Weekly Round-up and Low Spend November Final Report

I'm quite pleased with how Low Spend November went- especially in the Personal Expenses column, I was very restrained!

This is what I wrote at the beginning of November....my version of the depressing Thomas Hood November poem.

No books

No clothes

No pensioners Fish and Chips

No Ingredients for Christmas Cake or Puddings

No Advent calendar

No coffee and cake out

No random spending on hobbies

No food except fresh fruit, vegetables, milk and cheese and anything I don't want to run out of

No suddenly buying things I don't usually buy (make up, jewellery, magazines etc)

No Newspapers or TV schedule magazines

No flowers

No more Christmas food things for me

I managed to avoid everything listed except for £5.50p on a second hand books and £2.50 on a jigsaw puzzle - and they were all from charity sales so it counts as a donation to charity! 

Changed my mind about the food spending and just shopped as normal otherwise it was only putting off buying replacements for things used until December which seemed pointless. So all in all I count it as a small success.

This is the final weeks spending. I spent on a couple of things that would have waited until December but I wanted to get them done while I thought of them including some Christmas things such as locally produced chipolatas(vital for pigs in blankets of course) which made food spending more than other weeks. So.........

 Diesel for the car, tube of sealant to re-do the en-suite washbasin/splash back tile join; charity raffle tickets; Christmas postage stamps; Exercise group; One grandchild Christmas present sorted; Food; Monthly Electric Bill , Smol dishwasher tabs; Over 60's group; Wild Bird Food.

Total for the week so far £223 .31

Brought forward £391.05 + £223.31 = £614.36 + today*

IF  I'd not bought anything other than what HAD to be spent (ie not left the house for visiting charity Christmas Fayres, Exercise and Over 60's groups therefore NOT needing diesel for the car) and then not bought ANY Christmas stamps, Christmas presents and Christmas food or wild bird food and NOT sent a present for the new Great Niece or NOT bought new jar lids and made Red Relish  or NOT had a window cleaner it would have been over £100 less!! But it would have been a dull and mean month! It could be done but I'm glad it wasn't necessary. 

(Glad I went to Over 60s group, we had mince pies and I discovered I don't really like them anymore, so won't even bother to buy any - another small saving!)

*There is one hitch with that total above because today I'm going to a Christmas Fayre in Son and DiL's village church.

We've been going together ever since Colin died and the two Grandchildren will want to have a go on the tombola stall and the other children's things and eat cake and Nanna will be treating them for sure!

There are 3 other Christmas events on not far from home tomorrow and two on Sunday, I'm not planning on visiting all of them!

These are this months tiny savings................looking after the pennies.............

• Lots of Christmas Fayres visited for fun rather than spending
• Eating  batch made meals from freezer
• Huge stalk of Brussels sprouts for £1.50
• Using up card making bits to make Christmas cards
• Beetroot from BiL's garden
• Leeks from my garden
• Making sure to close curtains as soon as it's dark
• Home made bread with the bread-maker
• Bargain butter find - all in freezer
• No coffee and scone out all month
• Dishwasher only used every other day
• Quickly using up one of my stored butternut squash as it was starting to go mouldy
• Reading library books for free
• Found out via youtube how to fix my TV remote when putting in new batteries wasn't the answer. 

Have a Excellent Weekend - Oh, I forgot, I'm blogging everyday until Christmas (Blogmass or Advent 2024).... so...................have an Excellent Saturday and I'll be back tomorrow! with news on the antidote to No/ Low Spend November .................. Decadent December!!

Sue

November Repost #4 Pat Visiting the Smallholding

Blog commenter 'Traveller' asked if would re-post the blog post about Pat -Weaver of Grass visiting the smallholding back in 2015. This dates from 24th May 2015.

Most of the post isn't of any interest anymore so I've not included it and I'm reluctant to show the photo of us as it was before I lost a bit of weight and I'm there in baggy tee shirt and shorts!

Last week I had a visit from a lovely blogger, well known to many of you out there because she writes so fluently about her life on a Yorkshire farm. Yes, Pat AKA The Weaver of Grass came around with The Farmer for a cuppa while they were on holiday in Aldeburgh. Here we are after a look round the garden, I'm complaining loudly that I'm in baggy shorts and tee-shirt  so  not dressed for photos, but as John at Going Gently would say "Hey Ho!"

 

The weather wasn't the best for their stay in Suffolk, which was a shame but I hope they enjoyed their visit to the East coast.

They were such a lovely couple to meet. RIP Pat. 

Back Tomorrow

Sue

St Mary's Church, Badwell Ash

 Happy Thanksgiving to all US readers celebrating - hope you have a good day.  

This is the sign that I like to see when hoping to visit a church.

This village church sits by the road right in the centre of the village.

The first thing I noticed were these cards for sale, standing on a lovely carved chest

View down the nave is very like many other small churches, there is a south aisle

Another church that still has its bier used to carry the coffin from the church to the churchyard.

(There was a funeral over the road from my bungalow last week and the coffin was carried down the hill from the church to the burial ground gate in a tractor trailer. The man who had died was a very elderly man, once a village farmer and his grandsons still have old tractors)

The font dates from the C14

Beautiful decoration on the organ pipes

It's always interesting to see these old notices, to remind parishioners of their duty to the poor

The choir pews in the chancel have angels at each end

The Victorian stained glass east window over the altar

At each side of the altar are the commandments

The window over the small altar in the south aisle

The altar in the south aisle on the Saturday after Remembrance Sunday

Back Soon

Sue

Thanks and Following a Tree

 Thank you everyone for comments on the re-post  all about Christmas moaners back in 2013. Perhaps after the covid years when Christmas was turned upside down  plus being older and wiser we are all more laid back and don't get so stressed - or that might be just me!

I tell the family that the worst thing that could happen has already happened to me and even being told a few years ago that "there wasn't room for me" for Christmas day didn't  bother me !  (It wasn't one of the children who said this - they were disgusted - a lot more than I was!).

Anyway..............................................

I'd unintentionally picked the coldest morning to walk up the lane for November photos of the Oaks so didn't hang around long. It was before Storm Bert which took all the remaining leaves off many trees in the village.

The leaves that were left were now shades of brown

Without the leaves you can see how gnarly the old trunk is

Still some rosehips for colour in the hedges

Sugar beet is still to be harvested

The view over the village is my header for a couple of weeks until I find something Christmassy.

Back Soon

Sue

November Re-posting #3 - A Rant Post From November 2013

Back in 2013 there were more people blogging  and some used their blog posts to go on and on about how they hated the commercialisation of Christmas. Here's what I wrote when I got fed up with all the carping!

 

Every year some people seem to  get themselves into a tizzy about the approach of Christmas. They are worrying about the commercialism, the never ending ads on TV. The over eating. The debt. But I can't see the point of getting all "het up" about it ( as we say in Suffolk).

You can preach all you like but there will always be some people who go completely OTT. This is the time that shops take the most money, so of course they are going to advertise. You don't HAVE to buy what they are trying to persuade you to spend on. 

However much money you give some people they would still spend it on things others consider unnecessary. However little money some other people have they will still spend it all and borrow more. 

You can be annoyed at the shops playing Christmas songs in November, but there's no point in raising your blood pressure over it. Just do your shopping and leave.
 You can be an all-the-year-round Christian or at only-at -Christmas-church visitor but you will be made welcome whoever you are. And if you are not - then find another church next year because if a church doesn't make a stranger feel welcome then they are not doing what they should be doing. You can be Pagan or Atheist as long as no one is hurt by your beliefs or non beliefs.

You can stay at home, read a good book, watch TV  or go to huge family parties, in the whole great scheme of things as long as you are not hurting anyone then it doesn't matter.
You can spend a fortune on presents, make them or buy them second-hand. If the recipient doesn't like it then it's their problem not yours.
CHILL
It's just Christmas, it happens every year. Enjoy it or not.
BUT DON'T GO ON AND ON ABOUT IT!

Thank goodness the world of blogging seems a much calmer place in 2024!

Back Soon

Sue

Ogham Tree Alphabet November 25th to the Solstice and Saturday Fail

 The tree I've not mentioned with regard to The Ogham Tree Alphabet is the Elder. If you've not come across the Ogham Tree Alphabet then this below is from my first post about it in 2020 explaining what it is.

The Ogham Alphabet is the only native British writing system devised over 2,000 years ago and carved using notches onto wood or stone.
I had heard of this way of writing from the Sister Fidelma Books by Peter Tremayne -the first few of these I read years ago before they became very repetitive.

It turns out that in the Ogham Alphabet each letter is also a tree and a number and part of the calendar or actually the other way round..........each tree is a letter and number and a month or day of the year.
Karen Cater (Author of this book below)

set out to find, in her local area, each tree of the calendar, illustrate them all and find out more about the history, traditions and folklore surrounding the trees.

I have been taking photos of the trees in the book and writing about the Alphabet off and on since 2020 but although I've written about Elder trees I've not shown the Elder photo and relevance from the book for this period of the year. 

Rather than re-write about all the wonderful properties of Elder and the way it keeps away witches! here is a link to all the posts that I've written about it over the last 6 years

Sadly there are very few Elder trees around the village and the one over the road at the edge of the burial ground has been 'tidied' by the Community Payback team(people doing Community Service instead of prison) who have been working there every Saturday morning with their strimmers and mowers for the last two years ...driving me crazy and ruining the habitat for many creatures in the process!

***********************

 Saturday's visits to Christmas Fayres cost me nothing except diesel and 1 hour of wasted time! I started at one that opened at 10am in Eye where I could also pop in the library to return a couple of books that had people waiting. There were a few stalls in the Town Hall but nothing very exciting. Then I went home via two villages where I should have found 3 sales - in the first village the fayre must have been cancelled, in the second village I looked round quickly hoping to get a jar of Lemon and Lime marmalade from a local producer but they didn't have any and their second sale didn't start until much later - I must have misread their times.

I was soon home again out of the windy weather!

Back Soon

Sue

Low Spend November Update and Other Stuff

 I reckon this is the only way to buy Brussel Sprouts - any that have been picked and bagged and transported miles are already old.

Got these from outside a house in the village that sometimes  has a few veg things out for sale with an honesty box. I'd walked up to the pub next door to put  a couple of jars in the bottle bank  and had to go home and get some cash when I saw the sprouts. £1.50 and I'll keep them outside, they'll be good for a few weeks.

At last a proper Yellow Sticker bargain from Asda, where butter has just gone up to £2 for 250g (what used to be ½ lb) and  up to £1.89 at Aldi. So when I spotted some 500g packs at the back of their reduced chiller cabinet  for £2.13, I grabbed 4 packs. The odd thing is that I've never seen butter in 500g packs anywhere around here before.

The home-grown tomatoes from the freezer, 3 red peppers and 2 red chilli's and all the other bits made 7 jars of my favourite red chutney/relish. A few will be given away and the rest will last me until next year. I completely forgot to get red onions so had to use ordinary which has spoiled the red-ness - but not the taste.

How's Low spend November going at the end of the third week?

Brought forward £331.75

Last Saturday Christmas Fairs £2.50 + £2.50 jigsaw (all for charity)

Rest of the weeks spending including the Brussel Sprout stalk + Keep Moving Group +Toothpaste + New Jar Lids + Food  from Asda and Aldi including the 2kg of bargain butter and red and chili peppers for the Red Relish    =    £54.30

So to carry forward  £391.05. Diesel to buy for the car and electric meter reading to ring in and then pay for this coming week and I shall ring and order 500litres of heating oil very soon.

Low spend November might suffer a setback because guess how many Christmas Fayres there are this weekend - all within about 10 miles .................................................................................... 

4 on Saturday and 2 on Sunday.................. and these are only the ones I know about! I won't be visiting them all!

Thanks to everyone who's read the blog through another week ......Hope you all have a good weekend.

Back Monday

Sue

Using It Up

I've gradually been using up my stash of card making materials . I just don't enjoy it anymore and life's too short!

Last week I got the few remaining sheets of Christmas  3D Decoupage sheets and card blanks out onto the table to turn into cards for this year....I've got enough that I bought from charity shops in the January sales in the drawer already, but the cards made will mean I don't need to buy many in 2025 sales.

16 Christmas cards made, pity 3D never shows up in photos.

 

There are  some birthday decoupage sheets that needed using too. That's a job for today after I've walked up the road for tree photos (weather permitting) and made some sort of cakes for the weekend.

Back Tomorrow

Sue 

November Re-Post #2

 Another repost........ a very  long one from March 10th 2015.

Seems so odd to read this and know that just 9 months later Colin would be diagnosed with the blood  cancer  and just a year later we would be moving away from this whole way of life...............  almost 10 years ago now - makes me sad,  but happy that we had those self -sufficient years together.

3 years ago today Colin gave up working full time for the County Council and launched into an unknown world of self- employment.
Actually it wasn't quite as drastic as that sounds because he carried on with his old job of bridge inspecting for the County Council for 3 - 5 days a month and had several part time things lined up and of course we already had the campsite up and running and  planned to increase  our eggs and veg to sell.
That first spring and summer of 2012 was an unsettling time. Ever since our youngest started school in 1992 I had been used to being at home on my own all day for most of the year. It took a while to get into a new routine. Colin still felt he had to be working at something all the time whereas I had been gradually slowing down since our youngest moved out in 2006. Everyone thought he had a pension to live on, which we didn't,  but I had been juggling our income for 30+ years, through many tight times and knew we would manage, while Col thought he needed to be doing dozens of different jobs to make ends meet.
3 years and two  heart events later and everything is much calmer, he is 58 tomorrow and so glad he finished work when he did. We are a long way out of the rat race and have settled into a  laid back routine. We don't need to earn "loads-a-money"  because we live such a simple quiet sort of lifestyle and  I no longer feel guilty reading instead of doing!

Well, what have we been up to over the last week on the Simple Suffolk smallholding?

Thursday morning was a wood cutting morning followed by a walk. Later I cleared all the small things from the dining room and brought the dust sheets in to cover the table and carpet ready for decorating. I'll get the prep work done bit by bit over a few days.

On Friday Col took the car to the dealers garage for them to look at the wheel bearings as we have a humming noise. The car came with a 3 month warranty - handy. They couldn't get it done Friday so lent Col an old Mondeo for the weekend. Later we shifted a load of shingle mixed with cement into some low parts of the campsite driveway. This sounds hard work but was mostly done with the front bucket on the tractor so not as energetic as it sounds.
Thanks to a reminder on a blog ( sorry not sure whose) I have taken cuttings from my money plant and shoved them into a pot in the hope they will root. Some pepper seeds which had been sitting in the propagator for  weeks suddenly decided to grow. Now I have 13 pepper seedlings - much better.

On Saturday morning our son came over to get the battery  from his old car to put on the newer car. I was doing a bit of baking including the mincemeat cake from Bovey Belle's Blog ( declared very tasty by Col later. I used ordinary SR flour as I didn't have wholewheat).
 Saturday afternoon was a quiet one on my own stitching, knitting and watching the Davis Cup tennis as Col went to Leiston to work for his customer on her allotment.

Sunday morning and spring sprung for a few hours, we lost the cold wind that seems to have been plaguing us since the beginning  of the month. Col wanted to check out that it was OK to borrow the muck spreader so we walked down to Friston by road, then across towards the church,

called in on our friend  and then back along the track, oil seed rape on the right and wheat on the left.

Lots of darts on TV during Sunday - and more tennis. By the end of the day the dining room walls were ready for emulsion after odd bits of filler, sanding down and washing down. We just need to go and get some - pale lemon I think.

Early Monday morning Col set off down the road in the tractor to fetch the muck spreader and was soon flinging all the old chicken muck all over the bit of the field that will be used for pumpkins and squash ( no main-crop potatoes this year.) He will be swapping the muck spreader for a big rotovator to turn it all in.

My Monday jobs were bread baking, ironing and cleaning windows.

Reading all my favourite blogs on Monday evening I saw that many parts of the country had a wet day, whereas it was dusk before we got rain here, and then it was just a shower - the driest part of the country again, so often the clouds have broken up before they get here - I do sometimes  wonder why we are thinking of moving west?

Another book has been finished, and once again it's something written in the 1930s. ( Angela Thirkell - Summer Half, first published 1937, reprinted by Virago in 2014) If anyone had told me a few years back that I would enjoy all these old books I probably wouldn't have believed them!

The new system for car road tax refunds works well. Now you don't sell a car taxed but get a cheque refund automatically  from the date that you transfer ownership to someone else. The road tax on the Hyundai is a bit less than the Jeep Cherokee, (which we had  only just taxed before Col decided on the Hyundai) and on Monday we got the cheque for virtually all the old tax  - enough to cover the new car - handy.

Which brings me back to today.
 Col headed off early for a mornings work in Leiston for his customer finishing the work on her allotment, coming home later with a cheque for £100. I had to stay close to the house as we were waiting for the plumbers to come and service our thermal-solar-hot water thingy

(that's it, on the flat dormer roof of the back bedroom- heating our water for free - as long as you don't count the couple of thousand pounds it cost to install it in the first place!!)

  It's been chugging along nicely since it was installed just over 3 years ago, but when the sun was shining the other day and the temperature of the water was high enough the pump didn't come on as quickly as it should have done. The men arrived eventually and did various complicated things in the airing cupboard to check it. I thought I would rustle up a coffee and walnut sponge for Cols birthday and also made a big batch of shortcakes ( recipe here) to squeeze into the freezer.
When Col got home he brought in a bowl full of salad leaves from the poly-tunnel for our lunch

(some of this yummy stuff) and after it had been rinsed and dried and put in a bag, I weighed it....... 350g, that would have cost us around £3.50 in a supermarket. Yes, growing your own IS worth the effort.

Back to 2024 Tomorrow 

Sue

November Re-Post # 1

 November isn't a very interesting month for blog post ideas,  which is why posts in 2022 and 2023 were A-Z posts.  To fill up some days for the second half of the month I'll do a few reposts from my 11 years of blogging.

Here's the first  which comes from May 19th 2013 with one of my favourite smallholding photos............

We got the onion weeding finished, some rabbit fencing and enviromesh over 4 beds of various greens, one lot of supports and canes up ready for runner beans.

 Then Him Outside volunteered to climb up on a pile of bricks to take a picture of the whole vegetable garden ( this makes the pylons look even closer than they are which is actually on the adjoining field right at the top of our 4 acre meadow.)
It was so lovely and sunny I wandered around taking more pictures.
The Lilac, coming out at last.

The strawberry bed

Out of the front gate and over the road, this field is planted with beans, but they look a bit sparse.

And then it was lunch time- nearly all home grown today. Lettuce, mixed salad leaves, various coloured radishes and asparagus with a few cubes of cheese and a splodge of mayo being the only things bought.

That's my lot for today, need some reading time. 

Back tomorrow.

And today is the 20th November 2024 and I will be back tomorrow................ yet again!

Sue

PS Hello and welcome to new people who have pressed the Follower button  since Sue in Lancs mentioned Followers on her blog last week. Sue's Followers went up by 80+, mine have only gone up by 4 but I'm not envious!...........Much!!.........

St. Peter's Church, Monks Eleigh

The other church visit from the weekend before last, the church was full of poppies on the Saturday before Remembrance Sunday. 

A walk up to the church through old trees

Quite unusual is the stair turret going up the outside right to the battlements

Some lights came on  automatically as I opened the door but it was a gloomy day, so they didn't have much effect.

Looking down the nave to the chancel, the church is wide with aisles both north and south 

Typical Victorian stained glass 

Some of the poppies for Remembrance Sunday behind the altar

Coat of Arms for Queen Anne above the chancel arch

More poppies over the font and it's cover

This bier for carrying the coffin in the past, not common in churches now but there are several remaining

And even more poppies at the base of the tower

Back Soon

Sue