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As Christmas Day is almost upon us, I thought I would wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and thank you all for still coming by to visit, even when I haven't been around much to post.

It's not been a great year for me, but I can see light at the end of the tunnel and am looking forward with a new sense of optimism to 2020. It's the start of a new decade, and somehow that fill me full of hope.

Today will be a quiet one, very little work is waiting for me in my inbox so I'll tidy, clean a bit and make some plans for the New Year. I'm quite liking this post on MSE; 20 things to accomplish in 2020 So I'm going to sit here and have a think about what I could do to join this challenge.


So, have a wonderful time everyone and I'll see you again soon.

xxSteelkittenxx
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While cleaning out the hot drinks cupboard recently I was shocked to discover that my penny-pinching ways had come to bite me on the bum.

For some reason, I had a number of packets of tea leaves, some bought from yellow-sticker sections, and all were expired. One was dated 2015. 😱 And yet every cup of tea I drink is made from a teabag.

I'm loathe to throw anything away, especially when it is stored in unopened foil fresh containers. The Cath Kidston tin of Darjeeling was a present, one box was pure Assam and the third box was standard black tea. There was also a tin with about half a pack of normal tea, which had actually gone stale and tasted a bit odd.

It's not penny-pinching if you don't use it so I took the bull by the horns and decanted the whole lot into one big food bag and gave it a good shake to mix it. Then I made up a pot in my little ladybug teapot and sat down for a taste test.

It's lovely. Phew. Situation saved.

I now have 1lb 4 oz of tea leaves to make my way through before I touch another tea bag.

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"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."
Robert Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)
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Goodness me, we've had some horrible days weatherwise here (not as bad as further north of England though). I've woken up a few times in the night this week to hear the rain lashing down and one night I ended up putting my heated blanket on at 4am I was that cold! We have an all year 10 + 4 tog duvet and at the moment we have on the 4 tog plus a quilted bed cover. Look like I'll be switching to the 10 tog duvet this week. 

In addition to having fires most nights, to combat the cold on Tuesday I put the joint carcass from the weekend into the slow cooker overnight with a slightly worse for wear onion, carrot and some leftover gravy plus some salt and pepper and used the resulting stock to make leak and potato soup with a bit of GF spaghetti chopped up in it. That was dinner for us all one day, for MIL and I on another day, and for three days on the trot I had a big mugful for lunch as well. I also did slow cooker sausage casserole from the BBC Good Food website. I had everything in the recipe bar sweet potatoes but I substituted in butternut squash. I also added a tin of baked beans to thicken it up a bit more as they cooked down, plus five gluten-free suet dumplings. Haven't had dumplings for ages and they were lush. That was dinner for all of one night, Martin the next night and today I'm going to liquidise the remains for soup and have it for my lunch 😁 I'm really stretching the food this week, which is a good job as I spotted an offer on the recipe page and ended up treating myself to 5 issues of the Good Food magazine for £5! I'm usually pretty good with cancelling offer subscriptions before I'm due to make a full price payment so that is a nice treat for me coming in for the next few months and will hopefully give me some inspiration. 15 years of cooking almost every night has left me a bit jaded. 

 Unfortunately, this bargain led on to me finding an offer of 5 issues of Country Life for £5 😳 😁 I do like Country Life but it's quite expensive so I only ever buy it when it is on offer or sometimes someone buys me a quarterly subscription for xmas.

On the two nice sunny days we had, the chickens got a good old scratch in the pig pen, and I managed sweep the patio and paths, remove the saucers from under the plants and wind up the hosepipes for winter. Martin cut the front lawn but couldn't get to the back lawn before spots of rain started. Due to my fatigue I had temporarily stopped going to the gym in September as it was exhausting me further, but this week on the nice days I went back and eased myself in gently with two 30 minute sessions on the treadmill. It's important for me to keep up the routine of walking, as it strengthens my dodgy knee, helps me lose weight and contributes to my health self-care.

 Talking of health, my 76-year old mother had her hip replaced last Friday. It's remarkable how hip replacements have come on so far now they are treated as a routine procedures. Her operation was at 1:30pm, she was out by 3:10pm, and she had sedation and a spinal block so she recovered quicker. She was taking herself to the toilet that night, was up and around by Saturday, had a physio assessment and was tackling stairs by the Sunday morning, and home by 3pm that day. She's only taking paracetamol for wound pain and has a single anti-coagulant pill to take every day for three weeks. Every now and then she goes to the GP for a wound dressing change. Remarkable. To be fair, she has been doing her exercises to ease her hip pain for a few months and we think that's why she's doing so well now. Her leg muscles are strong. If she had to do it again, I think she would have added some arm strengthening exercises into the mix as she has to put her weight on crutches and then two walking sticks, which requires a bit of upper body strength.  

 Anyway, she was discharged from hospital before I could get up to see her so yesterday I took the day off and visited.The journey down was ok but coming back was frightful. Took me nearly three hours to get home in the dark instead of the usual 1hr 45 due to the howling rain and traffic. 

Stupid me thought it would be ok to drive back around 4pm on a Friday. Of course, a lot of people leave work early on a Friday so it was chocker on the main routes. I was going to go out into town today to do a bit of charity shop snuffling and buy a few bits of food but I'm still in bed drinking tea with the heated blanket on and sore shoulders from gripping the steering wheel so I'm giving it a miss. I've asked Martin to swing by the supermarket and buy the few bits we need.

I might catch up on some knitting, reading and do the finances, the latter of which is giving me a little cause for concern. One of the funds we have some investments in is an Invesco fund, and Invesco is in the news at the moment as the fund manager has been following Neil Woodford's investing rationale - the Neil Woodford whose funds have collapsed recently. So I need to do some research and reading, and see if the risks have increased beyond what I'm happy with to continue with Invesco. 
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So, I'm back. I'm feeling stronger, a lot wiser and ready to post again with some semblance of regularity. I'm still pretty tired, but that comes and goes in waves and I'm more relaxed than I have been in years.

First order of the day - Fleagle. We're very sad that she is gone and miss her very much: she was a funny cat with very human ways and her loss opened up a gap in our lives. Georgie was obviously missing Fleagle too, much to our surprise as we thought they never really got along but it appears that having another cat in the house made him feel secure. He was very clingy with us, off his food, and kept going round and round the house yowling and looking for her. He stopped going outside for anything more than a sniff of the wind and suddenly started to shadow us from room to room.


We never planned to get another cat so soon, but one thing led to another and we had the opportunity to adopt a three year old Maine Coon called Snowy. Her owner was moving from the Midlands to a small flat in London and wanted to find her somewhere rural so she could have a better life than she would have if she went with him.


We weren't sure how Georgie would take to another cat; with him being deaf and also losing his sense of smell we thought introductions would be tough. However, within a week of having Snowy he is relaxed once more, going outside for longer periods and scoffing food again. They're not 100% relaxed in each other's company but they are able to sit about a foot away from each other without incident and sniff noses occasionally. We have plenty of catnip to hand to make sure every interaction is a positive one so they build up trust.


Snowy is very timid and addicted to tuna in brine, which we are going to have to work hard to replace as it is no good for cats as anything other than an occasional treat. They need a complete food with plenty of taurine. Already after a week her playfulness and loving nature are shining through. She is extremely inquisitive and once she finds her feet, she's going to be a beautiful little terror! She knows that she is on Georgie's territory and he is the boss, which helps with the introductions enormously. When Georgie arrived on our doorstep in 2007 he was the opposite and he tried to take over, only to be repeatedly slapped down by Sophie and Fleagle. He never stopped trying. It's only taken him 12 years to be Head of the Feline Household :)


The pigs and sheep have gone to the abattoir so I now have four freezers full to them brim with meat, which should last us around 18 months.  The sheep went in June and the pigs last Monday. We won't now have any more animals until 2021. The pigs were pedigree Oxford Sandy and Blacks and were tremendous diggers, so much so we feared for the trees, but they produced some great lean meat.





I was very strict with weighing their dried food, after the last lot of pigs had kilos of excess fat due to me mismanaging this aspect. They also had all the grass, apples, pears and acorns they could stuff themselves with, plus the odd slice of bread as a treat. I kept my distance and did not get too attached, and the trip to the abattoir was as good as it gets. Everyone was friendly and calm, and they simply walked down the ramp and into their pen without any fear or fuss. I was so grateful to the abattoir staff who were exceptionally kind and professional.

The rest of the smallholding is in a bit of a state. Being so tired I just don't have the energy to do more than the basics but the wildlife will thrive on my neglect so there's a silver lining there.

I've been focusing on my physical and mental health and wellbeing. I've managed to lose 10lbs by walking for a minimum of 45 minutes 5-6 times a week, so I fit better in my clothes, and I'm making sure I spend less time doing chores and more time doing things I enjoy.

I'm knitting Martin a jumper, getting back into baking and cooking, doing some painting by numbers and lots of reading.  And of course, bargain snuffling.






I even managed a trip to Cyprus with my sister. Here's me fishing off the back of a boat near Larnaca. I was up the competitive end with a load of Russian men and I caught a fish. They didn't :) 


So all in all, still ticking along :)

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I'm sorry I haven't been here for a while. I'm still getting to grips with a lot of things and haven't felt up to posting but I thought today it would be appropriate to post. My beautiful little scruffbag died yesterday. It was very sudden, a heart attack, preceded by a short period of panting. She was gone within moments. I knew something was very wrong and had managed to get her to the car for the vets but she died on the driveway, with me holding her, before i could start the car. I went anyway, just in case she was in a coma, but it was pretty obvious to everyone she was gone.

I am beyond gutted. I feel completely heartbroken this morning.


We rescued her in September 2004, a month after I moved in with Martin, from an elderly breeder that had lost control of the cats. She was eight weeks old and neglected by everyone. 



She was fighting out every meal time with seven adult cats, so wasn't getting much food, and those memories of being hungry stayed with her all her life. 

 It was apparent to us as she grew that she was some type of odd breed because of her appearance and how large she was. She was the epitome of a gangly teenager, with enormous paws and legs. 

Later she developed a proper double water-resistant undercoat, which was hell to look after as she had not been taught to groom herself properly by her mother, so we were regularly brushing a triple coat full of greasy waterproofing. She had a neck ruff, fluffy inner ears with 'lynx-like' tufts on the top and a huge plume of a tail. We now know she was either a pure breed or hybrid Siberian Forest cat.

She grew into a beautiful animal.



She attached to me as I was home freelancing all day and was usually always to be found near me or on me in some way, inside or out.





If I got up, she got up. I went to the bathroom, she came with me. I cooked, she stood behind me. I remember sitting on the floor stripping a doorframe once and she came over and sat next to me on my skirt so she could be near me. She didn't care what I was doing, as long as she was near me.







She was very intelligent and talkative. She had a wide repertoire of noises, far wider than any other cat we've come across. It meant we could usually decipher what she wanted. It also meant she could huff at us if we annoyed her, which was usually when the word "no" was used. Fleagle was not a "no" cat. She actually seemed at times like a dog - we could play fetch with her if she was in the mood and we could find her favourite rattly mouse.


We'd occasionally find her watching TV, lounging back against the sofa cushions, completely at ease, her eyes following everything on the screen.






In later years she became obese, driven by her childhood fear of being hungry, and no matter what we did she always found food; stealing from other cats and dogs, breaking into people's houses, eating bird food left on people's lawns or food dropped by passers by. Nothing was off limits - she had no recognition of species-specific food or limits to the quantity she would eat. Diets only worked for the short term until she'd find a way to obtain food and then it would go back on again. She would eat rubber bands, feathers, ribbons and string so playtimes were very carefully supervised to stop her eating her toys. The vet thought it might be a mental illness of sorts. At her heaviest she topped 18.5lbs.


It was only when we moved to Lincolnshire we could finally get her weight under control. With no near neighbours the only food she could get would be what we put down for her, and over the last three years she slimmed down to 11lbs.

But age crept up. Her fur lost its lustre and became a bit scruffy, no matter how much you brushed. She slowed down and jumping was out of the question so I made her steps onto the sofa and bed so she could still get around. She took to quietly sitting outside for a while each day in the last few months, even bringing back mice every now and then for a cheese treat. She was never a mouser but seems to find enjoyment in it towards the end when she figured out mouse = treat. Ever Fleagle :)




She was my constant companion every day and I am bereft. I shall miss her dreadfully.

She's being cremated and then will come home to sit on my bedside table so she can be right next to me again always, just the way we both liked.

Love you baby girl.
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I've spent a lot of time over the last few weeks relaxing. So while this post is about pensions, the photos are about how I've attempted to mimic the cats and de-stress, and I am typing this post in approximately the same position as Fleagle above. It feels good. I have an idleness deficit I need to address :)

Anyway, Martin and I started our retirement plan about 10 years ago and we're over the halfway point in terms of time; we have four more years before Martin retires and 9 years before I do. We are not, however, over the halfway point in terms of money. I'm pretty sure we'll be on track until Martin retires, but after that things are now looking a bit squeaky. I always knew money would be a little tight after he stops work but I wanted to ensure we had the whole property updated before then and that's where some of the issues are.

After you retire you only have a set amount of money to live off so there may not enough in the budget to do big updates plus it's in my mind that if Martin and I decide to convert our barns and downsize to them, we will have to either rent or sell off this property, and it will need to be in good condition either way. In addition to all of this, we still have to make progress on the restoring our classic car projects. These add up to a tidy chunk of money in our retirement one day (fingers' crossed!) but not if they sit there rotting gently away year after year. Now summer is here, Martin is getting excited about the possibility of doing another restoration but as ever, money is the perennial issue.


(while that box doesn't look comfy, Georgie was so relaxed he dropped off to sleep for two hours.) So, we've sat down and had a look at things again. He's going to thin out some of the project cars we have to release cash to do others. Fortuitously, some of that cash will come back into our joint account, as a lot of the project cars were originally bought with joint money, but it will be temporarily diverted into our emergency fund for now until we find out what is happening with Brexit. As I've said before, my job relies on being able to access a pot of cash held by the European Union so that may be off limits after Brexit. If I'm going to be made redundant, I don't want to be caught on the hop without cash reserves.

But the gap between what we need and what we would have after Martin retired has been bothering me so I decided to go through everything to do with the pensions with fresh eyes, thinking maybe something would jump out. I was sorting through some old leaflets and pamphlets from Royal Mail about the pension and impending changes and my eyes spotted something I hadn't seen before. There was a small section on flexible pensions. Our plan has always been to leave Martin's pension in place to grow until he is 65,  because he would miss out on the growth for the those last few years if he took it, however, after reading the bit on flexible pensions and researching on the internet, it seems that Martin can take part of his pension at 60 and part at 65. What Martin built up prior to 2008 in his final salary pension makes up the 'retire at 60' part (NRA60) and the new scheme he was put into after 2008 is the 'retire at 65' part (NRA65). I thought they were all in one pot but they are both are separate. I fundamentally misunderstood how his pension worked.


I'm assuming that the NRA60 part of the pension is moved into safer funds that don't have a lot of risk, but also don't produce much return so he wouldn't be missing out on much by taking the NRA60 bit when he supposed to. So, he could take the 'retire at 60' part and keep on working until 62, which means we would have surplus income that could go straight into his self-invested pension, giving that a boost to the tune of about £5k + 20% tax relief each year.

I was pretty shocked I hadn't seen that before. That plugs the gap that had opened up between 62 and 65 and makes things look a lot less squeaky. Of course many a slip could happen before then - the government could introduce all sorts of silliness to throw us off course, but for now it looks like we're back on track.

It's been a good week :)
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It's been over five weeks since I last blogged and even longer since I read anyone else's blog. Hope all of you are well and for those of you with blogs I am slowly making my way round reading up on all of your news.

I'm afraid the stress of work and home life took its toll in May and I became so drained I had to withdraw and focus on only those things six inches in front of my nose. I wasn't a cheery person. It can be inspiring sometimes when blog authors set aside the carefully curated content normally on show to open up when their life is on a downer because it shows they suffer the same trials as the rest of us but in this case I was on such a downer writing about it would have made things worse for me. So I withdrew from everything, even going out, talking to people and self-care.

My GP surgery has a mental health nurse so I went to see her for a chat (i.e. I blubbed massively in front of her) and she told me about an NHS service called Talking Therapies, which I could self-refer to. I gave it a call, had an assessment and chose to do a five week self-help course. Once a week I attended a session where counsellors explained the impact of anxiety and stress, the role of negative thinking and gave us homework to do every week to help us begin to understand the factors at play in our own lives that were contributing to our mental health in positive and negative ways.

It has been eye-opening to discover I have had anxiety all of my life (which I thought was just normal scenario planning), and which has become quite severe over the last few months since I came back from Australia. Being removed from every day life for three weeks helped me relax more than I ever have over the last 15 years (in fact, since the last time I went to Australia) and then trying to cope (or go 'back in the box') when I came back brought everything to a head. I knew I felt that living with my MIL was hard but wasn't consciously aware that some of my feelings were the same as I experienced when I was living at home with my own parents, which I did not like and I left as soon as I was able to financially support myself at 19. My brain remembered, however, and has been employing all sorts of physical and mental protection strategies, the majority of which were/are simply not necessary and made me unwell.

I'm now feeling better able to cope with life. Tomorrow I have my course assessment, and I will decide whether I want to go on and talk to a psychologist or work with the strategies I have learned on the course for a bit longer. They can take up to 12 weeks to have an impact as they gain strength and momentum the more they are practised. I have no idea at the moment which way to go but my conversation with the nurse tomorrow will help me decide.

So that's it really. I do have a few things to blog about that have happened over the last few weeks. The sheep were sheared, the Oxford Sandy and Black weaners have arrived, and I have returned to bargain snuffling and reading, as they are two of the things I identified on the course that I enjoyed and had stopped doing, but that is for another day.
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Apologies for my slow rate of posting lately. Since I came back from holiday my health has taken a downturn due to having a low white cell count, which would account for my headaches, fatigue and general soreness and aches. I had a short cold about a week after we came back, which I think may have triggered an immune flare. Combined with the new gym workout, busy period at work and psychological stress of starting to drive, I've triggered a storm.

So, progress has been slow and I haven't been able to do a great deal. I decided to focus my attention of repairing/maintaining some of what we already have rather than starting any new projects. I finally cleaned up the Victorian cast iron downpipe near the barns which has been annoying me since we moved in nearly three years ago. The flaky blue and green paint has been replaced with smart black paint and the huge grey rectangular cracked water butt has gone.




I have three nice green butts to take its place that I found secondhand on eBay so I just have to connect those up.



We've started giving the summerhouse a bit of a makeover. I've cleared out the Plague chairs, two old chairs that were infested with insects and who knows what else (hence the name). I left them outside for a couple of days to let the inhabitants relocate before they went onto the pile for the tip. I've painted the unfinished wood supports either side of the structure at the front with some old cream Cuprinol paint. I rescued two full tins from someone who was throwing them out because they'd gone a bit rusty in their damp garage. The contents were perfect and both had £24.99 Homebase stickers on them!


To replace the chairs, we found a two-seater wicker sofa and armchair plus a small pine side table on eBay locally for £95. The rug is a bound carpet cut off I unearthed in the attic (along with the clock), while the lamp came from my father. I remember that lamp in the house when I was growing up so it has to be a good 40 years old.




The sofa throws are actually curtains; I found them for £6 in a charity shop a while back in a William Morris Golden Lily pink and light green colourway I've not come across before. The two patchwork quilts are also secondhand finds, one from a local charity shop and the other from a car boot sale in Australia.

I now work in there during the day to get some peace and quiet from the cats and MIL's phone habit. At the moment we have to run an extension cable reel in there for electricity but there is power to the pond pump about 15 feet away so we'll sort out a more discrete arrangement for power at a later date using that. I still have to add two front pieces to top of the summerhouse so you don't see the joists, do some flower baskets for the outside and add some pictures to the inside.

Finally, I'm trying to get the back lawn to look halfway decent. The previous owners cut the lawn on a high setting and never scarified it so the grass is bent over and soft and springy underfoot, as well as uneven and full of ankle-spraining hills and valleys. Some pieces of the grass are over six inches long but about four inches of that runs along the ground with only the last two inches popping up to be cut.



So, last week I started scarifying and cut it back hard. I've extracted five full wheelbarrows of thatch and moss and I'm only a third done on it. Once complete, I'll mix up some sterilised topsoil and lawn seed and rake that over to even everything out. With any luck, by the autumn we should have a half decent looking lawn that we can cross without twisting an ankle.

I haven't posted lately about my Grow Your Own efforts as that has been dismal so far. Poor germination, dying seedlings, cold, cats, birds, mice, you name it we've had it. I'm too annoyed and tired to post about that! That could be an epic whine so I'll leave that for another day.
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