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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