Splitting the difference

Another mostly indoors day today. For me this is fine and dandy – I have a list of crafting things I want to do, stuff I want to research, online things to catch up on, paperwork to process and plans to make for next year. I have writing I want to do. Mostly though I am planning on spending a lot of time this winter hanging out with the kids – watching films, reading books, playing games, stuff like Come Dine With Me cook offs and so on.

Ady and Davies went down and collected some big stones – Davies is planning to paint prices for our various eggs etc on stones for us to arrange on top of the honesty larder. Meanwhile Scarlett made leek and potato soup under my instruction. We talked about how onion, garlic and stock is a pretty standard starting point for any soup. For some reason I’d always assumed soup was a really complicated thing to make from scratch – I suppose because there is such a wide range of tinned and fresh soups in supermarkets and because the ‘soup of the day’ at Mum’s restaurant was always a large catering packet mix. I realise now how little cooking my Mum ever actually did (in her defense she did work full time and Dad did *nothing* at home so I understand why she relied on convenience food. When Ady and I were first together we always thought we cooked from scratch because we didn’t but ready meals but we still relied heavily on jars of sauces for curry and bolognaise etc. It was only really when we started to try and live on a tight budget that cooking with raw ingredients became something we did and I still learnt so much while we were WWOOFing about the ways different people cooked. Now of course it is a matter of finances and availability of ingredients that means everything is cooked from scratch really. It’s particularly satisfying that lots of the dried herbs I reach for in my cooking these days are ones I grew from seed, harvested and dried myself 🙂

Lots of wind today so everyone made use of the internet on all day. I sent a facebook message to my best friend from school, Vicky who is 40 today. Her facebook page is pretty neglected – within the last 10 items on her wall are happy birthday messages from me from the last 3 years so I assumed I was shouting into the wind really. I thought about her for a while though – we were close for the last 2 years of school, then fell out at college, then got close again – she came round for a takeaway on the day Ady and I moved into Osborne Drive. She settled down not long after with a bloke none of us (except her of course) liked very much who was even older than Ady and our age gap (29 to my 19) was gossip worthy at the time. They moved to Buckinghamshire and we became Christmas card friends and then drifted totally when we had kids and moved to Manchester. Her and Paul who she had by then married then came to our Welcome Back to Sussex Party / 40th Birthday surprise party for Ady and she was pregnant. They have since had another child but we totally lost touch so I was most shocked when she replied to my birthday greeting with a facebook message asking how we all are! I’ve replied and am hoping she replies with a longer catch up email. Funnily enough I was telling Davies and Scarlett about her just this week as I have a scarf she bought me for Christmas when we were 16 that I’d been coveting in a shop for months and she must have saved up to buy me. It’s a little threadbare 20 odd years later but remains a treasured possession 🙂

I did some drawings of house plans to send to the people we’ve been exchanging emails with. We are looking at a Nissen hut design from these people . Officially it would just be a workshop / office / farmshop but we would actually turn it into a dwelling for the 2 years it would take us to build a cob house. We would have oodles more space than we have in the static, including room for a bath and a washing machine (my two things I miss most), larger rooms for the kids etc. It would be massively more weatherproof than the static in terms of not worrying about losing the roof etc and it should be far more insulated and weather proof in terms of not having the same condensation / damp / cold issues we have in here. I think it is likely to come in at a price we can try and raise from massive saving over the next 6 months from winkle picking, venison processing, my post office /shop job, looking at trying to get some writing work, maybe another cash injection from my parents and potentially some crowd funding. If I can make it a viable croft expense we could also get some croft funding towards it too. All still very early stages as we are costing it out at the moment and there is a balance between wanting something much better than we have now but still keeping it affordable and being aware it remains a temporary housing solution rather than a forever house. I am very aware of Davies and Scarlett having now spent over 2 years living in a campervan or a caravan though and while it is another metal box rather than a proper house it is incrementally better again…I’m waiting on feedback with prices from the drawings I’ve sent and then we’d need to start looking at the logistics of making it happen. It feels good to have a plan which no longer relies on Osborne Drive selling though.

Ady and Davies checked for eggs but there were none which blew my plan of making a birthday cake for Mel out so I made birthday tiffin instead. Except Ady had been snaffling my biscuit stash so I only had half the required amount which made for a very sticky tiffin without the biscuit to bind the chocolate and syrup glue.

Then it was down to the hall for the monthly residents association meeting. All very benign and mild stuff this month. Afterwards we joined Vikki in heading to the castle to celebrate Mel’s birthday with her. The kids xboxed (Davies’ x box is there), we played pictionary and ate pizza and chips and drank fizz then had birthday tiffin to finish. It was all lovely. And Ady and I won pictionary 🙂

We got almost all the way up the hill before the hail started again so ran the last little bit and are now tucked up very warm and cosy while it continues to blow a gale out there.