Steel Kitten

Brother Hesachiah has a shave

It's been over a week since Martin shaved. The blade on his shaver broke last week and it's taken a while to get a replacement. 

I've always liked watching him shave after he's let his facial fuzz grow too much, because there comes a point when it's coming off where he looks like an Amish farmer. We call it his Brother Hesachiah look.

Looking at the expressions, I can only assume a great deal of thinking goes on during a shave. He's experiencing the full range of emotions while doing it. 

It made me want to ask him what he was thinking about, but I didn't because that was the kind of intrusive question my father used to ask me when I was growing up and I wouldn't answer because it was none of his business. Then he'd get angry because I wouldn't tell him. 

So instead I left Martin and his thoughts alone. 

Spring fever

I've spent the last few days in a state of suspended action, all revved up to do a million wonderful things on my ever increasing to do list. Then I had a thought. Realistically, based on past experience, how much will actually get done? So I thought I'd write the list and cross off the things I know won't get done over the next two weeks before I end up flogging myself over not doing them. I guess it's my way of dealing with my scanner tendencies before they deal with me. 

Ok here we go:

1. Spring clean the house - every morning for a week get up an hour early and deep clean each room. This won't get done. Not even if I do a Flylady five minutes every day. So let's forget about this.   
2. Put all my magazines on ebay. This has a chance of being done at a rate of about one magazine a week. I have around five years worth..... 
3. Go for a brisk walk everyday. This will get done until the iPod runs out of charge. Then it won't get done. Still three days is three days.  
4. Stomach crunchies. Every day. 20. Or maybe 10. Probably closer to five.....oh dear. This won't get done. Truth be told there is no unit of stomach crunchies I think I will do.  
5. Sow my leek seeds in a big pot. This won't get done. Don't ask me why, but every year since I began gardening I've always procrastinated over the leeks until I realise in mid June they have to go out at the beginning of July and then I sow them in a hurry. It's now a habit. 
6. Sort through the three large piles of work-related paper by the side of my bed. This won't get done. They've been there six months and it's now their home.
7. Hoover under the bed. This will get done. It's a small job and there's very little under there. I may even push the work paper piles under there when I'm done. Hmmmmmm.... 
8. Hang up all the clothes that are lying on the victorian clothes horse and buckling it. This will get done. I like hanging up clothes...but only if they're in a big pile and not as I take them off unfortunately. 
9. Sweep up the feathers in the conservatory. This has a sporting chance of being done. It may even get done sooner than I anticipate if I can borrow a neighbour's toddler for 15 minutes. Children love collecting feathers don't they?
10. Organise my food cupboard and begin a plan to bulk buy and stockpile all the basics. This will get done. I like planning. 
11. Write out my meal plans for April and construct shopping list. Ditto above.
12. Find recipes for manly meals for Martin. This month is a red meat month after several months of chicken and turkey. He's all pale-meated out, and fish, pulses and veggies just aren't doing it for him at the moment. Lots of steak and onion sandwiches, cottage pies, steak pies and fat burgers on the menu. Basically, we intend to eat a cow this month. 
13. Get the wedding photos printed and into albums. This is so not going to be done. It's been on my list for two and half years. It just won't get done. 
14. Buy a new attractive eco-friendly wooden nail brush from some enterprising artisan on eBay. This will get done. I can't stand the sight of Martin's nails at the moment. I keep attacking him with pointy objects to get the car grease out. 
15. Sit on my arse knitting and watching films. Definitely get this done. Been doing this every evening for some time and I'm very good at it.
16. Clean all the sweet papers out of the car. This will get done. I don't understand how I send my husband out with a large packed lunch designed to satisfy Goliath and he still manages to eat a large packet of sweets almost every day. I have to clean the car out to estimate how many he's had and when I think I need to call a dentist.
17. Clean the mud off the car. No chance. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
18. Take up the hall rugs and wash the tiles. This will get done. I like this job. 
19. Wash Martin's casual jacket. This will get done because I feel guilty. I put it on to go and clean the chickens out a couple of days ago and forgot I put an egg in the pocket. Martin politely requested the following day I not booby trap his clothes after stuffing his hand in the pocket, smashing the egg and then dripping the contents across the house.  

Of course I have client projects to finish  as well, which will get done. 

Of course. 

So 19 things on the list this week of which a nice manageable 9 will definitely happen, and the rest I will simply ignore guilt free having now decided they're not happening.

And I'm now off to do number 15. Tootle pip!!

Synchronicity at work again

It's funny. When you make a decision in your life, and it's the right one, the universe will show you somehow that you're on the right track.

In my last post, I talked about how I never wanted to be a big businesswoman, working all hours and damaging my health and relationships. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while will probably know that I had a bout of chronic fatigue a couple of years ago around the time I started this blog. It knocked me out for 3-4 months. I never really discussed the circumstances around it, although I have said I passed out one morning and then made changes to my life.

The chronic fatigue was caused by overwork. At the time I was working up to 90 hours a week and my stress levels were made worse by a client who was the Owner and Director of an advertising agency. He was rude, abrupt and very stressed himself, leaving him prone to angry outbursts and insults. He would smoke endlessly to cope with the stress - the whole office used to stink of ciggarette smoke. He would work on me relentlessly to drop my prices all the time, so two years after working with him I was earning much less per hour than I was in the beginning, meaning I had to work more hours to make up the money. He would also accept my estimates for timing then once I had begun writing chase me constantly because he had made unrealistic promises to his clients, which created even more stress.

That fateful morning, I recieved an email pushing me to complete a huge job - I think it was 40 page brochure - in a third of the time I had quoted for.My stress levels suddenly spiked and I passed out. When I came to, it was with complete clarity of thought. He was not that important, the money was not important and I was happy to lose the job and him as a client. Which I subsequently did. I handed the job back and walked away.

Yesterday I received an email from his account manager, asking me if I was still a freelance writer and even though we parted on bad terms would I consider working for them again. That there had been "changes" at the company.

A few minutes searching on the net and I found out what those changes were. According to the local newspaper, the Director and Owner of the company had died of a massive heart attack at the age of 48. He was smoker with asthma and worked extremely long hours. He was also found to have relaxants in his body - notably cannabis and the tranquiliser ketamine.

If ever there was an incident that made me realise how right I am to put my health and enjoyment of my life first, that was it. I'm only 36, but if I had carried on like I was I've no doubt I'd one day end up like him. He had a plan to build the company up and sell it one day then retire somewhere with his family. He'll never get the chance now.

Frucool

It's the new buzz word - apparently it's now really cool to be frugal hence the new word. Thank God. Finally I'm in fashion. I am Frucool. Excuse me if I don't buy the T-shirt, but paint my own. 

Talking of buying, is it my imagination or is this country's officials getting a teensy bit scared that we're not spending any money at the moment?

I keep seeing column inches devoted to this minister or that civil servant imploring me to go on holiday or start buying colour TVs. It's not that I don't have the money. I do. I just don't want to spend it right now thanks. There's no law that says you have to spent all of your income. By not spending money on unnecessary consumer goods, making do with what we have and recycling what we can, I believe we have tremendous power and freedom. Hence the frustrated squeakings from the government and retailers. I think this poster sums it up:

 

Photo by Georgina Coombes

I also thought this was quite funny....

Besides not spending my money just to annoy government ministers, I also don't spend money because I equate every pound I spend with having to give up a certain number of minutes of my life working.

Once you start to equate consumer goods with the amount of time you'd have to work for it, things suddenly stop looking too attractive. Well it did to me. I used to earn £9 an hour after tax when I worked in an office so every skirt I bought for £40 cost me 4.5 hours of my life. Spending £65 a week on food when I was single because I didn't budget, meal plan or buy smart meant almost one day of my working week was spent grafting to feed me - and a shocking amount of that food ended up in the bin because it was an inpluse buy and I didn't get to eat it before it went off.  

Over the last seven years, I've learnt to value time much more than money. If I get the work done that pays my bills I can then spend time with Martin. Or the chickens. Or in the kitchen garden. Or knitting. All things to me much more worthwhile than killing myself to get more money to pay for a bit of consumer tat. I don't believe in building a business with staff and offices and stationary and stress and long hours just for the possible reward of being able to sell it at some point in the future. My life is happening NOW. I'm not putting it off for some mythical date in the future when I can get loads of wonga, by which time my husband has left me, my family are gone and I'm probably too ill too enjoy it.

No thanks. I think I'm going to have to stay as I am, no matter how much those ministers sqeak with fear.

Do you want to join me?

Vintage radios

 

Thanks for your lovely comments about the laundry bag yesterday guys. I definitely think it was appreciated, as it is on permanent display hanging on the outside of my mother's clothes cupboard door. In fact, I think I want one for myself now so I'll have to get to work on another one shortly. Just as soon as I finish the needlepoint cushion I promised you all a couple of weeks ago. I haven't forgotten!

Just as we were leaving my parents following afternoon tea at the weekend, my father produced this little beauty and wondered if it was worth anything. It's a vintage 1950s Roberts R200 transistor radio that came out of a cupboard full of radios in my grandfather's house shortly after he died in 1991. Hoarding and collecting run in the family and apparently the radios were stacked floor to ceiling and the door wedged shut so they wouldn't fall out. I never knew that my father had kept one of them. I always assumed he got rid of them all to a collector.

With the imminent switch over to digital next year, analogue radios aren't worth a great deal anymore, which is a shame because something like this feels like it should be. But it's a great piece of history to look at, and I'll see if my father will exchange it for an extra large batch of rock cakes.

Homemade Mother's Day

Inspired by Rhonda's example of homemade gifts, I decided Mother's Day would be an appropriate time to venture further into the world of anti-consumerism.

My mother is not 100% sure about the whole homemade gift thing. I'm not sure whether my efforts in the past have been a bit amateurish, but I can detect - just occassionally - the slight wrinkling upward of her nose when a homemade package arrives.

However, I'm determined to perservere, so this Mother's Day saw me working on a drawstring laundry bag for her so she has somewhere to put her smalls when she goes to stay with my sister. The outside was some Ikea fabric I bought a few years ago, the inside a simple beige lining. On the outside, I sewed on a patchwork hexagonal flower and added a ribbon for the drawstring.

 

To add to that, a few weeks ago I found a great watercolour of some Sweet Williams in an auction for a shockingly small amount of money (let's just say you'd spend more on a bottle of pop than what I paid). Although stretching the boundaries a little, I still consider this homemade, just by someone else!

 

I also tucked into the present basket a huge slab of Cherry Almond cake. It was all well recieved with big smiles.  Does that suggest I've turned a corner with my sewing skills and can now make things that look semi-professional and not like it's been hacked about by a kiddies scissor class? I think so.....

Life finds a way

In my haste to get everything going in the garden I neglected to chit my potatoes. Never mind, I thought, they'll just have to be harvested a couple of weeks late and maybe covered up with some fleece to make sure the cold doesn't get them.

Au contraire.

The potatoes got fed up waiting for me to remember them in the box by the front door and took matters into their own hands. I spent an hour cutting these babies out of the netting yesterday afternoon.

Don't lose focus

Curry in the slow cooker (just about to serve hence the lid is off!)

I said in my last post I'd talk about how Rhonda's blog has made a difference since I've been reading it. I've felt for a while I've been ready to move onto a new level in my quest to be a bit more frugal and self sufficient, so the timing couldn't have been more perfect. 

The day after reading Rhonda's post about being frugal with utilities it crossed my mind I really hadn't been watching the meters since about November. Normally I'd pretty sure about what we spend gas and electric-wise and check the meters a few times during each billing period, but with the arrival of the hedgehogs and the need for constant warmth for them, I accepted our bill was going to be higher than normal. And with that, for some reason, I stopped monitoring it.

Without the vigilance I became careless and let old bad habits creep in. I stopped putting lids on the saucepans. I used the oven to bake one measly thing at a time. I stopped using the slow cooker and started cooking the same meals in the oven, three or four hours for a casserole or stew (I'm kicking myself as a I type this). That stinking thinking started to move across to turning things off at night. Little red standby lights started appearing all over the house again. The computer was left burning energy all day instead of being switched off when not in use. 

So what I wasn't prepared for two days after I read Rhonda's post was the huge gas bill that dropped onto our doorstep. Now at first glance it didn't look too bad - £186 for three months. Then I realised it was estimated, so as usual I took a reading to check and did a swift calculation of what it should be. Then I nearly fell on the floor.

It should have been £360. I have NEVER paid more than £200 for a winter gas bill in my life. Then the electric turned up - £180 for eight weeks. F*!!*%^$£$

After moping around the house for about two days, I stopped swearing and got proactive. I started reading the meters every day to see where all this energy was going. Now I reckon you've just said to yourself "it's obvious - gas central heating in the winter and price rises". You'd only be half right. But actually, I've discovered that two thirds of my daily gas goes on: cooking and baking. That hour's cooking in the evening plus a few baking sessions during the week has added up to a large amount of money going out the house. Yes there have been price rises, but I've certainly not been careful about usage and have wasted it.

To test this, I've only used the gas cooker twice in the last two weeks for unavoidable baking. I've planned all our meals around the slow cooker, steamer and microwave. Our daily readings have dropped from 10 units (around 110kw) a day to just over 3 units (about 33kw). That's a massive drop. At the same time I'm watching our electric meter like a hawk to see how much that increases, but bearing in mind a slow cooker uses the same amount of electricity as a lightbulb over the same period of time it's not going to be a massive increase. Any cooking in the microwave is for less than five minutes at a time and doesn't happen every day, while the steamer takes the same amount of time to cook rice and pasta as the stove. And I've even figured out how to boil eggs in it!

 

All the little red standby lights are off again. To make doubly sure we even unplug. The only things permanently on in this house are the fridge and Martin's clock radio. We've tested many other alarm clocks and have always come back to that. Battery powered ones sound great until the day the alarm doesn't go off because they are flat and Martin wakes up 4 hours later than he should do. Royal Mail aren't very understanding about things like that and once too often and you end up getting written warnings.

 

There's only one snag as far as I can work out. Having a slow cooker on for most of the day means by about 2pm you can start to smell the dinner, which has led to both of us to fantasising about food all the time. Instead of being hungry around 6:30-ish, he's peering round doorways enquiring about dinner by 4:30pm. Because I think I'm hungry all the time, I keep diving for the bread and lemon curd every time I pass it so trying to find a scrap of fresh bread in the house by dinner time is like the search for the Holy Grail.

 

It reminds me of that old Chinese proverb: It is not economical to go to bed early to avoid burning candles if the result is twins.

 

I sense I'm going to have to keep a very close eye on the shopping budget now as well. Not to mention expanding waistlines! Perhaps the slow cooker ought to go in the conservatory so we can't smell it...

 

 

So much to do, so little time....

Oxo has recovered again. After some daily crop massage, tons of yoghurt and some anti-fungal powder, she finally managed to....ahem...'move' a crop blockage a couple of days ago caused by twisted rotting grass. After what I saw she left behind in her night nest, trust me when I say you did NOT want to be a chicken in the coop that night. No wonder they all fell out of the coop at speed when I opened up that morning.

Just one week of good weather and the pace in the garden and house seems to treble. All those jobs that you store up in the back of your mind to do when it's decent weather very suddenly push to the front and demand attention as the first rays of sun break through. 

The last week has seen the rotary line groaning under the weight of household textiles. I've had so many huge throws, patchwork quilts and blankets to wash over the winter, but I've had to wait as they all need a good dose of sunshine and breeze to dry off in a day otherwise they take days to dry in the house and go smelly.  Big thick winter jumpers have been washed, dried and stored away while spring clothing has been hunted out of cupboards and drawers to replace them. Rugs have been taken outside and beaten up to get all the ingrained dust out of them that the hoover just doesn't touch (TIP: do not smack rug against side of house when standing downwind, otherwise you get covered in dirt and grime). 

 

The plants picked up the pace and started growing madly, all demanding their annual fertiliser and pruning. The seeds I sowed back a few weeks ago in our unheated conservatory were crying out for repotting so all the compost bins had to be turned out for some good stuff to tuck them up in. All the veg beds dried out nicely in the sun and have been dug over ready for this year's crops to go in. 

The greenhouse has been reclaimed from the chickens who have been using it as a dry, warm chickenopolis throughout the winter. The staging has been liberated from the cats who have also taken to snoozing in there of an afternoon. And if my nose doesn't deceive me, peeing in there too the filthy little lazy beasts, so liberal amounts of detergent will be sloshed around this week. It's very difficult to concentrate on Women's Hour when being nasally assaulted by that smell. 

All the pathways have been weeded and swept clean, and the left over building materials and broken paving slabs near the house taken down to the kitchen garden ready for recycling. The rest of the garden is being tidied up this week. 

 

 

I managed to make 3 little raised beds out of some leftover bricks laid onto the slabs and planted strawberries in the centre on. I didn't do my circular tiered bed after all - it just seemed more important to get the strawberries into something when they turned up and think about that next year. 

Finally I found a new blog, one that if you aspire to a life of simplicity and frugality you will enjoy as much as I have for the last few days. 

Go check out Down to Earth, the blog home of Rhonda Hetzel. It's been a while since a blog gave me such food for thought and made me realise I could be doing things differently and better, but Rhonda's has done. 

And that's a post for another day. 

A chicken mystery

 

One very sick chicken

After looking so well for a few days, Oxo has become poorly again. No rhyme or reason to it. First she's well, then unwell, then well, then unwell.....There's nothing like a mystery to engage my brain cells so Saturday saw me on the case again finding out what is wrong. The conservatory became a temporary vet's surgery and Oxo was confined to her bed for the weekend. 

She was so hunched and miserable she didn't want food or water and slowly sat there getting worse and worse shedding endless feathers and shaking. Instead of nursing plants, the propagator was turned on to nurse a chicken through the night and keep her warm. 

 

Whatever it was wasn't in her lungs as she was breathing fine and she didn't have a runny nose which might indicate a cold or lung infection. I had ruled out septic peritonitis, as she would already have died and certainly wouldn't have lasted weeks as she has, and after some 'explorations' which I won't go into here eggbinding was crossed off too. I'd given her a thorough check and all I could think of was a bacterial infection either in her digestive system or reproductive system. 

By Monday night she had gone downhill so much during the day we resigned ourselves to losing her, and agreed that if she was still alive the following day we'd take her to the vet for one last opinion. Now, you may ask me why we waited so long before making a decision to take her to the vet? There are several reasons.

First and foremost, most vets know bugger all about chickens. Not a jot. They either claim the animal is eggbound and needs putting to sleep or they shoot them full of Baytril as a sort of catch all antibiotic. It's not unknown for some small animal vets to incorrectly attribute a full gizzard (which feels like a solid mass underneath the breastbone on the left hand side) as a tumour and put a chicken to sleep. If you're really unlucky they'll insist on multiple x-rays and vitamin injections, leaving you still with a sick chicken and huge whole in your wallet. What 99% of them won't do is be sensitive to the needs of the chicken because fundamentally chickens in this country are regardless as just short of worthless. They may be numbered in their millions and part of the food chain, but I believe they are just as sensitive and deserving of kindness and attention as animals we don't eat, such as cats and dogs. 

Second, I'm a great believer in animals knowing what they want and if she doesn't want to eat, she doesn't want to eat. I don't feel like eating much when I'm ill, and that's usually the body's way of making sure all of its energy is directed towards fighting off the illness. I also believe that sometimes human intervention can shock an animal so much it ends up dead or much more ill. Chickens in particular seem to attract a lot of people who think shoving tubes down their throats and jabbing them with needles at the drop of a hat is acceptable. Time and again I read posts on poultry forums that describe tipping chickens upside down to make them sick, pouring olive oil into their crops using tubes down the back of their throats, taking them to vet at the first sign of being ill for multiple injections and then posting back a few days later the chicken is dead. 

I'm not surprised. If that was me I might give up the ghost being force fed, made to puke on demand and stabbed with chemicals. 

Anyway, to get back to the topic of what is wrong with Oxo, believing last night was her last on this planet, we put her back into the coop with Bisto and Paxo so she could die with her friends around her and not on her own. Yes it may sound daft as whatever she had, they could have caught, but she'd been in and out of the coop with them so much over the last three weeks and they are still fit and healthy I chose to risk it. And this morning when I opened up, she slowly approached the coop entrance, tipped herself forward and vomited liquid. Then she sprung out of the coop like a new chicken and started scoffing food. 

That's when the penny dropped. She has sour crop. Sour crop is a condition where the food in the chickens crop does not digest for one reason or another and an overgrowth of the yeast candida ferments the contents, making the chicken fill up like a balloon with water and display the same symptoms as we had seen from Oxo. They can't digest any food so they get weaker and weaker. So, this afternoon Oxo is back in the conservatory being dosed with an anti-candida powder in her water (very similar to the ones us ladies take) and being fed natural yoghurt every hour to correct he pH in her stomach and get things moving again. 

Also, I've been digging into what the best diet for her might be to ensure good nutrition for her yet will ensure the candida fungus is brought back under control to normal chicken gut levels. For this I turned to the books on anti-candida diets for humans, and found some very interesting information.  

I read a lot on poultry forums about apple cider vinegar as a tonic for chickens, and about apples being good to feed to them when sick as it is fast digested sugar. In fact, I've read about people trying to treat sour crop with diluted vinegar, and about how chickens love the stuff in their water. 

Which is odd because in the human world both vinegar and apples are considered to aggravate a candida overgrowth and make it worse. The fact that the vinegar seems to pep them up temporarily may (and this is my personal opinion I hasten to add, not textbook fact) because they have a slight intolerance to it. Popular belief says if you eat something that your body cannot tolerate you will feel unwell. That's not true. You will only feel unwell if you are allergic to it. On the other hand, if you eat something you are intolerant to, your body will actually produces a momentary surge of adrenaline into your blood stream as a reaction and you will feel temporarily good. Later when the adrenaline has been processed, you come crashing down again and start to fancy eating the very item that caused the trouble in the first place. It's not hard to imagine a chicken works in a similar way.

Chickens probably love diluted apple cider vinegar and apples because it gives them a mild adrenaline high. I can't prove this at all, but I do know that - until I can work out what the similarities and difference are between the stomach organisms of a chicken and a human - I'm cutting out all apple and vinegar from Oxo's diet in case they aggravate the candida. I'm also cutting out sugary substances like honey, which are often quoted as being good as fast digestible sugar, but in fact again may feed the candida fungus. 

Phew...long post, but I just had to get that off my chest. 

By the way, in between writing, I popped out to feed Oxo her second lot this of yoghurt this afternoon and was forcibly reminded by her that when she's had enough, she's had enough Thank You. I ended up wearing the last spoonful on my face and in my hair. 

Good girl!