Why I never appear to get anything done...

...and why my house is always messy.

It's because I find things like these (see below) kicking around the house. Dd's 'Christmas' lights were hanging from her bed for several years until they started behaving strangely in December and we replaced them with some boring but cheap lantern alternatives.

So this bundle of lights has been sitting on the windowledge at the top of the stairs for at least 2 months now. Waiting for some purpose.



Instead of doing all the essential things I should have done today, I set about cutting the wires and making the dysfunctional lights into little perspex Christmas decorations.


The leftover wire I cut and bundled up as garden ties or general use.


To be added to one of my many piles of boxes of 'useful' things...

Which is why I don't have a tidy house and never seem to get around to doing all those things I probably should be doing.

I had finished cutting up all the bits of wire, had put them safely away in boxes and was feeling frugally and resourcefully smug. That is, until dh came in and said 'Oh. I could have mended those. It was only a loose connection'

ARrrrrggghhh!!!!

I did mutter something about the fact that if that was the case then why had they been sat on a windowsill untouched for more than 2 months...and how he'd told me that once led lights go wrong there's no point trying to fix them...and something along the lines of 'if you'd told me that I wouldn't have cut them into little pieces and bought dd a replacement set of lights' in a polite restrained manner.

[Obviously although we live in the same house we reside in parallel uncommunicating universes and there are times when the everyday sentences that come out of my mouth slip straight under the male radar (because men really are from Mars) and disappear into intergalactic worm holes.]

'Never mind they were only cheap, you can get some more'

'Er actually no. They were expensive and we've looked everywhere and can't get replacements.'

So much for resourcefulness!

But, on the brighter side. Dd has been drawing:

And the kids brought back these free kits from our local science festival

The finished result

Engine meets Spaniel.

The frugal sap is rising...

I was replying to someone else's blog here about sewing, when I felt a blog post of my own coming on...

Look what I've been up to this morning:

No, they're not my legs!

Dd's previously almost-too-short-and-rather-tatty jeans, transformed into girl-power fringe monsters with the help of my clanky-clonky machine and a really horrible denim Barbie skirt.

It wont win any awards for tidy sewing, and certainly no prizes for style or design, but it was worth it for the pleasure of cutting up that skirt.

And also this morning, the habitual 'easter egg hunt'.

God I so hate doing it, but the kids love it. Best part was making the little easter egg cards for the treasure hunt (especially feeding them into the laminating machine). But that was 6 years ago and the pleasure has long worn off.

So each year I salvage the egg cards from the back of the home-made-jams-and-other-forgotten- things cupboard and tie them around the house and garden.

I deserve at least 3 easter eggs for being an obliging mother and an oscar for being able to fake such convincing Easter enthusiasm.

Well there goes the diet then...

Being frugal is like being on a diet.



At first the diet goes well, a little weight is shifted, success seems on the horizon, you're feeling right chuffed with yourself.



And then the diet gets a bit boring and repetitive. A life of salad is dull. Perhaps you haven't lost quite as much weight as you'd like, progress is slow, friends stop telling you how wonderfully well you are doing and get fed up with you mentioning food all the time. They try and tempt you with takeaways and trifle.



And then, one day, you snap. You have the sudden urge to treat yourself, to reward yourself, to completely and totally pig out!

Well that's exactly what happens with frugality. And today we pigged out. Once in a while I just take the kids out, we have lunch out, we spend money we haven't really got (or that should be earmarked for something else) and then we go home, feeling like the kid who stole the chocolate cake at diet camp.

Money was burning a hole in the children's money boxes. Dd has been asking every day for around a week if she could spend some of her money. I don't think it's the money that interests her, just the process of going into a shop with her own money and buying something. She was getting desperate (and annoying).

So why not help her spend her pennies. And the boys were keen to break open the piggy banks too. So where could we go. Well how about that place with a toy shop and - er - the (shhh) wool shop.. [You didn't think the trip would be entirely altruistic do you?]

So after wandering round charity shops, chip shop, weird plastic and assorted junk shop, toy shop, pet food shop, and WOOL SHOP we came home with:

2 soft toy beanie dogs
1 hard plastic, extortionately-expensive dog
1 wind up furry mouse (possibly a rat?) that makes the dog bark
2 bags of sour Haribo sweets
1 pack of Pokemon cards
4 full bellies from greasy chips from very unhygenic chip shop (remind me not to go upstairs to the toilets in restaurants until AFTER I've eaten the meal - it's best not to know what you might be eating or where they chop the chips)
2 balls of black double knitting wool (for ds1's balaclava)
1 ball of furry skinny wool (for socks?)
1 sack of chicken mash
1 sack of chicken corn
and 1 of these:

Oops...how did that get there?!

Ok, so I forgot to mention the bike shop that was next to the pet shop. Saw the above item outside the shop and fell in bicycle love. Well as much as a committed non-cyclist can be attracted to something that you have to put energy into to get to move.

Ok, so it's a bit battered. But it fits in the car. And will probably fit even better once I've worked out how to fold it (erhum). Bet the guy in the shop enjoyed watching me as I tried to squeeze a fold-up bicycle in its non-folded-up state into the back of a people carrier on top of two sacks of chicken food, one large bag of just-bought tat and three small children. That should keep him going in laughs for a few weeks at the pub.

What is most amazing is that the bike fits me. I mean I can actually sit on it and reach the floor with my feet (Unlike my huge great hulking lump of iron on wheels that is currently residing in the garage - yeah one of those 1940s things that you expect to see a huge breadbasket on the front). And the wheels of this bike don't go round with almighty clunks and shudders that throw you off course(unlike my huge great hulking lump of iron on wheels...etc etc) and this bike is kinda cute (unlike my huge behind when I'm riding it...).

Anyway, I don't know why I'm here justifying my decision to break from the dieting regime. So, I confess, today I AM the kid that stole the chocolate cake at diet camp. But, life is just too short to not impulse-buy strange bicycles outside pet shops.

Frugal vs healthy...the battle goes on.

Some days I really hate food, which is rather unfortunate. I was speaking to a friend recently about how much the thought of food - the planning, buying, preparing and clearing up, as well as the ethical issues and guilt surrounding it - occupies so much of our waking hours.

I've been trying to have a frugal period. At the same time I've also started thinking about producing healthier food for the family. You would think that the two were agreeable. Unfortunately, despite the myth that it is cheaper to live on wholesome home cooking, there is no getting away from the evidence that faces me on food shopping trips; i.e. that it costs more to eat healthily than it does to eat processed and packaged food.

There are of course exceptions, but processed food - especially the supermarket value ranges - are cheaper than what it would cost me to buy the ingredients and make my own. It is of course in the interests of manufacturers and supermarkets to keep it this way. And it's not just about comparing the exact ingredients used in recipes vs the finished processed product, but also the expense of ingredients that never get used, or are mostly wasted. I've lost count of the number of aubergines destined to be ratatouille or mediterranean tart that have decomposed from the inside out on the top shelf of my fridge. And that jar of tahini, used once to make humous and now sat in my fridge (for about 2 or 3 years I think!). The cucumber fated to sludge instead of tzatziki (because the yoghurt went off before I got around to it).

Menu planning helps of course. But if like today I was looking for fresh coriander and fresh mint to make some lovely thing in a recipe book, then so much of it is wasted (unless of course I can think of a whole load of other recipes to use the same ingredients, but these will then require further ingredients that I will have to buy).

Hmmm.

While I'm on the subject I am keen to learn how to make bread that does not have a crust the thickness and hardness of the earth's mantle. I have tried different recipes, different methods, different oven temperatures and cooking periods. Once again today I have produced two loaves with dark brown rock hard criusts and overly-soft inners. If I am to ever progress to the role of Earth Mother I really must get this bread sorted.

Hoarder? Or just frugal? The survival instinct kicks in...

There's been a terrible smell in the house for the past few days. I think I've tracked it down to the fridge, but despite throwing everything out that looked like it had a life of its own (there were quite a few contenders), the smell still lingers.

I even wiped it out with our really stinky cheap washing up liquid. Didn't make any difference, except that the fridge now smells of yuk AND a lavender/toilet cleaner-sort of smell. Bicarb solution might be the next step. But in the meantime I'm just hoping the smell will somehow go away...[yeah, head in sand as usual]

Well the snow finally stopped on Saturday and once a bit of ice had melted we were able to get the car out safely. Like others that I know, the survival instinct immediately set in and I drove out to get SUPPLIES.

It's only been a few days since we've been able to get out the house, but the shopping centre was like pre-christmas madness! People were buying up anything and everything! I'm not sure if this is something specifically British, but we seem to be so scared of going without. We are a nation of hoarders:we hoard and hoard, and then barricade ourselves in, just on the offchance of starvation, or drought, or flood, or Tesco closing for a day, or any sort of shortage.

Maybe it's a leftover effect of World War II, where shortages were commonplace and our grandparents learnt to live with rationing for many years? I've had the 'make do and mend' mentality driven into me from a young age and in times of stress - or shortage - it kicks into overdrive. How can I throw anything out when it may, at some time in the future, be so very useful??!

Of course this hoarding is useful when it comes to home educating. We have every resource we could possibly need - except that we have so many things it's quite difficult to find what we need when we need it. Or maybe home educating is just an excuse to hoard even more stuff? No! I'm frugal! I recycle! I'm good for the environment! (at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it).