grab stuff while it is on offer knowing that it will get used. Importantly you must remember to include all meals in this, not just the main one of the day. The rotating part is to stop you getting bored by having the same meals every week. By planning in this way we should be able to cut down what we spend on groceries by buying in bulk/seasonally, reduce the amount of packaging things have, reduce waste when we don't eat all of those impulse buys (come on who hasn't found stuff in the bottom of the fridge or the back of the cupboard that they've forgotten about because it doesn't get eaten regularly?) and hopefully eat healthier too.

My plan is to get everyone in the house to write a list of their favourite meals. I can then use this as a basis for my list. I also want to look at ways to alter these meals as well. For example replacing the meat with pulses etc. Spadgersdottier has recently decided to have another go at vegetarianism so I need a repertoire of veggie meals anyhoo. I have been vegetarian in the past but I really had no idea how to cook at the time so from a health perspective it was a disaster. I like the idea of incorporating more veggie meals into my diet again. By making our diet more vegetarian as well it means we can get even better meat because we will be buying less for more money. Both me and Spadger would prefer it if our carnivorous sides were fed with animals that actual saw sunshine!

The first thing I am going to do is sort out our freezer again. I started keeping a record of what was in it at the end of last year but it sort of petered out and once again I have no idea what is in there apart from a ton of pumpkin! I think February is when all this will start as we need to get our lists together and look at where we are gong to buy things from to get the best deals . Not to mention storage of goods too!

Is it wrong that I'm quite excited about this idea?

How ace are bugs?

Oops, though tI'd posted this yesterday. so a bit late but here you go.

Well it definitely looks like winter is slowly ending. I could see grass and flower beds this morning. Out overwintering garlic was standing there with it's little shoots poking out of the snow looking very proud with itself for surviving. (we have a habit of anthropomorphising everything in my house, you'll get used to it)So I am now starting to look forward to the next season which is spring. Spring is my second favourite season. The first, surprisingly enough is Autumn. So it goes Autumn, Spring, Winter then Summer. I like the changing seasons best. In Autumn everything is getting ready to go to sleep and puts on one last show of gorgeous colour before doing so. In Spring everything is waking up, dusting off it's Sunday best and trying to attract all the bugs for pollination.



I love bugs. I think I really started to notice them when I got into photography as I could see them close up (not as close as I would like. Man I'd love to be able to afford a decent macro set up). Most people dislike all but the prettiest bugs and many gardeners see them all as pests. However there are beneficial insects which can really help out.

If they are not having a detrimental effect, then leave them alone as they all form part of the natural balance between flora and fauna which gives us the beauty we all strive for.

Quote from here

Now this site has a list of bugs which fit under 3 categories; friends, some bad habits and the enemy. This made me smile quite a bit. Makes gardening seem more like playground warfare, which I guess it is. But the 3 categories are important. Only one of them is solely bad. So out of lots and lots of different bugs and other garden animals only a few are bad. However chemicals and pesticides are indiscriminate. They will attack everything. Then other animals will each these infected animals and bugs and so the poisons pass into their systems. They leech into the water systems and eventually get into our bodies. So in the end we are harming ourselves. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Nope. didn't think so. So what do you do to stop your crops being devoured by slugs and aphids and everything else? Well you can introduce the helpful bugs to your garden either by buying them in or good old fashioned encouragement via the right plants. You can use various organic recipes to keep the nasties at bay. You can use companion planting where you plant things next to each other that help encourage the right bugs, discourage the bad ones and generally support one another's growth.



These are all things I need to learn more about. I am a gardening novice and am quite black fingered really. But I plan on learning this year. I am in charge of the herbs, salad and peas in our garden this year! Since I like all of those it's the best motivation for me to learn. Plus the more bugs I can encourage in the more pics I get to take :o)

The death of winter

Hey guys. Well the snow is still on the ground but there are mixed forecasts, some saying sleet, some saying snow and some saying thawing. So we will see if there is still enough for a snowman next Saturday. I think this is the death of winter, or at least the extreme cold and snow we've had. The 3 of us have spent the weekend sledging. This is the 2nd year running we've been able to do this which is great. This year is definitely better though. We tried out 2 different sets of hills. The first was over the road from Kirkstall Abbey, which is where we went last year. We also went to the hill just at the bottom of our road. It was quieter and steeper and has no trees. Man you get some speed up. This is the hill we went back to today. I didn't take part today as I have a misaligned pelvis and one day of sledging is about as much as I can take. So I stopped at the bottom of the hill and took pictures. There were a couple of gentlemen and their sons on sledges made of sign boards. They very kindly sold us one of the boards. I guess they made a tidy profit today as they sold another as well. They work for a sign company so I'm guessing the boards didn't cost them too much.



I managed to get a few pictures of the ice. I was hoping to get some of the icicles we saw the other night but most of them had thawed yesterday.







Now these are the icicles on our guttering. Quite impressive I thought.


There are also a few on the bin and a set of stalagmites/stalactites on the water barrel.



I can't remember the last time I saw proper icicles. It is just not cold enough for long enough anymore. We seem to have lost the seasons bit here. We get a couple of warm days in summer and a couple of cold days in winter and the rest of the time it is just damp in one way or another. These last couple of years have been more like the ones from my childhood, at least with the winters. Now if we can just get some sun in summer.

So if you thought my icicles were nice here are the ones at my mum's. Mighty or what? They're at least 3 feet long!



And just for pretty's sake here are a few other pics. But be warned dear reader, too many photos in icy conditions (especially after spending a couple of hours watching your dearly beloveds sledge) will lead to hands like this.