Still Waiting.

I'm not a patient person. You'll often find me muttering away under my breath (or sometimes a little too loudly for DH's comfort) when someone is holding up the queue at the checkout. A pet peeve is when someone has been waiting for ages to be served and then holds everyone else up while they get their money (or debit card) out of their purse. Why on earth didn't they get it sorted whilst they were waiting? Surely, as I try to do, they had time to work out an approximation of what their goods cost and have their payment ready so they don't hold up the rest of us. 

Anyway, with my lack of the virtue of patience, I am finding this whole house selling/buying thing bloody frustrating. We are still waiting on our buyer to come up with the money. He's the one we were assured had no problems with finance at the very beginning of this process, so why are we and our sellers and their sellers all ready with our contracts sitting signed and dated with our respective solicitors while he's still awaiting his building society's decision? 

Grrrrrr! 

We should have been packing up the last of our stuff this weekend ready to move on Monday, instead we still have no idea whether the deal will actually go through at all or whether we're going to have to start all over again.

Anyway, as much as I feel like throwing in the towel and staying put (although I really, really don't want to stay here), we're being proactive and have a viewer coming round on Wednesday afternoon...just in case our buyer doesn't get his money sorted, but also to give him a kick up the bum and let him know we're not going to just sit and wait for him forever. If this viewer was to offer cash (or substantially more than our buyer is paying) then we might very well be tempted to accept. The person due to view last Wednesday cancelled, so we'll have to see if this one even turns up.

On another topic, I had a wonderful time with my old school friend and two hours in the coffee shop flew by. Some reminiscing was done about school days, but a lot of the time was spent catching up on our lives since school. Funnily enough, although we've gone in completely opposite directions, we still had quite a lot in common. She's never married, made a career out of nursing and, apart from 10 years spent working in London, has lived in her childhood home with her parents who have now both passed away. Whereas I went from job to job before having kids, marrying and going on to have a large brood and not working for over 30 years. Even so we both have collected teddy bears (she still does but I sold my collection a few years ago), we still like to write fiction as we did at school, like me she's never learned to drive and for similar reasons (hate being in traffic and both feel we would do better learning to drive the car on waste ground before ever going on the road) and we both enjoy coach holidays. She admitted to also being nervous about the meeting and wondering whether we'd find enough to chat about, but in the end that was no problem. We've both agreed to do it again, maybe once a month and hopefully get together with a few other friends who she keeps in touch with. 

I also went to my craft club on Thursday morning and there were a lot more people there so it was a lively gathering. Like me most people are knitting for various charities. I took along a pile of knitting magazines that I'd sorted out and they were pounced on by the ladies.

So, although I didn't make any actual new years resolutions, my determination to make this year the year I got out more and joined more things is well on track, only being put on hold last week when I was ill. I'm all better now, and so is DH after having three days off work with the same bug. He seems to have kicked it a lot faster than I did though. 

I've been making more dinners with leftovers today. There were some chicken legs and wings, a few slices of pork and a little stuffing in the freezer left from Christmas. I used the chicken, half a jar of Chicken Supreme sauce from the fridge, a splash of white wine, an onion, some frozen sliced mushrooms and a few frozen peas to make a chicken supreme with rice for dinner today. I chopped up the pork and combined it in the slow cooker with carrots, onions, celery, a tin of mixed beans, some roast parsnips left from Xmas, a couple of stock cubes, pepper and thyme to make a casserole for Monday. The stuffing was mixed in with 250g sausage meat leftover from the roast I did earlier in the week. It was packed into a puff pastry crust, spread with some spiced apple chutney and topped with more pastry to make a pie for tomorrow. There was also a bit of pastry left so I rolled it thinly, cut into 4, spread each piece with jam and made into turnovers with a little granulated sugar sprinkled on top. My freezer is definitely looking empty these days, but even so there's at least a week's worth of dinners in there.

Have you had snow? We've had a spattering but nothing that's settled; it's mostly just been cold, damp and depressing. We might have a bit more tomorrow, but it's more likely to rain. I'm fed up with winter now, can we move in to spring please? Shouldn't wish time to pass too quickly, should I?

That's all for now folks. Sorry about the moaning. Enjoy  the remainder of your weekend. Love, Helen xx