Monday 25 September 2017

Bum

So Friday evening we get a phonecall from the hospital can Mr BH come in first thing Monday for a root up the buttocks type procedure . Bless him he was ranting within seconds and i had to ring back and check it was the right procedure , which when I rang it turned out they hadnt read to the bottom of the booking slip , it was for a procedure the consultant  had decided not to do because it was to risky but we got it sorted and he had the correct procedure this morning . Talk about terror he was sweating before we pulled up in the car park , dripping by the time we got in the building and his blood pressure was through the roof . So he had to have a sit and a cuppa to calm down .  What made it worse was the nurses dealing with him were lovely lads but they were a pair of trendy hipsters with the big beards . He said it was a judgement on him for taking the mickey out of hipsters all the time , i think he must have cracked every bad joke in his extensive bad joke book .
Bizarre really , all the truly scary stuff hes had to have done the last few years , where he hasnt batted an eyelid and this was the one where he freaked .
He came out eyes wide and commented " they shoved an alien tentacle up my orifice and ive been violated by hipsters !!! "
Men....theyre just strange

Saturday 23 September 2017

Grim Day

Saturdays are usually pretty grim , everybody's home , they all want things done NOW  and its always creative cooking day , the weather forecast looks good for tomorrow so ive got mountains of curtains to measure and label , oh the joys of probably the last car boot sale of the year , i need to get rid of tons of books so a 10p sale on them tomorrow , just on the grounds of  by Spring i will have read dozens more ..lol
I dont have much storage space , ive 40p to my name till someone pays me, no fuel and theres a good cat jumble sale today Aaaaaarrrrggggghhh 10am Birchwood Scout Hut    just spotted another Scout Hut Nettleham 11am , tiny jumble but ive found some amazingly strange stuff there from time to time.
Weird cooking fact , seriously out of date cuppa soups , half a bag of freezer burnt mixed veg , the bones and skin of last nights chilli chicken , slack hand full of lentils and pearl barley and a few soup noodles make good soup .
The ebay shop is up on its wobbly toddler legs , diabolical photos and scans. Because the postage on the listings is so hard to figure, im only listing teeny things and selling in the UK which is a bummer .


http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Vintage-Coat-Bestway-2095-Pattern-Original-50s-/192311752588?ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT

So im off to measure curtains wish me luck , ive mountains to get through but i know i will start rooting, find something interesting and my mission will take most of the day ...lol

Tuesday 19 September 2017

Bimbling Along

Ive always loved the word bimbling probably because i like life to be bimbling , sort of unexciting and regular . Sadly theres not much bimbling anymore ...lol
I feel that im writing a record of the decline and fall of the human race most days , the end of the world is supposed to be some time this week or the next , according to someones translation or prophecy.  The Rapture is booked for the 23rd I believe , which could be a shocker to those who think theyre  holy , when there still stood here as the most unexpected people just up and vanish.
So what do you buy from the jumble sale , when youve £4 between you and the end of the month , I think I did well, a jug full of good make LED lightbulbs  for 50p, much needed as i have been going to bed with a torch for a fortnight , theres enough bulbs to see us through the winter.  A huge carrier bag of "sewing rubbish " as the lovely lady called it for a whole 50p , it was packed with lace and ribbon , binding, elastic , piping cord and at the very bottom 3 white and one pale pink Gutterman unused reels of thread....Woop Woop . Also 4 brackets to go into the greenhouse construction box for a whole 10p each , the next book in a series ive been reading etc etc and I still have change in my purse . So the thrift gods shone  in the right direction if nothing else .
Meanwhile it was caseworker day and she rang the DWP to ask the question on everyones lips . Why do we qualify for not a penny at all !  There was much mumbling and eventually they came to the conclusion that we hadnt filled in a farm eos31 or some such , our caseworker had never heard of it , they have certainly never asked us or even sent us one, in fact they have never mentioned it at all before !!!  She asked if we could do this retrospectively , much mumbling again , yes  Where do we get said form ? Its not available online you must go to the jobcenter and ask for one . Thankyou said the caseworker jumped in her little car and went trundling off to do the 30 mile trip to get one ....
3 hours later she returned to tell us the Job Centre had never heard of this form and it wasnt till she had a paddy with the DWP on her phone and the Job Center manager was dragged from his office , they eventually found said form , theyd always wondered what these were for because nobody ever asked for them !!!
It took her 3 hours because someone had once again jumped off the roof of the multistory car park in central Lincoln so she couldnt get her car out .........Just one of those days
We filled in the pink form  of 30  pages of information they already have on a blue form and she took it straight back to them and stood over them while they checked it and sent it on its merry way to HQ.
What will be the result of this form we have no idea , but you have nothing to lose when you have nothing anyway.  But the annoying and worrying thing is theres no reference to this form anywhere , nobody at the job center knew anything about it and most of our Job Centre are pretty useful and helpful , both our caseworker and I have spoken to the DWP numerous times been stuck on hold with the god awful music that saps everyone's will to live , patronised by kids in a call center for hours in the last 6 months and im bleedin angry about the whole shitty performance . They will not tell you anything that actually helps you , unless you ask the right questions they dont give any answers what the hell is going on ?

Saturday 16 September 2017

The Joy of Poverty

Now heres a little challenge for you all if your purse was really empty with cobwebs in the corners and you have a prepper attitude what would be the things you forgot to stockpile for the apocalypse ?
Heres a little list of the irritating things I forgot and the strange things ive had to adapt .
Wash powder , why have i never stockpiled washing powder ?  But nobody noticed  that i spent 2 months using dozens of odds and ends of bath foam , posh weird shampoos and even washing up liquid to do the laundry . I can vouch that Matey makes your towels lovely and fluffy !! and cheap washing up liquid cleans soiled sheets far better than any posh powder .  I now have a huge box of Easy the £5 for a huge box from Iceland courtesy of daughter , she only noticed when there was more room on the shelf in the bathroom and her bedding smelt of her disgarded nettle shampoo ...ooops.

Why is a bar of soap so cheap these days?  it works out a fraction of the price of shower gel , I have a huge selection of unopened soaps gleaned from auction lots , unopened xmas gifts we find in them and big bags of the little hotel soaps. I could probably go years without shower gel...lol

On the sewing front , white thread and white quilting thread ..AARRGGHH  when your miles from a shop and youve got not a penny thats the really irritating one .  Had a blinding idea the other week at the jumble , mattress covers , you know the varying thickness ones that nobody ever buys . I got a dustbin bag full for 30p , you guessed it theyre now all unpicked and i have tons of wadding sheets for quilting , far less messy than the time i decided to undo a duvet in the garden for wadding ...lol

On the never putting the greenhouse saga  , Mr Bah Humbug has finally after 4 years admitted hes no longer having anything to do with it...HOORAY ..the boys and i will create something that resembles a greenhouse with the greenhouse frame and the rubble we started to liberate from the airfield  a local dumping ground and resource for those needing breeze blocks and rubble . First batch of breeze blocks and bricks currently hiding in my boot at the moment . We also did a few minor storm repairs to the sheds and noticed a few more me and the boys can tackle , one shed window broke and we have plans to replace it with some toughened blue glass shelves from a wall unit i salvaged and hid years ago.  Roof repairs to leaky shed will be tackled once the munchkin returns from his holiday and i can ram him on the roof . I have some multicoloured  bits of wagon tarpaulin , just need to get some felting nails  which im sure i can turn up at the car boot and the shed will have a pretty patchwork roof ,  it will irritate Mr BH no end   and the neighbours will doubtless report us yet again...Ho Hum
So go on confess , whats the strangest think youve done while poor or just in a bid to recycle ?


a little pyrex love just because im in that kind of mood and i just washed it up and put it away

Thursday 14 September 2017

Gray....

That I think sums up life these days , nothings going very far on the DWP front , we had a letter a few weeks ago saying they were refusing to accept the consultant letter we supplied regarding the current situation with Mr BH and the lower back and bowel problems , they told us we must reapply  because they were a new condition that occurred after his assessment ...REALLY
This week we have a letter from the tribunal service saying they have received the same letter and it will be included in the evidence pack for his tribunal.
If you didnt realise what lying cheating skanks the DWP are you would get nowhere with anything .

Not around much at the moment due to work and harvest commitments , being poor is bleedin time consuming im afraid , its all a bit 50s housewife , by the time its picked prepared and into the freezer or jammed thats another day gone .
Someone did ask if I would publish recipes , but being as im a spur of the moment cook and what i cook is hardly healthy , just filling and very cheap , that will be a very occasional happening ..lol
On the crafty front I think i should hang out a sign saying closed for the foreseeable future , I just dont have the time.
What I really need at the moment is a nice sunny sunday to do one last car boot sale , ive been donated tons of curtains and bedding by the church charity shop , they were going to send them to the ragman but theres really nice clean items among it , tons of big modern curtains and nice bedsets that sell so well out here in the sticks .  We had one of those chats where you realise that the person youre talking to has no concept of real poverty and rural poverty is very real where i live .

Bless her I caught her chucking piles of blankets to the rag man , nice expensive aertex and real wool blankets , she was baffled when i said price them up and sell them .

But nobody uses blankets these days

Live in a house with heating you cant afford to run , you use a lot of blankets come the winter

A wonderful christian charitable lady , love her to death but shes never had to think before she puts on the heating and really doesnt grasp that theres a lot of people out there who have no heating all winter. Theres plenty of houses that i visit where the kids spend the whole of winter under a duvet on the sofa with hot water bottles . Our munchkin is a hardy soul who spends his time moaning that its to hot at school , even now hes getting funny looks running to school in his shirt sleeves , they look even more baffled once it gets to January , the trick is physical activity first thing in the morning and popping your hands and feet in a icy bucket of cold water when you get up , my dad taught me that one many moons ago its an old farmworkers trick it constrictes the capilleries in your hands till the point where they hurt , but you dont feel cold again all day even working outside . Guess i just grew up in a farm house with one little range it was only warm when we had the washing copper on all day and  we all had corned beef legs from sitting to close to the fire and fighting the dogs and cats off the hearth rug ..lol ...those were the days its sad to see them back again .

Tuesday 5 September 2017

Silence

Can you hear that?  total silence the munchkin has gone back to school today !!!
Its sort of weird to get used to , but it does mean i can get on with my harvest chores , mountain of blackberries boiled up awaiting straining first job of the day . Going to try the pickled pears Hairy Bikers recipe , im missing a few ingredients , so i will improvise ..lol
Noticed the rhubarb has sprung back into life , so i will go and chop it all down and freezer a load , plus i may do a jam .  Sultanas soaking in tea for a batch of tea bread buns .  Apple everything with the windfall apples , main crop due this week...AARRGGH
Raspberries to pick theyre just yielding a pint a day at the moment but theyre going to glut shortly .
The freezer is starting to look grimly empty , so need to find cheap protein from somewhere , starting to realise that is going to be the stumbling block through the winter on the extreme food budget were on at the moment .
 Ive tried to explain to Mr Bah Humbug that we can happily live without meat but hes been really twatish about it , not that we could afford much meat before our latest financial apocalypse ..lol  He had a paddy because i served up the worst sausages of all time the other day , just straight forward sausage egg and chips and he goes off on one , only to be told hes been eating them for weeks disguised in various fajita rice , sausage casserole etc etc .
We eat a lot of cheap supermarket eggs , bacon miss shapes and liver , because they are cheap , cant beat yellow sticker liver , we had a yellow label pork chop each last week sheer luxury ..lol ..Theres a lot of indian food as well , its amazing what you can achieve with lentils and chickpeas , endless bhajis and falafels , ive always stockpiled gram flour and semolina flour so ive barely made a dint in them yet , i always mix 20g of semolina flour in when i make pastry it seems to make it less sticky and gives it that store bought colour. Getting low on dried onions but you can get a sack of onions for a couple of pounds out here in the wilds.
I have a shopping list in my head for when were flush ..lol...if it ever happens