Where growing, making & good living come together

September 2011 – month in review

Posted by on Friday 30 September 2011 in goals, less than 12 clothes challenge, meta | 7 comments

Wow, this month really flu flew by.

Goals in 2011 progress

Sigh, too ill to do anything much. Still a lot to accomplish in a short amount of time!

Buy less than 12 items of clothing in 2011

I’ve bought LOTS of clothes this month! Partly inspired by replacements – a favourite (work) top & a (newly holey) pair of jeans had to be decommissioned from general service this month – and partly by the start of term & change of the season. I bought a pair of jeans (excellent second-hand quality from eBay), two long sleeved cotton tops (new) and two t-shirts (new). I also bought a new pair of trainers as my last pair developed a 2inch split along the sole – fixable for dry weather wearing but not for the incoming soggy winter.

Before this month, I’d bought three things, so now I’m up to nine items in 2011. A few months ago – when I had bought anything for more than six months, I’d have been surprised at that. While I didn’t NEED these things, my existing clothes (which generally pre-date the start of the challenge by at least six-months/a year) are wearing out.

Growing & Chickens

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How do you stay motivated?

Posted by on Thursday 8 September 2011 in meta | 10 comments

Apologies for the lack of posts this week and I guess the nature of many of the posts over the last few weeks/couple of months: I’m in a bit of a slump.

It’s a very precise slump though – I’m as generally happy as I’ve been in a long time/ever but feeling a bit meh about most of my work stuff and most practical things. I think it started in the garden in the early summer but has spread to just about everything else in the simple living milieu now and I’m finding it hard to get enthused about doing, or rather getting started doing just about anything. (It’s definitely not helped in areas like the garden, where the job to be tackled gets more difficult with each day I procrastinate, so makes me procrastinate about starting it even more.) Siiigh.

I’ve still been doing some stuff: looking after the chickens, cooking (which is why there have been a few new recipes recently) and bits of crafting, albeit pointless-just-pretty sewing projects (don’t get me wrong, they’re very enjoyable and I enjoy the outcome a lot but they’re not clothes or anything practical) but just about everything else … meh. I’m usually more about the journey than the destination but I can’t get motivated enough to even start the journey at the moment, and the reward of the destination doesn’t seem to be enough either.

I could go into a long, self-indulgent list of reasons what might be causing it but I think I’d prefer to focus on positive ways out of it instead…

So if you hit a motivation slump, what do you do to kick yourself out of it? Do you do things daily to keep motivated? Do you use lists to stop being overwhelmed by things? Do you focus on one area at a time, to hell with the rest – or do you do a bit of everything? Do you have any tricks for, well, tricking yourself into getting started?

Video games can keep my attention for a ridiculous amount of time: any other gamers thought of ways to “game-ify” simple living tasks to keep themselves at it?

Any suggestions would be very gratefully received!

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August 2011 – end of month review

Posted by on Thursday 1 September 2011 in goals, less than 12 clothes challenge | 8 comments

Cor, another month that seems to have taken its sweet time to come to a close – again, not dragged but the beginning of the month feels very long way ago now.

(Lemon curd, with cinnamon, which I made one day to accompany a fig-and-fennel soda bread test loaf.)

Goals in 2011 progress

We tried to go sea-fishing but failed. We haven’t had a lot of food from the garden – a few courgettes/marrows, tomatoes, potatoes but nothing major-major. I’ve been sewing quite a bit but for decorative rather than practical purposes. I haven’t made anything with wood. I have baked quite a bit – actually done quite a bit of experimental baking & cooking, trying out new ideas for recipes – but not made cheese. Basically, I’ve got a lot of goals still to accomplish and an increasingly short amount of time to do them in!

On the plus side though, I did slightly better with my month’s mini-goals: we sorted out the bills stuff (2), I researched the ISA options and decided it wasn’t worth switching until next year (1), cleared out the cupboards (4+5), nearly stuck to my budget (3 – see below), would have done 6 if there wasn’t a damp problem in need of investigation, and made a purse (8). Not great but better.

Buy less than 12 items of clothing in 2011

After buying two things in July, I bought another thing – a light “so very me” cardigan – at the beginning of August. My old cotton cardigan has seen better days so this is sort of a replacement and will be useful in the next few months over t-shirts/vest tops.

One of my favourite pairs of jeans has developed an unfortunate (and very difficult to fix) hole in the bum so I’m on the look out for a replacement pair but not seen any yet.

Anyway, no other temptations or anything else from the exempt list so I’m just up to three items so far in 2011.

Growing & Chickens

As I said above, the garden has not had a hugely productive month – which is a bit of a shame. I’ve run out of preening steam too so it looks a mess as well. Sigh. September should bring lots more tomatoes (we’ve got lots of green ones at the moment) and more courgettes, and hopefully our first achocha. Two out of four of our achocha plants have pretty well developed fruit on them and finally, the other two — which have grown up together against a wall and are MASSIVE (15ft tall, 8ft across) — have finally started fruiting too. That might result in a lot of fruit!

The chickens have had a good month – no broodiness and Ginger definitely started laying again (she went broody in the middle of June, came out of it finally about a month later but I couldn’t be sure that she was laying again until mid-August when we finally got six eggs in one day). With six eggs on some occasions, we had a grand total of 157 eggs, an average of just over 5 a day.

Spending

I had given myself a budget of £100 for my SAVE-as-much-as-you-SPEND (corrected!) categories this month and if I hadn’t gone completely craft supply crazy, I’d have made it. I spent a whopping £55.75 on craft stuff this month: mostly embroidery threads and cross-stitch fabric but also £17.20 on yarn from Bobbins in Whitby. The yarn was a complete impulse buy – I saw it, wanted it, had a vague project in mind but not great plans to use it ASAP (since I can’t knit/crochet in the summer) – and that blew my budget, pushing me over to spend £110.66 in total. *shakes fist* Yarn aside, I do know that all the embroidery stuff will keep me quiet for a long time so while it was a lot of money, I probably won’t need to buy anything more for ages.

Aside from crafts, restaurant/takeout food wasn’t too bad this month (£46.42) but I could easily have saved about a tenner of that by taking sandwiches, snacks & drinks with me when I was teaching during the day, rather than using the Coop. Naughty. It did also include expensive fish’n’chips, donuts and other seaside treats when we were in Whitby.

Transport costs were quite low for the month (£30.70), especially since £16.70 of that was last night alone (a return bus ticket then a taxi fare when the meeting overran and I missed the last bus, grr). I didn’t buy any books – used the library a few times instead. Entertainment was a newspaper one Saturday (and all the crafts, of course!). The silly thing was my cute vase. Household stuff included the wool blanket, some photo frames, a bathmat, and an oven thermometer – wild ;)

I spent £175.74 in total, after bills and food shopping – my lowest month since I started tracking spending (the previously lowest had been June, at £188.91). Bit disappointed that I “wasted” some of it on impulse yarn and actually wasted some of it on unnecessary lunches, but I’m not beating myself up about it too much.

How was your August?

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Alphabet in August – U to Z

Posted by on Wednesday 31 August 2011 in meta | 2 comments

This is a month-long creative exercise led by Chiot’s Run: descriptive words and pictures about me/my life starting with each letter of the alphabet. Most people are doing a letter a day but I’m doing it in groups instead. I’m a little behind at the moment because of one of the words for L and one of the words for P… :)

I’ve done five words for each letter up to now but I don’t think I’ll be able to manage as many for these difficult letters, or find pictures for everything! It’s also pretty hard at this stage coming up with words that aren’t just synonyms of previously mentioned things.

U is for unusual: I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was a unique and beautiful snowflake but I think it’s fair to say I am quite unusual in my habits and hobbies, certainly not what people expect when they meet me for the first time.

U is also for underemployed: With the exception of a few weeks here and there, I just about always have been, either in terms of workload/hours or difficulty of work. This is mostly by choice now.

and U is also for ubuntu & Ubuntu: the philosophy (“I am what I am because of who we all are”) and the operating system. Actually, I’m not particularly tied to Ubuntu per se, but in the 10 years I’ve been using Linux, it’s the distro I’ve used the most and I can’t see that changing very soon.

V is for video games: I’ve played video games all my life. My not so secret addiction.

W is for weird: Like with “odd”, not always in a good way.

W is also for waterbaby: Floating and paddling. Pools and ponds. Streams and the sea. They’re all good.

X is for XL: extra-large and extra-loud.

Y is for yarn: I like yarn.

Y is also for Yorkshire: my adopted home county, which I’ve gone on-and-on about before :)

Y is for yummy things: there is a reason I’m “fat”, “XL” and the one below – I’m all about tasty, tasty food.

And finally, Z is for Zaftig: I’ll admit I had a bit of help from a dictionary for that one but it’s definitely going on my “remember for Scrabble” mental list. Wonderful word, and one John has adopted as a nickname for both me and the dog!

Final thoughts

I’ll admit that the last half of the alphabet has felt like a slog (even though I had nearly all the words picked before I started) but overall, I’m glad I did it — as I said for Q, I’m not very good at finishing projects so I’m glad I finished something!

Reading other people’s alphabets – and seeing comments on my own posts, it seems we simple living bloggers have a lot of traits in common – perhaps we’re not all as odd or unusual as we think :)

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Alphabet in August – Q to T

Posted by on Monday 29 August 2011 in meta | 0 comments

This is a month-long creative exercise led by Chiot’s Run: descriptive words and pictures about me/my life starting with each letter of the alphabet. Most people are doing a letter a day but I’m doing it in groups instead. I’m a little behind at the moment because of one of the words for L and one of the words for P… :)

(Ok, that’s a bit of a cheat but I couldn’t think of any other ideas for a Q picture and while her very-much-missed brother Carbon has been featured, alongside Boron & Lily-dog, Carla hasn’t been used for a picture yet and dagnammit, she deserves to be. :) )

Q is for…

  • Quick-learner: I pick things up quickly, which is useful given my many interests!
  • Quick-witted: Cheating with another “quick-” word :) There is nothing like knowing other quick-wits to speed up your own response time.
  • Questioning: I accept very little on face value.
  • Quitter: Quitter is a bit too strong really, I’m just not a finisher of things. I’m good at doing the first 80% of things, bad at the last 20%.
  • Quibbler: This goes with “questioning” I guess but in a bad way: I get stuck on the micro details in macro arguments sometimes.

(And egg shells are one of my favourite examples of recycling since they can be baked and fed back to the chickens as a calcium booster, enabling them to produce more eggs. Weee! That’s also one of the first pictures I took for my other site, How Can I Recycle This?, back in early 2006.)

R is for…

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