Monday 13th December 2021: Monday again and as I read through the blog from this time last year not much has changed. I am still having to rubrics cube everything in order to get sorted for Christmas, move things from one place to another so that I can get the once a year decorations in. I know it would be bah humbug not to do it but sometime I must think life would be so much easier 🤪 This year is actually slightly different as we don’t have the Rayburn any longer, how is that going you might ask, brilliant is my reply 😁 Apart from not being able to get into a routine for washing and drying the clothes it is all good, it is so nice to go out and come back to a warm house. It has freed up a lot of time and it is cleaner I just don’t want to look at the electric bill when it arrives 😝 One day we will get the solar panels and storage batteries then it will be tickety boo.
This morning we went off to get the last bits of Christmas shopping and so I am pretty much done now (almost) Once back home we sat and had a cuppa and a rest before getting on with any other jobs that needed doing. John went out to try and fix the car door, the front passenger door has been playing up for months. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, sometimes you can open it from the outside, sometimes not and now we can’t open from the outside or the inside. Three times someone has had a go at sorting it out, John, John mad my Sister and the garage when it went for an MOT, each time it kind of worked for a while and then it stops working. This time John could not fix it and so finally he has booked it into the garage to get it fixed properly, instructing then to buy a new part for it. It is a pain in the backside as I have to jeep getting in the back when it won’t open. Meanwhile I was indoors sorting out so sides of the rubics cube 😂 Moving the spare room around so that I can get the grandchildren’s toybox in there so that I can get the Christmas tree where the toybox usually lives. Then complaining to John because the furniture we have is too big for the small rooms and it’s impossible to manoeuvre the vacuum cleaner around the room. My personal opinion is that the designing of rooms and furniture (including kitchens) should really only be done by women because they (on the whole) are the ones who have to clean them or use them 😜
Tuesday: I did the morning rounds while John went off to do a few jobs but he was home just after lunch. I had a plan which as usual was scuppered by something else, I had planned to get the house work done so that I could start with the Christmas decorations. I got as far as getting the bathroom cleaned and the towels washed. Then I thought I would check the delivery of my oranges, one box I have the other I haven’t received but in checking I can see that the status was delivered successfully. Nope, nope they have not been delivered to me even though at the time of delivery I was here 🙄 Then I have to spend the next hour going round and round in circles trying to find an email or a contact number to let someone know that I have not received them. You know how that goes, you get directed from one web page to another, at one point I was directed to a German website, I can’t read German so I have no idea what that was all about. The upshot is that the sender thinks I have received them because the carrier says it has delivered them 😏 Eventually I managed to talk to someone on the phone and have to fill in a claim form and they will resend a box of oranges, let’s hope they actually arrive at my address this time.
Wednesday: Ooosh busy morning, John was home today and so we were out before daylight broke to get the animals all fed and watered. I then went on to clean out all the huts and pens in the orchard and replenish with fresh straw and hay and clean out the water holders. I also took a couple of wheelbarrows of woodchip for the light Sussex pen as that is getting a bit mucky. Then John and I started to shift the mountains of type 1 to dust which will cover the lower part of the side driveway, it’s been sat there in two big piles for a few months and we haven’t done all of it yet but we can get a bit done at a time. While we were doing that a delivery of ply sheets arrived and then we had to carry those into the back area. That is easier said than done when you are only 5’3” with small hands, manhandling sheets of 8×4 is a difficult task for me 🤪 After we did that we went to find a Christmas tree, we tried yesterday in the late afternoon but they were all too big for our small sitting room, well now we have a very tiny tree because that was all that was left 😂 It will probably look quite big in our room to be honest, does t really matter a Christmas tree is a Christmas tree. That statement will be unbelievable to my children 😂 in the past all potential houses we bought or altered were viewed with the Christmas tree position in mind 🥰 We don’t have the option here so it is what it is 😜
Thursday: Up at the crack of sparrows to get on this morning. We got the morning rounds all done and then went into town to get some shopping done, the market first to get some bits of fresh veg for Christmas dinner. They will store nicely in the pantry for a week and it means I can beat the Christmas rush which I don’t want to get tangled up in 😜 Then round to the butchers where I ordered some gluten free sausage meat for the stuffing, I could have got a hand of pork and made my own but it’s just another job to add to the list and as they are ami,ing it anyway then I might as well buy it from them. Over to the post office to post some bits and then into the supermarket to get a few bits. I say a few bits, how come I always end up with much more than I thought I needed. I could have bought a whole lot more, there is a tendency to get caught up in buying huge amounts of food for Christmas but luckily I have trained myself pretty well over the years to stop and think about if I really need it or not, mostly it’s not. I have some bits in the freezer that I can get out if we have unexpected visitors but on the whole we won’t eat much ch more differently than we normally do. Once we got back home and unpacked John got on with the work out the back and I spent the rest of the afternoon wrapping presents. The tree still has to come in and it’s a bit little but I think I will put it in the ‘cute’ bracket lol. The twins and Mia arrived after school, Mia went for her swimming lesson and the twins stayed here with us, they seem delighted that their toy is has moved to the spare room, a whole new adventure for two and a half year olds 😜
Friday: John was supposed to go to a job this morning but the chap rang to cancel as he has woken up with a cough and needs to get tested. The infection levels are through the roof with this new variant, Omicron, but so far the hospital admissions and death rate are much, much lower than before so the vaccinations must be working. Watching the news last night the nurse reported that out of 11 patients they had in, 9 were unvaccinated, so it seems that it can still affect you if you are vaccinated but not as much as if you are not. That is not fake news, that is from a nurse on the front line and it’s not the first time I have heard it. There are so many conspiracy theories out there, I struggle to get my head around the fact that all these governments would band together to conspire when they can’t agree on anything else. I also read a comment from someone with a science background that said different departments can’t even agree on what colour pen to use to annotate notes let alone join together for a massive conspiracy 🙄 And I always ask myself, what would be their ultimate aim anyway? It has massively hit the economy, caused millions in spending for the governments which are pretty loathe to spend anything they don’t have to normally, and generally inconvenienced the whole travel system throughout the world, I struggle to see the benefits of any kind of pre organised operation or mass conspiracy. I also think that as much as I detest the probing press, a mere whiff of anything like that and somebody somewhere would be exposing the ‘truth’.
I spent the first 2 hours this morning feeding, watering etc and then moving the horses. The latter involves moving electric fencing stakes and tape and the water buckets, the horses were very happy and did plenty of belting around. They like a change of scenery as much as the rest of us and they certainly like to go on new grazing even if it is mostly standing hay lol. Then it was back inside to get the rest of the presents wrapped and the decorations up, I hate doing it but now I am sat in the festively lit room it feels lovely 🥰 Our tree is tiny 😂 but at least it doesn’t swap the room, there have been years when we could hardly see the tv which is not a bad thing at times 🤪 John came home at lunchtime and he has been busy doing more to the pool room out the back. It is in a kind of lean to (a very robust one) and so he has been insulating it all as well which will make the house even warmer hopefully. It has been fairly mild and the radiators have hardly come on, they are warm in the morning but then they don’t come on for the rest of the day usually. Our replacement window is in apparently but we don’t really want it fitted before Christmas, we can wait until afterwards. The room will then need redecorating as the window is smaller than the existing one and the floor is caving in one area where we had a prolonged leak on the radiator that we hadn’t noticed for months, more jobs on the to do list 😂 At dusk it was time to feed the birds, collect the eggs, put the geese to bed, check the post box and then back in to get the dinner on. Another day done and at least we have the dark evenings to relax 🥰
Saturday: After doing the usual rounds and an early delivery of diy materials we cracked on with the rest of the day. John out the back putting a floor down in his pool room and me making orange muffins. I made the muffins then tried to get some translucent bits of orange made to go on the top as decoration but they didn’t really work out too well. The muffins tasted good though and when Josh and Flo arrived mid morning they did a taste test which I passed 😁 I had them for a few hours while Shelley was working. Once the afternoon rounds were done I got ready to go and do my second stint of babysitting for Sam and Luke. When Sam asked me I was with my sister and she said she would come and babysit with me so that’s what we did. We had a fish and chip supper with the kids and lots of playing and cuddles.
Very foggy on the journey home last night.
Sunday: Up a bit later than usual today, totally exhausted 😂 children never stop talking do they lol, which is good because it’s mostly questions and I love a bit of learning 🥰 But questions like, why does Father Christmas never use the door? And why is God the father of Jesus when Joseph is Mary’s husband are very taxing on the mind 🤪 and how come that all conversations with a 5/6 year old end up talking about poo 😝
The fog was still lingering this morning and it is a tad colder on the finger tips but the sun is trying to peek out and we haven’t seen that for a good few days or more. We got the animals done and then I needed a sit down, I felt tired this morning, I could easily have gone back for another sleep.
The virus infection numbers are climbing rapidly, and with only five days left until the Christmas celebrations begin, I think everyone is holding their breath, trying to dodge catching it and generally very wary. I was thinking that I would like to go out here and there but on reflection I think we won’t bother, I want to spend Christmas with our lot this year so I don’t want to risk it.
Having said that we did nip out today, I wanted to go to a local well known organic farm for a look round and a festive coffee. We had the coffee and the a festive cake and marvelled at the insane prices of everything 😂 Though I really admire their whole ethos on sustainability and organic growing I can’t help but cringe at the niche that people buy in to 🤷♀️ I wander round thinking ‘I can make that for a third of the price’ or ‘why do people need these fancy pants things to grow veg’ It is astounding that a typical rural way of life (growing your own) has in some part become a twee thing to do and a whole industry of expensive equipment to do it with. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for people growing their own but I am confounded by the way it is becoming an artisan craft in some quarters. I am also amazed at the fact that people don’t seem to know how to do these things without going on a very expensive course to learn. How to make a twig, five point star should not cost upwards of £50 even if it does include coffee 😜 I think after all these years I am pretty qualified to teach most of these things but I still couldn’t bring myself to charge that much, maybe that’s where I am going wrong 😑
We are almost at the Winter solstice 🥰 and the year will be on the turn again, it is the return of the light and the Oak King begins his rule. Many of the things we do at Christmas time have roots going back to ancient times, pre Christianity some of them, wreaths are a symbol of the wheel, bringing in greenery, hanging up charms (tree baubles) feasting and blessings however you chose to celebrate, do it well, with love and sincerity, with happiness and hope for the new year. 😁
This weeks blog will be it for the year, thank you all so much for reading my musings and daily goings on. As I have always said it is a diary really, a record of daily life both on and off the Smallholding. Here are few stats for you: 11.1k views, 5,942 visitors to the site, 71 followers on the WordPress site, 16 that have it emailed to them, lots of people who read it on my social media pages (though I don’t have the figures for that) The very first blog was in February 2011 so I am now going into year eleven 😮 at first it was a monthly blog and eventually became weekly and now I try and jot something down daily. Where has all that time gone 🤷♀️ Still the aim is the same, be as self sufficient as possible, look after nature as much as possible, I have learnt a lot along the way and there is plenty left to learn I suspect. I know there are people who hope to live this kind of life that read and people who just enjoy reading about this kind of life, my aim is always to pass on any knowledge I have to anyone who wants to learn. I hope you will be back with me again in the new year and that by the end of next year we have begun to move on from the pandemic but who knows how that is going to pan out 🤷♀️ That just leaves me to wish each and every one of you A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY AND HEALTHY 2022.
frieslandfarm (flowers) 