Steel Kitten

A leaky life right now

 
The last month or so of the car rebuild we are doing has been rubbish in more ways than one. Martin was going great guns and has now ground to a halt. We seem to be hemorrhaging money and time and energy with every passing day. There are some parts we've had problems sourcing, others that we've thought were good turn out on closer inspection to be rotten and others that have been utterly destroyed and need refurbing from the ground up. All told, the problems of the last month have added another third of the total cost onto the car and put us behind by about six weeks and we are very unhappy at the moment.

I guess though that this is that part of a goal where the going gets tough. You either step up and deal with it, or you give up. With this, there is no giving up so we grind on. We have already spent enough on the rebuild to put us past the point of no return. If we were to stop, the car in its semi-finished state would start to disintergrate again so we have to push on regardless of how tired we are.

And we are tired. I had to put Martin to bed the other night at 6:30pm becuase he was pale, shaking and nauseous through exertion and worry. Some good food, 11 hours sleep, and me rejigging the finances again to show him we could cover the extra did him the power or good so now he's back on track. Two nights working until midnight + one night in bed by 10pm. Repeat until until third week of July.

I'm not on track at all. For the last five weeks I've been fatigued, really fatigued. I feel as tired getting up in the morning as I do when I go to bed. I've had a headache (and by that I mean an all over ache in my head rather than a sharp pain) for weeks now. My joints burn and my muscles are sore. My glands in my throat are so large they are pushing on my jaw muscles and nerves so my face has swollen up. And I can't walk far without being exhausted and am on the verge of sleep at work. I yawn violently from the moment I get up to the moment I go to bed, sometimes every few minutes or until I can get some kind of stimulent into my bloodstream or find somewhere to have a nap. Combined with the sore throat, eyes that feel as if they are bugging and general weakness with limbs like lead, I presume I have some kind of virus which is taking a long time to work itself out and this is the post-viral fatigue part, or I have worried and stressed myself over things into a fatigue state.

While I'm at home I stare blankly at things and do things on automatic pilot. At work I  focus hard on what I'm doing (phoning hundreds of companies as part of research project at the moment, and cold calling ranks up there as a hyper stressy situation for the majority of people) and push out the worry and tiredness. Trouble is, I've had to work full time on the project - in fact more than full time hours - to ensure it is completed on time for the client and bring in the money to ensure I stay full time permanently. Not the right time to do that when you're feeling unwell, but I'm between a rock and hard place.

I'm trying to trust that everything will work out in the end for the best, but it's so hard. Right now I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel. All I can see are meal plans and shopping lists and finances cut to the bone until the end of July and no prospect of a day off from the office just to rest and sleep until my project ends in three weeks time due to its deadline for completion.

I cannot drop the ball. No-one is there for me at work to pick it up.

Maybe I'll feel better about things tomorrow.

That I'll remember we are doing something very big, building something very special, and that nothing worthwhile is ever easy.

But I need a win really soon...I can't keep dealing with one problem on top of another at home and at work for months without solutions to any of them.

Marybelle out of my bathroom would be a good start...

Have some daffodils...

Daffodils on my desk at work to brighten my day.

Sorry for my absence - between doing my course, being inundated with work at my job and having no  internet connection for a while (still don't), my life has been one dull round of nothingness that I'm not sure any of you wanted to read.

However, hopefully I will have a little more time on my hands now, because as of this week I am part time at work. We're trying a different way of working in the business - from an entirely government funded business - to a grant and project orientated company. For me it means I have a choice - I can stay part-time and be paid out of the company coffers or I can go out and find half of my salary and employment costs in project work on top of what the company will give me and be full time. Having been freelance for five years I figured I'd go for option B because of how much autonomy it grants me, although option A sounds soooooooo appealing on a permanent basis. Still, Martin and I  have goals to achieve so part-time working permanently is a dream for the future still. This month I am likely to remain part-time but I have two projects in the pipeline that will take me within spitting distance of what I need to go full time again by May.

Some of the others things that have happened around Steel Towers include:

• Georgia-belle fully recovered and is now back with the other chickens. Her and Oxo have become firm friends and between the two of them instigate camp breakouts on an almost daily basis.
• The combination of part-time working and Easter means I'm getting a whole 5 days off, an almost unheard of occurance in this place.
• My FIL's chemo is not working as quickly as it should be so he's sheduled for another six cycles (a cycle last for about 4-5 weeks)
• The boiler is on the fritz again so no hot water out of the taps, but this time we've got other means of washing dishes, clothes and ourselves. Our dishwasher, washing machine and shower heat up the water themselves so we're leaving having the boiler fixed until after the car is done and perhaps we may even opt to have it replaced.
• The car rebuild is going slowly at the moment as none of the bits Martin needs are in stock. Still on course for Silverstone though, with May and June destined to be the most expensive months of our lives so far bar the time when we bought the house.
• I'm half way through my Business Analysis course and had to stop due to sheer volume of work I had, but am aiming to go back to it next week.
• The internet is on the fritz. Still. One week and counting. A technician is coming out to fix it on Thursday hopefully.
• Did you know the average person spends 15 hours on the internet every week? Martin and I worked out that we're closer to about 25 each, and since it's gone down have spent an awful lot more time talking to one another and doing other things. We quite like it.
• I'm reading a hardback book!! Yes - hardback, not kindle!! I've taken time out every evening to go to bed at 9pm and read for an hour. Again, almost unheard of and not sure whether this is due to the internet outage. I'm reading John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids.
• I'm past the novelty of the kindle for now. I have actually found some audiobook resources on youtube and have been listening to those to give my eyes a rest. Have a listen to some classic books here.
• I have started planting seeds for the kitchen garden.
• I have found the most brilliant wallpaper for my computer desktop. You can find it here. To line up all your desktop files where you want them on the shelves, desk and pinboard, right click on your desktop, highlight 'Arrange Icons By' and take off the ticks against 'Autoarrange' and 'Arrange by grid'.

I think that's enough news for now. All little things that happened but not enough individually to justify a post each.

If I get my internet connection up on Thursday, I'll be around to visit you all from the comfort of my own armchair, rather than the hard seats of the local Holiday Inn.

TTFM

Steel

 

Spring has sprung and I'm back to school

 

All the spring magazines are out in the shops and the contents look wonderful.  Martin treated me to a magazine yesterday for the first time in months as I had a horrible meeting at work I got through intact. Country Homes and Interiors looks particularly good - love anything with farm anaimals printed on it - and I'm itching to get back to my crafts. I have a jumper for Martin to finish (still!) and a hexagon quilt I started an eon ago, although I seem to be having problems with repetitive strain in my left thumb if I do more that five or six hexagons at a time so that is slow progress when I do pick it up. I also want to add some fresh new textiles to the kitchen in various forms, such as curtains and napkins - and have the cloth to do it - but time is very scarce for me.

I've gone 'back to school' to do a course as part of my continued professional development and the first step is for me to do a 20 day e-learning programme. The 20 day course requires 3-4 hours of study a day outisde of work (I'm doing some retraining in a subject that isn't related to my current role so I have to). I'm half way through it at the moment and that has to be my priority in my free time.

I can focus for 20 days surely? With all the spring growth and lusciousness that starting to emerge it will be very tough, but it will be a poor state of affairs if I really can't...

Separating the Dream from Reality

 

Now we've decided when we want to be ready to make a move on to the next chapter of our life, the natural step is to fill in some of those gaps about what we want and what we don't.

This I think is the hardest part, because often none of us really knows exactly what we want in any great detail if we haven't been through quite a comprehensive exercise to work it out. If someone said to me right now: "You want that smallholding in the country? Cool...what are you going to do once you're there? What are your plans?"

Ummmm...don't know. Bees? Goats? Origami?

So I've done a bit of reading up on this over the last few days and have a handle on the process I need to go through to figure it out though. I thought I'd share it with you just in case you find it useful.

Not the first clue - usually the first step

If you really have no clue at all about what you really want, figure out what you don't want.  

Few people know what they want, but they will know what they don't want. Get someone to come up with something, anything, for you and then figure out what aspects of it suck! I guarantee you'll pounce on bits you don't rate. So if someone said: "Well you could keep goats and process the milk into your own cheese and butter and stuff, and you could build stables and offer them to rent to people with horses. You could make jams and sell them at farmer's markets," At which point you go "GOATS!! Bleurch...I wouldn't have a goat - I'd have to milk them everyday...and stables? We're thinking of going to Wales and the market is saturated...etc etc."

A bit of a clue - you're either lucky or have been through the first bit above!

You'll probably do this spread over a few days to let the ideas 'ferment' a bit. A nice glass of homemade sloe gin helps as well ;-)

1. What's the dream and what's the reality?

This is where your likes and dislikes come into it, as well as you fears and prejudices. How do you feel about heat, cold, snow, rain, mud, poor roads, power cuts, long journeys to see family? Be honest.

The dream....is to spend every day immersed in smallholding, making jam, pottering around the garden, bottle feeding orphaned lambs and piglets wearing hunter wellies and a Cath Kidston tea dress...the reality could be you're probably not going to have the time to potter due to a part-time job plus the fact the lamb will stick it's poo-covered trotters on you tea dress the second it sees the bottle and the piglet will bite through your expensive wellies. Ask me how I know ;-)

The dream....is to have an old stone cottage with a aga that heats the whole house...the reality is you hate the cold and all that stone will make for a cold damp house if anything goes wrong with the aga or you have a problem getting it lit. It could be you decide to forgo the idea of a stone cottage for a more modern insulated property, or you might decide there needs to be a secondary heating system installed.

The dream....is having a placid jersey cow and making your own dairy products...the reality is there'll have to be a baby cow about the place for part of the year that you may have to sell or send to slaughter, plus if you have a job you may not be enamoured with the idea of milking that cow every single day for months on end come rain, shine, sleet or snow. Who milks her if you're ill?

Here are some other things to consider in your initial plans.

• How isolated do you want to be?
• How's your health and will it stand up to what you want to do?
• How far from a main town?
• How far from neighbours?
• How much land is enough and how much will be too big an area to maintain?
• You can cope with it now, but what about in 10 years time when your back hurts a lot more?
• Do you consider "privacy," to be the last house on the way out of a village or a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere?
• Do you want mains gas, or will you settle for an oil or a wood burning range as your only source of heat?
• Do you want to be able to drive in snow in bad weather or are you happy to be snowed in for a few days with no ill effects?
• At what point would you feel trapped and start to panic?

Now you won't get everything you want, so you will have to compromise. What will you compromise on? Write it all down. You may not want neighbours within five miles of you, but if the reality is that you have a health problem and you could need their help one day, perhaps no more than a mile away would be better.

2. Write down pieces of your dream and join them together.

Now you have a handle on what you don't want, what the realities are and what you could compromise on, you can start to actually write down what the Dream looks like. For example your Dream might look like "...20 acres with a stream running through it. A couple of good fields for horses and stabling. Preferably on flat land with a south facing kitchen garden. England only, no further North than the west midlands to ensure a decent length of growing season without needing a polytunnel. About a mile from any neighbours and within 10 miles of a main town. Would like some woodland to coppice firewood from. Ideally a three bedroom stone house with outbuildings. Concrete or stone pigsties. etc etc..."

4. Gain experience and skill

Now you have the Dream written down, what life experiences do you need to make it a success? Will you need to learn to garden, to can and preserve food, to hunt, fish or forage,to keep animals for meat and other products, to use and maintain a chainsaw, to have first aid training (should go hand in hand with learning to use a chainsaw), to build outbuildings or animal houses, to learn to drive a tractor to help maintain a crop, pasture or meadow land? Will you need a 4x4 if you live somewhere that can’t be accessed well in bad weather or you have to drive over very poor road surfaces to get to your home? If so, how much will that cost you to buy and maintain - could you maintain it yourself if money was tight?

Whatever you think you will need, spend the time until you can implement your dream getting the experience you need. Read books, go on courses, try experience days at farms and smallholdings, have working holidays on farms. Take tiny baby step steps forward, have a go then alter you plans as you get a better idea of how those pieces of your dream match up to reality.

4. What you think you will need

As you start to get some of these skills you may soon realise you're going to need a whole lot of stuff so start a 'Dream box'. You'll probably need three types of 'boxes' - a physical box or space, a digital box and a mental box to collect all the tools, equipment, supplies, safety gear, reference information and knowledge slowly and thoughtfully in advance.

5. Now imagine you're living the Dream; practice with mini challenges.

What do you need? If necessary create the same conditions as you might experience to practice. If you know the area you will be going is off-grid or experiences power cuts in bad weather, try living without your electric for a couple of days and see how you do. Can you live comfortably rather than just survive?Can you stand each other’s company without the distractions of the computer and TV?

Farming experiences are ideal to get more experience of this and many places offer weekend deals that could provide all the challenge you need if you ask the owners for it. Does your Dream start to change after two days getting up at 4am, you're dog tired and the goat bites you?

6. Finally money, moolah, reddies - a few helpful suggestions in the money department.

Whatever you decide to do, money will be vital. I've never met anyone or read anything that advocated starting this life with a large mortgage and debt. It starts you off at a disadvantage immediately and one financial problem could lead you onto a slippery downward slide from which you may never recover. Also, if you plan on setting up a business you'll need every ounce of credit you may have until you are established.

Have no payments for anything debt-related, including mortgage if possible.

Pay off your credit cards then cut most of them up bar one for dire emergencies. Put that one in a block of ice in the freezer.

Pay cash for your house, land, tools and animals.

Get all the dental work done that you need and any nagging health problems addressed. Don't put off having a knee joint replaced that's hurting all the time, otherwise it could seriously impact on the lifestyle you want to have. As mercenary as it sounds if you're employed and get sick pay, now is the time to get it done not when you're struggling to establish income sources and keep a holding going.

Try and get stash of money togther as an emergency fund for after the move. Things always need replacing after a move or an opportunity may come your way shortly after that you want to capitalise on.

Develop your talents into something you can market and set up a few income streams from before you're scratching around for cash. Do your research though.



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So there you have it. That's what I've managed to glean so far from all of my wandering across the internet.

Is there anything else you think should go in here?

How do you organise yourself?

This post is prompted by a comment I left over on the Down to Earth blog recently. Rhonda was asking how everyone kept organised, whether people had routines or kept lists etc and I replied by telling her about my diary and about the list I keep in my head.

First my diary. I have one of those page to a day diaries and it's become a Godsend to me over the last few months while juggling a job and the preparation for us restoring the racing car. 

The diary has a small list of things that have to be done (so I must post off that letter, get the washing out of the machine and hang it up etc) and these are things that would be important to do on a weekly basis to ensure the basic things of life get accomplished. It makes sure there's always clean underwear in the drawer and bills get paid on time, that sort of thing. 

However, there is a second list of 'nice to get done' items, which might be washing a settee cover if I get a few moments to pop it in the machine, or clean a couple of shelves in the fridge. If I don't get them done, it's no biggie - I just move them onto the next day's list and see if I have time or energy then. The 'nice to get done' things can float across several days, but sooner or later they will get done. Nothing has ever been on the list longer than a week.

However, in addition to these two lists, I also keep a lot of information in there, such as things that happened that day I want to remember (sometimes even things that Martin wants to remember), the dinner I'm cooking that evening and sometimes things I copy down from websites or magazines. I keep track of days when I felt off colour so I can track if it is a recurring pattern. I stick in supermarket receipts so I can keep track of our spending and food price rises and sometimes I also stick in emails or post it notes of recipes I find. It's got to the point where I'd find it very difficult to be without my diary.

The list in my head is something different. It's a revolving list of things that I need to focus on to accomplish mini goals. So if I'm about to go upstairs, I remind myself to take something with me that needs to go, which will help keep the place cleaner and tidier and stop me running around like a headless chicken doing things later. I actually have a stair basket that you can take up and bring down with you. If I'm waiting for the kettle to boil, I give a few items in the sink a wash or wipe down a surface or something so it looks tider and cleaner. 

I've found doing it this way on a consistent basis starts to open up chunks of time where I can relax of an evening and (gasp) go to bed early. In the winter this is essential for me as it's tough to battle seasonal affective disorder when you have to be up at 5:30am and don't get into bed until midnight. I might have taken that too far last Thursday though. I had a whole evening free as I'd already had dinner cooked and just needing heating up, so I was in bed by 6:20pm with my Kindle and asleep by 8pm!

How is the budget doing?

So how are we doing with the big goal, the ones that will put us in the poor house ;-)

Pretty good so far! We are 23 days into January - our fourth week - and are bang on budget. I set my groceries budget for £160 a month, and so far we have spent £114.51. This includes cat food and cleaning stuff. In fact, we have eaten better this month since being on a strict budget than we do normally because I’m trying to be very careful to ensure we get our five portions of fruit and veg a day and make the food as flavoursome as possible.

I base the food for the week around a roast dinner on Sunday evening. Whatever I cook, Martin has the meat from it on Monday and Tuesday for his sandwiches. Tuesday night I then make up something else for him to eat for the rest of the week, usually some kind of pasty or large sausage rolls with pickle or peri-peri sauce inside depending on whether he wants a traditional one or spicy little number. Then on Wednesday I cook up a Chinese. He seems to be addicted to green peppers in black bean sauce at the moment, so I thinly slice up whatever roast meat is left and do that with noodles and/or egg fried rice.

This all works of course because I don’t eat meat at the moment.

If I were eating the roast dinner along with Martin, there wouldn’t be enough meat to last for sandwiches or his Chinese on Wednesday. Instead I have the largest Yorkshire pudding known to man made in a cake tin. Then I pile a load of veggies and roast potatoes into the large yorkie with gravy. Occasionally if I’ve done some kind of pastry based pudding for Martin, I’ll do a veggie slice with cheese and have it without the yorkies and just vegetables and potatoes. This is a mushroom slice with a base of onion relish that I found ‘seasoning’ in the back of the fridge.

I do have a tendency to be a little lazy during the week with my food. If we’re having a big casserole with lots of veggies, I tend to have it too but only put in enough meat for Martin. Then I’ll mix my meat-less portion with couscous. I’ve found that rather than eat a lot of protein in the evning, I tend to eat quite high protein foods during the day, which fills me up and helps me avoid snacking.

So over the last few weeks I’ve alternated cheese and crackers, hummus and pitta bread, egg or cheese salads, lentil soup, beans on toast or in a jacket potato. I also try and have a coffee every day made with milk, as milk has valuable proteins in it too. I don’t like tofu or meat-alternatives like quorn, as I think they are very expensive for what they are and I don’t like the texture when I’m chewing it. For obvious reasons being allergic to nuts has taken out quite an important source of proteins for me. I’m a little concerned I’m not getting enough iron so I want to start taking a multi-vitamin on the days when I don’t think I’ve had enough.

Apart from that, food-wise we’re doing ok!

Any ideas what this is?

 

I was turning another compost pile yesterday and I found this perfect circular hole when I accidently sliced a hard clay crust off it.

I've been wracking my brains trying to work out what made it? Can't be a mouse, rat or hedgehog - it's too big and it's very damp and cold. There are individual indents on the wall (bites?) and a pattern on the underside of the crust almost like - well - something has regurgitated the mud.

That just left me with toads really and I found a couple of likely candidates further into the pile. So, hopefully them being the originators of the little damp nest and potential parents, I left that area without turning it, re-made a cap for the top on top of some twigs as a scaffold leaving a small hole to enter and leave it, then placed the two of them about 6 inches apart orientated towards it and covered them up. 

Hope they weren't two boys...and that it wasn't someone else's hole.

Ooops. 

EDITED TO ADD 24/1 - it does belong to someone else!! It's an old wasp nest! Poor toads...

Anyway, willow. I decided to have another bed, a much larger one this time. I planted two beds last year and one bed failed. All but one plant died, which I think was due to two conifer trees about 6 feet away which were probably using all the available water and nutrients.

This time, I'm going to do an extended bed on the site of the old chicken pen...

I was going to grow potatoes there, but then I realised that potatoes are so cheap now that it wouldn't be worth my while growing them. I'm better off growing some of the more expensive fruit and veg we eat. So instead I'll plant the willow there. 

I have a few leftover whips I can take two foot cuttings from, plus when I trim the main willow supports of my willow fence there'll be around 3 to feet from each of those, so there's plenty of new willow cuttings to plant. Hopefully that will be next weekend, althought the building of this might get in the way!

Yes, we started on the greenhouse today and found out it is 11-sided, not 10-sided, and because of this is actually fits around all of the fruit bushes! I'm still not 100% convinced I will leave the fruit bushes in,as it cuts down the space for growing tomatoes, but the grape vine will stay in and be trained into the roof space in a way that lets light in and its tendrils can get good air ventilation.

Goals for 2012

 

"Gather round chaps, this is the plan..."

Well, it's January and time to get down in black and white my goals for the year. I have one very large goal and a few smaller ones, the majority of which will support the larger one.

Let's get the smaller ones out of the way first.

Drop two dress sizes

I need to go from a 14-16 to a 10-12 by Christmas 2012. Unfortunately, me and dieting don't mix. I discovered last year that if I go on a diet to lose weight I don't succeed. I get bored too easily and distracted. I've even found that some days I got so busy I forgot I was on a diet until I got back in the house in the evening.So, this year I'm going to try something different.

1. I'm going to be switching to a vegetarian diet, which I know from past experience helps me lose weight automatically plus I don't feel so bloated after eating and have more energy.

Mmmmm...mushrooms and stilton

2.Exercise. I'm currently doing an exercise programme on my treadmill. Yes, I have a treadmill! I can't remember if I blogged about this at the time, but around March last year I picked one up dirt cheap on ebay. The pre-set programmes change the speed randomly and without warning, so I've found that to be quite challenging and interesting for me. Also a friend has lent me a workout DVDs to try and I think I have a couple of exercise videos in the loft I could transfer to DVD too so I have a few workouts I can rotate. Somewhere upstairs I also have a weights bench and free weights - just a question of finding somewhere for them to go.The combination of all of these things may very well keep me interested in exercising for a lot longer than I usually last.

3. There'll be very little in the way of bought lunches, snacks, takeways or other naughty luxuries to throw me off course due to the large financially-based goal that I'll describe later. It's always at the forefront of my mind so I have less incentive to spend money on extras.

In the last two weeks of doing these three I've managed to lose half a stone already so I'm on the right track ;-)

Crack the non-chemical hair products dilemma

One of my minor irritations last year was never being able to crack the dilemma of my hair not liking non-chemical shampoos and conditioners. This year, I'm going back to basics and examining different natural plants and products that could clean my hair without turning it into a bird's nest. This might mean growing and finding ways to used plants with saponins, or investigating natural food stuffs that could do the trick. And of course, hopefully this will be a cheaper alternative to buying shampoos and conditioners, the more expensive the better as far as my hair seems to be concerned.

I will also spend some time dying my hair various different types of henna to see if I can get a dark brown shade rather than my current copper-toned light brown, which will also help with the condition of it.

Permaculture and growing our own

I need to grow at least 50% of the fruit and vegetables we will be eating this year to help support our large goal (later). This neccessitates a complete overhaul of the third major bed by the house to a productive bed plus the planting of several new fruit trees and bushes.

The third bed: it always looks 'interesting' at this time of year

I also need to sort out setting up some kind of greenhouse arrangment, because the tomatoes outside did not ripen until the end of September last year and there were still many green ones when the frosts hit. 

To this end, I have already managed to pick up a greenhouse on ebay.

Such a fantastic shape! I squealed when I saw it. As my birthday is near the end of the month, everyone has pitched in to help buy it. So my task for next weekend is to get it up.

Read a book a week

This will be easier to achieve than you might think due to Martin buying me one of these for Christmas.

I have found that my treadmill time is ideal for reading ebooks! It just seems to make the time fly past and I'm surprised when suddenly the treadmill goes into cool down phase. At the moment, I'm reading Living the 80/20 Way by Richard Koch. There are thousands of free ebooks and thousands more for less than £2.

Get to Expert level at Microsoft Excel

I need to start addressing my Continued Professional Development. Learning excel to expert level will benefit me at work both now and in the future, as well as help me develop better tools for financial management at home.

I bought two books about a month ago. The first is Learn Excel 2007 Essential Skills with the Smart Method, which will give me a thorough grounding in the basics. The second is Learn Excel 2007 Expert Skills with the Smart Method, which will get me to a completely new level of knowledge.

The first book has 113 lessons in it with exercises, and my aim is to complete these by the end of June. Then I will do the Expert skills, which has 136 lessons. I think I will complete the first book quite quickly as some of the detail I already know, which is just as well as the second book will take a lot of effort to complete by Christmas.

*********

And now for the big goal.

I alluded in my last post to having a goal this year that was going to be financially painful. It's actually a joint goal with Martin, and I think probably our first one in the almost eight years we've been together. We've had some goals before, such as pay off the mortgage, but that was a general plan to pay off as much as we could each month until one day it wouldn't be there any more, rather than set out a specific goal to pay off a certain amount across a certain number of payments.

Rebuilding a rare racing/road car

Martin will be spending the next 8 months rebuilding another Fairthorpe car, far more expensive this time as it is being built for both racing and the road. It's going to take all of his income and some of mine to do it and we estimate it will cost between £10,000-£12,000 to do up. That's up to £12,000 to find spare in eight months.

So we're going 'bare-bones' frugal. 'Rice-and-beans' frugal. 'What-shall-we-have-for-dinner-tonight-because-there's-nothing-in-the-fridge-and-just-spinach-in-the-garden' frugal. I'll have to use *everything* I know about frugal living to get us through this.

I am covering all the household expenses for the next 8 months (if not longer if we can make this work). Once a week I look at how much has been spent by Martin on household bills and expenses (have already set limits!) and I transfer the money to him from my own account. Any surplus in my account at the end of the month goes to him.

Why are we doing this?

First, it's time to do it. Martin's father would dearly love to see this car on the road, has been wanting to see it on the road since the 1980s, and at 82 with cancer that he's currently having chemo for, time is now of the essence. For anyone who has a relative with cancer, you'll know *exactly* what I mean but just can't bring myself to say. This car rebuild will give Martin's father the boost he needs to get him through the gruelling rounds of chemotherapy ahead of him, and keep him with us for another few years. He's extremely excited already and sometimes it's the only bright glimmer he has on the horizon when the side effect of the chemo are really bad.

Second, we're also doing it as an experiement. If we can live on my income for eight months, we can live on it for a year. If we can do a year, we can do it for two. How much could we accomplish with that amount of money at our disposal all the time? We could hit the mortgage hard and pay it off completely. Save some cash for investing. Pump our pension plans up. Martin could retire early and perhaps set up his own car business.

The possibilities are endless. And very powerful.

What does it involve?

The amount of management and preparation that has gone into this plus continuing daily financial vigilance is huge. I was in planning mode for three solid months up to Christmas. Everything I know about money management, finance and stretching pennies will be needed as well as much persistence and patience as I can muster when a filthy tired husband crawls into bed at midnight every night reeking of grease and petrol.

I have taken over the food and grocery shopping entirely now and menu plan down the minutest detail.

• My monthly food budget is £160, and that includes cat food. So far I've been under every week but that's only because I have so much meat stashed in the freezer.
• I have gone vegetarian to lose weight, learn to cook veggie food and cut down on the grocery bills. Only Martin will eat meat, which is probably the most expensive thing I buy every week. I have no issue with that as he has a manual exhausting job and I get to sit behind a desk all day.
• I have built up a food store (about a month's worth of dry and frozen food) over the last few months in case we run out of money at some point
• I will be growing at least 50% of our vegetables and around 25% of our fruit. The fruit is the hardest, as much isn't ready until late summer or autumn and it doesn't last long.
• All superfluous direct debits and standing orders have been cancelled. And by superfluous I mean anything that isn't an essential household bill or car-related.
• No buying magazines or physical books. Library only. In fact, no buying of anything unless every avenue has been exhausted first.
• I've built up a cushion of savings in case of emergencies, like the boiler breaking down (again) or the cat going to the vet.
• Our efforts at overpaying our mortgage have had to stop for now so I can cover all the normal bills.
• We can do one lunch a month and have one takeaway a month (but if someone else pays that's fine we'll eat more ;-))

Also eBay is taking a bit of a pounding at the moment. We have a lot of surplus stuff we're getting rid off to help fund the project, which is having the added effect of making the place a bit cleaner and clearer. Martin in particular has a lot of hobby bits and pieces he is selling and I'm slowly rooting through boxes of my stuff to add to it.

I must confess I'm looking forward to being lean. Over the last 12  months we've replaced a lot of broken stuff and bought some things we had been putting off which would make our lives run more efficiently and productively. But in all honesty it's made me a bit flabby round the edges (and not just physically!)and I need toning in every respect. 

I like challenges, especially really hard ones that take a lot of ingenuity and effort. My brain needs the exercise to stop it going into hyperdrive and keeping me awake all night coming up with ridiculous ideas and scenarios.This project gives me something I can really get my teeth into and brings a lot of our interests together. Now, rather than doing them in isolation, they will all be interwoven into one big goal, which will really help when the going gets tough and we feel like giving up.

We'll need each other like we've never done before.

They spank the gas bill

Credit: science photo library

Well, we had a lovely surprise last night when we got in from the hospital. There on the mat were the gas and electric bills. Cue yucky faces being pulled. We knew the electric bill would be around £120 and we weren't far off at £125. Our consumption hasn't increased a great deal this year but obviously the price per unit has. Still, it's pretty good.

But then there was the gas. Martin opened this one with some trepedation, expecting to run round the house exclaiming "you CANNOT be serious".

He remarked how calm I looked and why did I have a little smile? I had a little smile because I know what the gas reading was as I took it shortly after we bought our halogen oven. It was better than I could have hoped though.

We were £11 in credit! So no gas bill for us to pay this autumn. Which is just as well considering how much I forked out on the pets this month. That's a story I shall bore you with another day, probably tomorrow as I'm still smarting over the whole thing, but at least I've stopped gibbering with rage.

Anyway, I think part of the reason for the low gas usage this time has been the boiler. We've had such problems with it over the last few months that most of the time we've been doing everything in cold water. It simply wouldn't stay fired up for any length of time to heat the water up and it took a good six weeks, if not longer, to sort that out. So there was a silver lining to that cloud after all.

The other reason is that we haven't turned our heating up yet due to the unseasonably warm weather lately. I switched the central heating on at the boiler at the end of september, but turned the thermostat down to 14^oC. That way the heating only kicks in when the temperature drops that low. It's kicked in three times so far this month - one of us usually hears the click and whoosh as the boiler fires up in the night and the radiators still have some tell-tale residual warmth in the morning. 

So that was a really welcome end to a long day.

Martin's father had his last readiotherapy session today, but his doctor wants him to stay in hospital off his feet for another 10 days. FIL is very unhappy about that. However, everyone has told him how close he was to losing the use of his legs as the tumour was pressing down on his spinal column and nerves to his legs, hence the emergency radiotherapy, so he must content himself with being laid up for a bit longer to ensure his future health. I think he had it in mind he would be out of hopsital and going to his car club's annual general meeting on Monday, which goes to show just how much spirit he's still got, but he definitely will not be going. Even if he had have been discharged, the family had decided to collectively sit on him so he couldn't go.

He hates resting for any length of time - he's a Mr Busy that doesn't know when to stop ;-))

We're peas in a pod really.

An enforced calmness

You'll be pleased to know I'm being a lot calmer this weekend than I was last, but it is an enforced calmness I'm afraid. My 81 year old father-in-law was rushed to hospital on Friday afternoon with chronic pain due to a flair up of his multiple myeloma. He could no longer walk or keep down any of his drugs and the morphine pills just weren't cutting it any more. An MRI that evening revealed the worst - in the five weeks since his last MRI he has got a new growth on his spine that is aggressive and compressing his spinal cord. The doctors no longer want to wait for a biopsy before treating him, and yesterday he went straight for the first of five radiotherapy sessions to a nearby oncology centre. This will be swiftly followed by chemotherapy next week. 

So I've spent the weekend flitting between hospital and home, and deliberately tried to do as little housework as possible. The washing and ironing got done, the bed changed, the downstairs bathroom given a cursory swish and wipe, and the kitchen is in good shape as I made sure I did most of the chores here Friday night. I've managed to make a little cider this afternoon with some apples that were almost too ripe to use, and an apple cake with the left over pulp thanks to a lovely recipe by Rhonda at Down to Earth. In between there has been some knitting and a film running in the background. 

Martin has just come in from the hospital (oncology wards usually turn a blind eye to visiting times as the patients are so ill) so I'm sorting him out some food. But good news, that one radiotherapy session yesterday has done wonders - father-in-law has had no pain today and needed no morphine at all. He can sit up and move around fine. He's actually chirpy.

Absolutely amazing that one session can do that.