No storm damage but a fluffy bottom

Posted by louisa on Thursday 5 January 2012 in chickens, house | 7 comments

My Twitter feed today has been full of nearly squished chickens, roofs flying off sheds, greenhouses half blown away and house roof damage but despite living near a lot of very tall trees, this was the extent of the damage we experienced in yesterday/last night’s gales:

Because we live next to woodland, wind always sounds much worse than it is around here – even light winds create a constant roar through the trees – and every morning after windy nights, I wake up expecting three trees to be smashed through the greenhouse, half our roof tiles on the floor and the chicken coop have blown away to the marvellous land of Oz. It’s always a relief when I see that hasn’t happened.

The bird feeder isn’t even broken – just the twine that was holding it up – and I’ll get the chickens up to that level of the garden tomorrow (when it’s supposed to be sunny) for seed clear up. I’m sure they’ll love that chore.

Speaking of the chickens – four small things:

• John’s dad surprised us with a trailer load of woodchips yesterday so they have a nice fat layer in the run – lots of fun to scratch around in and much better for draining a storm’s worth of rain. The woodchips always smell great – usually like a pleasantly woody men’s aftershave but today they (or at least the garden) smelled like raita/yoghurt and mint sauce. Not like mint but specifically like yoghurt and mint sauce. I don’t know why but I’m not complaining.
• I mentioned this on Twitter earlier but for those not on that mighty social media timesink, the partial roof I put on the run last month survived the winds just fine, therefore I am ace and a master craftswoman. And/or the chicken run is in a sheltered dip and I got lucky.
• Rain/mud issues aside, this winter (so far) has been much better than last winter for our girls – I’ve not had to defrost their drinkers at all (I was doing it twice a day during the coldest bit of last winter) and they’ve kept laying well – we got four eggs (from six girls) just about every day in December despite the short days, them getting older and the fact it’s been moult season.
• Blue the chicken has been the last to moult and since the others are all refreshed & perky, she’s dropped right down in the pecking order these last few weeks. As my new joint favourite chicken, I’ve felt sorry for her so I’m pleased to see her bottom is getting nice and fluffy again. Hurrah for fluffy bottoms.

Have you suffered any weather-related damage to your house or garden this winter? Do you have any ideas why the new woodchips smell like raita? How do you feel about fluffy bottoms? All important issues of the day! :)

Buy less than 12 items of clothing in 2011 challenge – end of year update

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 3 January 2012 in anti-consumerism, frugal, less than 12 clothes challenge, low spend 11 | 10 comments

This morning I tweeted that I think it’s going to take me most of 2012 to catch up on all my leftover stuff from 2011 – and this is one of those things!

The Challenge

Last year, I set myself the challenge of buying no more than 12 items of clothing in 2011 – and I invited other people to join me. A good number of people signed up (or committed themselves to similar goals).

What I bought

I went until July (which was a full nine months since I’d bought any new clothes) before buying anything then raced up to 11 things by October!

I bought:

• 1 x a woolly hoodie jumper from a charity shop
• 4 x jeans from eBay (mostly replacements for old ones falling apart – I wear jeans all day, every day)
• 1 x light cardigan from a high street store
• 2 x t-shirts from Threadless
• 2 x long-sleeved tops from a high street store
• 1 x a cord jacket from a charity shop

I can’t tell you how many things I watched on eBay, or added to basket on other online shops, or considered at in-person shops – it was a LOT but I only bought those 11 things. By and large, I thought a lot more carefully about what I was buying because I didn’t want to go over my limit. That said: I still made impulse buys and mistakes. I love the cord jacket I got in October but that was a mistake: I’d spent most of the year trying to find the perfect spring/autumn jacket on eBay but then impulse bought the jacket at a charity shop even though it didn’t have a hood (which was a key thing for me) — I’ve been rained on so many times since then! The biggest mistake though was the Threadless t-shirts I bought in September – I’ve had t-shirts from there before and they’ve been decent quality; this batch though are awful — incorrectly sized, shoddy fabric, poor stitching = unwearable. It really annoys me that I wasted two of my quota on them! GRRR!

(The jacket, with the reason I keep getting rained on asleep in the background ;) )

Lessons learnt

Six things that have helped me live a simple, frugal life in 2011

Posted by louisa on Saturday 31 December 2011 in meta | 11 comments

1. Making every day tasks easy for myself

If something’s easy to do, I’m so much more likely to do it when I’m in a rush or distracted. We’ve always been avid recyclers but for a long time after we moved to our new house, we didn’t have a recycling bin in the kitchen – stuff just stacked up on the window sill which was messy and annoying; a new bin has made it easier. Ditto always having a roll of masking tape & a pen next to the freezer has made us much better at labelling food as it’s going into the freezer – which in turn makes us much more likely to get it out and eat it again. Just something as simple as having that masking tape & pen on standby has improved our freezer usage no end! I’m going to look for more ways to make my life easier like that in 2012.

2. Having defined “rules”/mini-goals

Funny, I’m not a fan of arbitrary rules generally – I usually use them as a to list of things to rebel against ;) – but having a few rules that I’ve set for myself this year has worked well (possibly because there is no one to rebel against except for myself ;) )

I’ve tried to make them SMART rules or goals – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant & Timely. For example, in the past I’ve set myself a goal of “buy less clothes” – that’s not SMART, but this year’s “buy no more than 12 items of clothing in 2011” goal has been exactly that — I think it’s been a lot easier to stick to as a result. I also have two other rules when it comes to clothes: they must be at least 50% natural fibres (in practise this is typically 80+%) and I must try them on before I buy them (when I first started buying a lot of clothes, I was a pretty standard size/shape so everything fit me and I didn’t get into the habit of trying things on first. Now I’m not-so-standard and clothes sizes seem to vary greatly – and I know I’m not very good at taking things back – so I force myself to try before I buy). Overall, those three rules have really helped me cut back on my clothes buying – and overall, my desire to buy clothes. Now I struggle to find stuff I actually want to buy!

I’ve given myself another few rules/ongoing goals this year too – for every two books that come into the house, one has to go out; to put at least two meals (of two servings each) in the freezer each month to use as future ready meals (John does similar too so we should always have something in the freezer for lazy evenings); and to save as much as I spend on frivolous/luxury items – myVAT. Which leads neatly onto…

3. Keeping a spending diary

Keeping a track of all the money I spend has been very useful in making me conscious of my spending in 2011. Do I still splurge on silly things that I regret afterwards? Yes, occasionally, but it’s made me think twice about a lot of stuff too. Reviewing at the end of each month has made me especially aware of when I’ve had book heavy months, or craft supply heavy periods, and that’s made me more conscious in those areas the next month: not binged/purged, just generally aware. I’m definitely going to continue doing this in 2012.

4. Getting into a decluttering habit

As a lifelong hoarder, I’m really coming around to the idea of stashing less stuff. I’m never going to have a minimalist home – I like books and have too many hobbies for that to be the case – but as our November challenge revealed, there was (and still is) plenty that can go without it being the slightest bit painful. I think our eyes were really opened when we finally sold our old house over the summer – we moved most of our stuff out when we moved over here in September 2009 but we left the stuff we didn’t want over here — the junk tucked away under the eaves or filling up the tiny cellar — until we *had* to get rid of it before the sale was finalised. We had a lot of stuff that had sat there for a decade – just in case we needed it, but we hadn’t and instead it had just got in our way. As soon as we finished the final clear out there, we got rid of, amongst other things, a spare fridge-freezer, a spare separate freezer, two microwaves, two electric keyboards, a drum machine and various old computers. Lots of space freed up! We’ve found that once you start giving stuff away, it makes it easier to give more stuff away – and we’re hoping to stick to that in 2012. I would much rather other people got definitely good use out of something rather than us possibly maybe using it in the future.

5. Knowing what isn’t worth me bothering with

I think I’ve had a bit of an ongoing epiphany in 2011 about everyone having different motivations in life – to borrow another project management idea, they have different key drivers. I’ve always known it but it feels like I know it on a deeper level now, and whenever I wonder why someone is doing something completely different to how I’d do it, I now try to say “different drivers” rather than get all “what the heck… flaming idiots!” about it. I’m sure I do a lot of things that would get me branded a flaming idiot by other people too because I’ve got my own drivers and they’re not necessarily consistent/understandable. I am trying to become more aware of them though and that’s where this point comes in: I’m starting to become more aware about what is and isn’t worth me bothering with.

For example, I made soap at the start of the year because it’s something I’d wanted to try for a while. It was cheaper than buying the equivalent 100% olive oil soap from the soap but more expensive than generic cheap soap – and very time consuming (I’ve bought a cheap stick blender for next time) — but we’ve liked the result so I’ll do it again. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s worth me making my own homemade laundry detergent – I’d had that on my list to try but since we don’t use that much powder in the first place, weighing up the risks (it not getting the clothes clean enough for a while) and the potential gain (a saving of no more than £10 a year), I’ve decided that it’s not worth it for me.

I think this is an ongoing thing but I feel like I’ve made a start in 2011 on pinning down my wants/not-bothered-abouts. I think it’s important to realise the latter as much as the former so I don’t feel overwhelmed by having so much to do – and so I’m…

6. Not beating myself up about what I don’t do

I had so many things on my goals list at the start of the year which I’ve just not done in 2012. I had so many mini-goals throughout the year that I didn’t do either. I’m frankly a little disappointed in myself but really, if I’d wanted to do them that much, I’d have done them. (I think it’s the difference between how I want to see myself and what I’m really like – a id/ego/super-ego clash.) I’m disappointed about not meeting those goals but I’m not beating myself up about it. I’m not beating myself up about feeling meh mid-summer even though that means we don’t have much at all in the garden over winter, I’m not beating myself up about .. actually, I’m not going to list what I haven’t done because that’s exactly my point here: I’ve done a metric heap of stuff in 2011 – I should be concentrating on being happy about what I have accomplished and not getting bogged down in what I haven’t.

I need to do my December review and a statistical summary of the year – mmm numbers! mmm graphs! – but I think that’ll have to wait until 2012 now. See you all in the new year – I hope 2012 is as fab for you as it, hopefully, is going to be for me :)

Have you had a good year? What’s going to be your take-home thoughts/ideas/memories from 2011? Have you learnt/applied any new tricks or ideas that have made your life better?

A few things from the week

Posted by louisa on Friday 30 December 2011 in meta | 5 comments

One. Whenever we tell people we don’t celebrate Christmas, the first question is often “what do you do on the 25th?” – we don’t do anything special, we just treat it like a normal day. A few years ago, when the 25th fell mid-week for a few years, we worked – it was a good day for doing things to busy websites or the like. Last year, it was a Saturday so we had some equally unobservant friends around for pizza and to watch dumb movies – a common Saturday event.

This year it was a Sunday so after a lie-in and a lengthy Lily-dog walk, I cleaned out the chicken coop as I do every Sunday morning – it was so warm that I was fine out there in just a t-shirt, quite different compared to last year! – then hoovered (the new bale of wood shavings had ‘leaked’ as it was carried through the house), then spent the afternoon gaming. Just a normal Sunday really.

Two. I spent that afternoon – and most of the last week in fact – in the World of Warcraft. I’ve jokingly called it a “holiday in Azeroth” – it’s changed a lot since the last time I was there two years ago and I wanted to have a look around to see what’s new – but it’s actually been more of a holiday than I reckoned. It’s as absorbing/disruptive to normal life as being out of the country for a week! I do like that I can create a character that cares about nature and spends as much time looking for herbs, crafting things, cooking & fishing as she does killing things :)

Considering there is a lot of WoW which feels like chores, it really pushes my buttons and I can play it non-stop for hours and hours. I’ve been complying a list of ways it does that – along with ways that my other favourite video games do too – to see if I can transfer some lessons from them onto my real life — make my real life to-do list as fun as running around killing murlocs.

Three. While I was gaming on Sunday, John went for lunch with his family – as he does whenever they all gather together – and returned with a huge pile of leftovers for us, so we’ve been able to join in the “when will we finish all the turkey?” game even without celebrating Christmas ourselves ;) We’ve had turkey & ham leftovers each day since then, and I made a turkey & chorizo jambalaya (like the one mentioned on here) last night which was yum. John also brought home leftover meat from people’s plates for Lily-dog & the feline duo, and leftover veg & fruit (including a LOT of melon) went down to the chickens. Glad we could use it up rather than it all going in the bin.

Four. The chickens’ new roof is working well – and by the amount of digging that’s going on in that area, I think they’re enjoying having a new dry part. If anyone sailing about 700miles south-east of Invercargill in New Zealand (the antipode of West Yorkshire) spots some chickens, they’ll be mine – having dug right through the earth.

Five. I bought some forced hyacinth bulbs a couple of weeks ago as and aside from getting a bit leggy/too heavy for their own good, they’re pretty – and so fragrant – at the moment. I am regretting it a bit though – I prefer plants to cut flowers but while these are in soil, they’re essentially as disposable as flowers. I will plant them out in the garden, to see if they’ve got enough energy to grow again in the future (apparently hyacinths are more likely to grow again in future years than something like tulips), but I’m not holding my breath over them.

What have you been up to this last week? Had a mountain of turkey to get through too? Any tips for helping my hyacinths along?

Chicken meets sprout

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 21 December 2011 in chickens | 3 comments

Since we’re not big sprout eaters in this house, our chickens hadn’t tried them before this week. I got a big bag of them reduced to just pennies at the supermarket nearly closing time the other day and thought I’d offer them up to the girls as a leafy treat.

“Hmmm? What is that crazy green thing? A mini cabbage?”

“Noooooooooooooooooo! Iccccccccccccck!”

“Dude! What the heck!?”

The black rock chickens liked them at least but the ginger girls, particularly this one (Green) like me a little less now ;)