September 2011 – month in review

Posted by louisa 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

August 2011 – end of month review

Posted by louisa 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?

Not fishing in Whitby

Posted by louisa on Thursday 18 August 2011 in goals | 8 comments

I’ve had “go sea fishing” in the North Sea on my goal list last year but faff and disorganisation meant it didn’t happen, so it was pushed onto my goal list for this year. Eight months through the year, faff and disorganisation were at risk of having their way with things again, so rather than postpone any longer, we decided to go risk going in the busy summer holiday period yesterday.

We found an afternoon “taster trip”, took the doggie to her granny & pop-pops’ house for the day (she’s their granddog) and organised our schedule with a good hour/hour-and-a-half buffer zone between getting there and needing to go to the boat, just in case we got lost, got stuck in traffic or had trouble finding a parking space. That hour/hour-and-a-half buffer zone would have covered one or two of those eventualities but, as it turned out, not all three. It took us nearly twice as long to get there as it should have done, and we missed the boat (literally) by about ten minutes. Somewhat annoying.

Lemons/lemonade – we were in Whitby, my favourite seaside town (sorry Southport, you might have birthed me but your sea is, frankly, a bit rubbish) and had already mentally committed to having an afternoon off so we played tourists: a walk on the beach, fish & chips, donuts, some casual jet jewellery window shopping and some serious seagull watching. We parked at the Abbey so got to have a distant gaze at that too.

I also indulged my craft bone with a visit to Bobbins, the mostly yarn/some antiques shop in the shopping area on the east of the harbour. I stroked various yarns before buying some King Cole Riot DK (very nice, even though it’s 70% acrylic).

It’s a shame we didn’t get to go fishing but we still had a jolly pleasant afternoon in the sunshine. We were hoping to actually go fishing next Wednesday but as the Whitby Folk Festival starts next Monday, I suspect it’ll be too busy for us – but we will get there, we will eventually, we will!

(Photo from a previous wintery trip to Whitby – we didn’t think it would be sensible to take an expensive camera out on a fishing trip so didn’t have one yesterday. Imagine the same shot with a brighter blue sky and about a hundred times as many people :) )

UK people – have you been to Whitby? What are your favourite spots there – any recommendations for places to eat/drink for when we do return to fish?

Mini goals for June

Posted by louisa on Friday 3 June 2011 in goals | 7 comments

Frugal/money

1. Transfer Cash ISA to new provider
Been meaning to do this for a little while. I love my current bank’s ethical policy but their interest rate is appalling. I’m going to try to find somewhere still reasonably hippy-friendly but a little more generous.

2. Transfer to new energy company
Our cheap offer tariff has come to an end so we’re being shifted onto standard – time to move! I’ve used a comparison site and every single option will cost us more – so I’m going to explore cashback options to offset the hike.

House

3. “Clean slate” tidy the bedroom
The bedroom has been an utter tip – even by my generally untidy standards – since we started refitting the bathroom in February. We still don’t have any cupboard space in the bathroom yet so all the things that usually live in there are strewn throughout the bedroom, on the landing and in the spare room. The bedroom stuff is the worst – not only is it cluttering it up, it’s stopping other stuff going where it should go and encouraging further clutter. The cupboards *should* be built in the next few days so once all that’s out, I think the bedroom needs some love.

4. Finish painting the bathroom
Like Laura, we keep putting this off – but when the cupboards are in, we’ll really have no excuse not to finish it all off! Once it’s painted, we can “finish” it off completely – refit the radiator, seal everywhere, put up mirrors/artwork — can’t wait!

Growing, eating, making and chickening

5. Fill all my planters with soil – and plants!
I’ve got a lot of empty planters at the moment – waiting until stuff is ready to be planted out. But frankly, if it doesn’t happen in June, it’s not going to happen. I think there will be more than enough plants to go around – but if there are any empties, more quick salad leaves are always useful.

6. Learn how to poach an egg
I have never done this successfully. I would like to be able to do this successfully. If only I had a steady supply of really fresh eggs… oh wait!

Have you got any mini goals for this month? Do you have a foolproof poached egg method? ;)

May – end of month review

Posted by louisa on Thursday 2 June 2011 in goals, meta | 5 comments

Another month that seems to have lasted ages but in a good way. Lots of long weekends too – but enough stuff going on to fill them with. I meant to write this post yesterday but was in the garden ’til past 10pm — so much to do!

Goals in 2011 progress

Things are still progressing in the garden – but slower than I thought in some areas. I only had my first fully homegrown salad last week – compared to regular salad from the garden in April last year. (I’m saying “fully homegrown” because we got two tubs of living salad from Lidl at the end of April and have cut-and-come-again from them several times – really been good value for money but not the same as growing from seed.) I’ve successfully taken cuttings from two perennial herbs too, so that’s another step – and I realised I should make that goal more measurable by coming up with a list of applicable plants/shrubs.

We’ve baked a good few times so are probably almost on track for the “once a week” goal, I’ve been making more stuff from wood so again improving those skills, and we went on a “learn to fly-fish” course while we were in the Lakes the weekend before last, which obviously isn’t the same as fishing in the North Sea but again, steps in the right direction. I like the idea of trying out the various different styles of fishing – see which one suits us/me best.

Not great goal progress but not bad :)

Mini goals

I set myself a few mini-goals this month – just a to-do list for myself really. Out of the five goals, I managed to complete one of them (pressure cleaning the coop) and half do two others (spent a lot of time looking at phone options and have decided I have to go see some in the flesh now; and, also I’ve sorted through nearly all of our kitchen cupboards). The other two things have been, um, forgotten. Will have to add them to my next to-do list…

Buy less than 12 items of clothing in 2011

I actually bought something this month! I bought three second-hand but BNWT bras on eBay – they are pretty but the focus is on functional, and they’re all replacements: I ripped one bra at the start of the month (not sure how), which spurred on my purchases, but earlier in the year had mentally retired two others because they were old and uncomfortable — so they’re on my exemption list.

Perhaps that purchase sated my previous “want new clothes” desires as I haven’t really been bothered about looking/thinking about buying anything else. Still no new clothes for six months now!