Oil Tanks, Electric Bills, Wood-Burning Stoves and a Journey

On Saturday the usual text message arrived to remind me to read the electric meter and send the readings. I do it all on the phone and found that the governments £66 had gone into my account and my new bill was a wee bit less, so I'm £1 and a few pence in credit.

It all sounds very good doesn't it?  In reality it's not really good at all because it means my bill for October was £64 ...........double that of the same month last year, even though I'd used less electric. Thank goodness it's been such a mild month the oil central heating has hardly been needed at all, and as there was more oil left when they transferred it to the new tank than I thought, I'm ordering 800 litres rather than 1,000. It should last me ages because this year as soon as it gets colder for longer during the day, I'll be lighting the wood-burner instead of clicking up the target temperature.

Brother-in-Law Andrew came to help me move mattresses - mine back into my 'new' room and the spare back into the spare bedroom. I got him to help me shift two cupboards while he was here too. He also cleared away the 3 posts and broken trellis that had been around the old heating oil tank and then tackled some large lumps of concrete and bricks that were under the sand that had been under the old tank. Presumably they were left over from the 1980s when there would have been a metal heating oil tank standing on brick piers. Best of all he brought me a bag of  logs  split small to use on top of the kindling in my stove. With nothing to use between small kindling and large logs getting the fire going was taking an age.( The wood he'd split for me was a little of what he'd cleared out of Clay Cottage wood shed nearly two years ago - he'd not used it because it's willow which he reckons is pretty useless!)

I then spent the rest of Saturday starting to put everything indoors back in it's rightful place - so good to get back to normal and tidy.

It was decision time on Sunday morning - should I go down to the second day of the Big NSPCC second-hand book sale in Colchester or not? Actually it wasn't a hard decision........ Of course I went!

It was a very wet journey down - absolutely pouring - but it only takes 40 minutes so not too bad. I'd never been to the second day, always queued for ages with the crowds to get in early on the Saturday so it was strange to find how quiet it was and of course many of the boxes of books were half empty, I found a few  - but it's more about the looking and searching than the finding (that's my story anyway!) and  there's nowhere else with such a huge collection of old books to look through.

I used to own the Self Reliance book but so many years ago I'd forgotten what's in it and the same with the John Seymour. The one by Margery Allingham is a book I've heard of but never owned or read and Scenes from a Provincial Life by William Cooper and the book of Christmas Card Poems are both books I've never seen before.

Got home in plenty of time to do more shifting, clearing, cleaning and tidying. Almost everything is where it should be again.

 

Apologies to everyone whose comments had gone into spam as Yet Again I'd forgotten to look. Weirdly some of my replies to comments were also in there.

And also big thank you for all the comments about NCIS - seems I really am late to the party with watching Mark Harmon  such a good series!

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Sue