Frugaleers, keeping their frugal resolutions in the new year. Keep on, erm, resoluting!?

[Cagliostro]

Hello everyone! :)

Nsd today, boots arrived yesterday, they are a bit snug around the ankles but I'm keeping them. Perhaps they will stretch or I will shrink and can always not do them right up to the top??? Maybe??
Happy Birthday Need!

Happy birthday need

Managed a nsd, as stuck at the shop, but dropped off some extra work, so that will be a bit more pay next week (I work from home, doing piece work for a local company. It's literally pocket money, but the deal I made with myself is it goes straight to my credit card, every little helps).

Had a Maccy-D's for tea - dp paid - now lying down with tummy pain! Not had any take out for over a month.

Been to options evening with dd1 how did this happen, where did my tiny 6lb baby go? Why is it picking gcse's? Can anyone explain the english baccalaureate thing to me? Her form tutor couldn't not helpful is it an extra thing as well as gcse's? Is it necessary do you think? Dd doesn't want to do it so she can drop french in favour of more dt.

Happy birthday, Need. Hope you're having a good day.
Girlie and girlieDD get well soon
Need, that soup looks wonderful. And it's cheap and veggie. Definitely will make some of that.
Snuggly, a few threads back, Cath did a graph showing which appliances cost most/ least. Microwave and toaster were expensive I think.
If you get a smart meter and then change suppliers can you still use the meter or do you have to get a new one?
Good luck with the job application Life.
NSD.
With all the talk about baked beans a few pages ago I decided I needed some. Just had beans on toast. ......microwave and toaster....not really frugal, but le yum (well at least to me).

Did you have cheese on top Trying?

I was wondering the same thing about the smart meter, trying, I don't know! That's a good point about jacket spuds, creme, even microwaving them for 10 mins would use loads of power.

Thanks to everyone wishing me well for my scan. No change since last week so still monitoring. They weren't measuring growth this time though, that is fortnightly so we'll know more next week!
Only a few more weeks until they arrive! I feel totally unprepared and it still doesn't seem real. I need to do some baby shopping and get organised, we haven't even got nappies yet!

Happy Birthday Need, I hope you have a lovely evening

A microwave is 700-1000w, so running it is 7-10p an hour on my tarrif. But it's not heating all the time. If you ran it 10 minutes it would be about 2p.

You can do jackets in a slow cooker.

A cheap halogen oven would save money, they're very good for small families. It's 1200w heating 12l of oven, even my tiny built in oven is 2000w heating 53l of space. It heats up instantly.

£3 Tesco, cheesecake and cat food.

Totally fucked up dinner, Dh has had mash, gravy and yorkie puds. The beef went in the sc too late. I've had half a cheesecake.

Shoes going back, too big & slightly damaged

I've done jackets in the sc before. Unfortunately I like them best baked for ages with really crispy skins!
fluffy I've just polished off my 3rd helping of "shepherds lasagne" if it makes you feel any better about your dinner disaster! It was quite nice and used up portions of Bolognese and shepherds pie filling out of the freezer that were too small to do anything with on their own.

Happy birthday need!

And thank you lovelies for the kind words as always! It's pretty much the only reason I ever think of what happened now, as it's annoying that it's still left a legacy when mentally I am basically 'over it' (which sounds rather basic, it certainly wasn't and it took several years of therapy and hard work, but you know what I mean!). But anyway. Onward and upward! I may be physically more frail than I would've been without all that happening, but mentally I am a whole lot stronger. :) :)

Today has been good, tiring as Thursdays always are and I came straight to bed as soon as we got home today. We're really settling into our little (and FREE unless we have a hot chocolate :o) habit of hanging out at the library between clubs though. It's getting easier each time to be there. The Caglets didn't actually want to leave and we nearly missed the bus to Badgers! They were too busy doing some of their projects. DD also chose a lovely book about Malala which she's been thoroughly engrossed in all evening.

Spends:
£20 food
£2 to friend for the scrapbooks she picked up for our new learning co-op (that will go under home ed budget)
£1 printing stuff for Badgers projects

Happy birthday need.
I think I need to do a spreadsheet so I can work out who everyone is!!
I think the smart meter is a government thing so once it's in it's in doesn't matter who your supplier is.
I've had a bacon butty for tea 😀😀 I had my main meal at lunch. Pork,stuffing, roast pots,mash,broccoli,swede and carrot and gravy £2.07 in my works canteen.
I'm going to try and eat out of my freezer the next few days there's loads in there. Hopefully it will be a cheap food shop this week.

Me too snuggs, with that chicken curry only the street sellers get right . 3 portions eh? One for you and one for each baby. Have you finished work now?.

I'm glad you're getting over that bug Creme. That's good news. Keep taking care of yourself there.

Fluffy that's really useful information on the cost of baking potatoes. I tried them in the slow cooker but they do some special process in there that makes them taste slightly different from oven or microwave ones and I wasn't keen on it. I like microwave ones though, so I just do that. I also slightly miss oven ones, but it seems a lot of energy for one potato. Maybe bonfires are the way to go.

We reconfigured ds's mindstorms lego set into the snake design today and he was really excited until we discovered that the computer programme makes it weave from side to side and strike in a really terrifying manner like a real cobra. Ds nearly had to be peeled off the ceiling and I had to take the snake's head off to render it safe. As a biologist I was impressed both by the snake and by ds's instinctive reaction. Mindstorms has been really worth the money; snake-fright notwithstanding.

I'm still brewing this flu thing so I'm wrapped in duvets and trying to boil it out. yay! for hot water bottles.

£8 in b&q, £4 fitness,

Happy birthday need
Get well soon frugaleers

I boil out bugs too. "take a paracetamol, your boiling hot" "but I need to run a temperature" Dh is very by it all.

Maybe frozen jackets are the way to go. From aldi obv.

Someone asked about the IB - don't do it. Its something that the she pushes because Michael Gove wanted it (some private schools do it). Its not worth it. Do the subject you want and choose appropriate A Levels - if you want to go to Uni. If you want to go to Art /work /apprenticeship then do art subjects.
Be firm with the school. If they tell you the subjects don't work with the timetable tell them to make it work. I used to have kids at the back of my class whilst I was teaching a yr 8 class, doing History because they wanted to do History (gcse) not French so that's how we got around it.

Am feeling slightly better I think, have spent the majority of the day in bed which is unheard of!! Dd def better and will be back to school tomorrow, she has been a today and basically sorted herself out and looked after me!

Its nice she is at that age now that she can be more independent and useful

Have managed a NSD, payday tomorrow which I am very excited about!!

Also had a lady turn up and buy a big of dds clothes for £20 ystd so that was good.

It's funny, cos I use the microwave as much as I can, but for jacket potatoes, I only ever think of doing them in the oven. Strange. In fact, I don't know how to make them in the microwave! I'm also of the few people on here who doesn't like slow cookers (I have a cast iron casserole though), but I might look into the halogen oven. That could work well for DS and I.

I want to switch from ovo energy as soon as I get my £140 warm homes discount from them. What's the point in not giving them out before the depths of winter? Eon gave me it in October when I was with them, so it helped me a lot. Also, ovo's standing charge for my tariff is 46 pence per day, which I think is very expensive.

Oh and jacket spuds I do 10 mins in the microwave and 10 mins in the oven - best of both worlds then!

Thanks Girlie, I'll give that a go for the spuds. What temperature in the oven, if they're only in for 10 minutes?

Glad you're feeling better. I think spending most of Sunday and a good deal of Monday in bed helped me recover quite quickly.

Jumping back in again, I am finding you lot hard to keep up with so I haven't read the thread.
Pay day and a nice short month ahead, so that's good. All my pots are empty as December and January and holiday bookings have wiped us out. I am going to have to be so careful this month and every month for a while.

Aldi today - £45 but that was lots of cleaning products so hopefully back to £35 next week. I've also spent £20 on signing up to do a charity walk.

I've started doing more survey sites again, I'm hopeful that I can make £30-40 a month on them. That would really help!

Creme I also struggle with slow cookers, but I found one with a stainless steel pot this year and we use it only for very strongly flavoured things that dh eats, like curries and chillies and things like that. It seems to work okay for him. More subtle things like joints of meat I just do in the oven.

Jacket potatoes in the microwave, you just put in a small casserole dish and microwave them on high for 10 or 11 minutes. They are nice but don't have the oveny brownness or crisp skin. They's one of my staples though.

Fluffy I'm delighted to hear that you boil out bugs too. I learned it from my dh and it seems to work well for him.

Glad to hear things are looking up there Girlie and that your dd is being such a . Sorry to hear that you were stuck in bed all day. I hope you feel better soon.

I put my oven on 200 (electric) which at a guess is a 6ish on a gas oven? I only bought a microwave last summer and have been pleased with how quick and nice I can do jacket potatoes now its dds favourite dinner!! If they are big spuds I would give them another 5 mins or so in the oven.

I agree with you re resting for a day or two, I sort of know when I am properly poorly and have to admit defeat. Have had a good run of it up until now though, think last time I was this ill was when I had proper flu about 3 years or more ago!!

We had quite a big frugal win in the make-do-and-mend department today.

We thought our big workhorse colour laser printer had had its chips. We did lots of taking apart and googling and we were really starting to think it was done for.

Then dh had a brainwave and realised that the page we were printing that was sticking in the printer over and over again was a full colour image and that maybe the ink was too sticky.

We printed a plain sheet with a little bit of text on and the printer worked fine. It turns out that that other page was just too much ink and the wrong colour. Mysterious!

So our printer is saved. Phew!

need happy birthday!!!

cag if you can get dd a copy of zlatas diary. It's like a modern day Anne frank (about her life in bindis during the war).

Loving the pics of the gorgeous woofers!!!

Nsd today!

Work. Then spinning. My legs hurt now. And my stomach. I hurt in places I didn't know I had muscles.

Dh made chicken stuffed with cheesey bacon sauce for dinner. With onion rings. Best dinner ever.

I'm in bed now with catface. She's taken up residence at the end of the bed. Dh is in the spare room tonight on account of him having a cold from hell. I was awake at 3am wanting to smother him to stop the snotting and snorting and snoring.

I also do jackets 10 mins in microwave and finish in oven.

I also had a bowl of cereal, fluffy! Last day tomorrow. Going out for a meal to celebrate. Luckily today was NSD.