Ridiculously Happy!

Sorry to have been AWOL for so long and thank you to those people who enquired where I was and how the move went. 

My life has been non-stop since we moved...and yes, it finally happened on 31st March. Almost everything went to plan with just a small hiccup; the people here were so behind with packing that in the end DH and DS2 had to come up and help them or our movers would still have been waiting to unpack at midnight

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I am ridiculously happy to be here in my lovely little house with no noise from the neighbours, far less traffic, a beautiful garden that I'm making full use of and planting up with lots of veg and fruit and a few flowers. 

Not much budgeting going on at the moment as we've had to spend out on various bits and pieces since moving in and will need a new boiler in the near future. But I have managed to fit in some knitting since starting to go regularly to a craft group. 

I also finally gave in and accepted anti-depressants as recommended at the psych assessment I had in March. I am definitely feeling more positive, not sure if that's as much due to the move as the medication but hey-ho I'm definitely in a better place than I was a couple of months ago.

Lots of family stuff happened or is on the horizon soon (wedding, 60th birthday, other birthdays etc.) but I'll leave that for another day.

And this happened in Dover...

Banksy's commentary on Brexit

It is so cleverly done, really looks as if there's a guy up a ladder chipping away at the star but it's all an optical illusion.

DD2 and her hubby are visiting for a few days and we're hopefully all off to Dover Castle shortly for the World War 2 weekend event. If not today then tomorrow or Monday, weather permitting (as usual rain and thunderstorms expected for the bank holiday). Fortunately having a son who works there means free entry saving us over £70. 

I'll leave you with a few pics of the garden and hopefully will write again soon.

Love you all, Helen xx

View from the patio

Strawberries in the raised bed

Herbs in pots

Flower border

Rows of salad leaves starting to poke through

Where we sit and enjoy the sunshine

Runner beans and tomatoes in amongst the rose bushes

More herbs

Another view

It's Finally Happening.

So many ups and downs and maybes that I'm scared to actually say we're moving but...

...we're moving!

This time next Friday, 31st March, as long as there are no last minute delays, we'll be moved into our new house...at last.

This time last week our buyer was threatening to pull out if we didn't move on the day he wanted. It didn't help that our solicitor was on holiday this week and the lady doing his work had her own work to do first before tackling his so we weren't high priority. 

Just by chance I saw our buyer in the local Wetherspoons' while I was having lunch with some ladies from my slimming club (talk about serendipity). I took a deep breath and went to talk to him. Within a couple of minutes we had everything arranged and, a quick phone call to the people we're buying off, and it was all agreed.So, off we go. 

We're popping round to the new house on Wednesday evening so that the current owners can show us the workings of the boiler, cooker, washing machine, and where all the light switches etc. are. Very thoughtful of them to invite us, even though the guy has been a right pain in the rear.

We've spent this morning packing and sorting out. Thankfully much of the stuff I'd packed when we thought we were moving in February was still boxed up, and we'd already disposed of most of the things we no longer wanted. Our nearby charity shop has benefited, and we've probably added a few tonnes to the paper recycling total for this area. 

Our future son-in-law was going to drive a van and help us move but now needs to work that day, so we've booked a removal van and 2 drivers through Anyvan, a sort of comparison website where you register your requirements and then available firms 'bid' for your business. I've paid the deposit and had email confirmation but need to phone the company who won our contract to confirm the details.

I spent last evening online doing all the change of address stuff with the water companies (we have 2 separate companies, one for water supply and another for waste water) and arranging mail redirection (£59 for 12 months). This afternoon I've arranged for an engineer to come round to the new house to connect us to Virgin Media services (Broadband, cable TV and phone) but that won't happen until 5th April so we'll be TV and broadband free for about 5 days. We'll still have internet on our mobile phones and if the weather is good we can fill the days with some work in the garden (not that it needs much doing to it, it's been beautifully kept). I can inform the power company on the day we move out when I take the final meter readings. 

My stomach keeps doing somersaults, there have been so many times we've thought all was going well only to have something rear it's head and set us back that I won't believe it's happening until it's happened. 

So, if I don't get on here again for a week or two, please wish me luck. I could do with something going right without any hiccups for once.

Love you all,

Helen xx

The Good News First...

A quick check in before we head off to Canterbury to take DD2 out for lunch. She's over this way for a few days for a friend's 30th birthday, but we're managing to get together a few times before she heads back on Monday.

So, the good news first...

Our buyer finally has his mortgage offer through so the move is back on. He's pushing for a quick move which is a bit of a cheek after he's the one who's kept us waiting. Since there's a teacher in our family and also in our seller's family we're holding out for Monday 3rd April at the beginning of the Easter break. After all, it's down to him that we couldn't move over the half term break so fair play that he should now work to our timetable. Also, he's out of the country next week so won't be available to sign the paperwork or exchange until the week beginning 13th March at the earliest. 

It's a big relief that all is going ahead. We actually went as far as putting the house back on the market and had a couple of offers we were considering, but that would have meant going back to the start of the selling process with the new buyers needing a mortgage so we hung on for our original buyer and thankfully it seems to have paid off. I won't count my chickens until we've moved in though!

And now the bad news. Unfortunately DS2's engagement was shortlived. It's uncertain exactly why she changed her mind and DS couldn't get a straight answer out of her, but it appears she returned home to the States and had second thoughts but couldn't bring herself to tell DS for weeks. He's absolutely heartbroken. As he says he was prepared to give up everything to move to the US and start a new life with her. The relationship is completely over so that's that. 

There is a bit of good news for him in that he's been offered a full time job as a court usher at the local magistrates court (subject to his references and health info checking out) but that's not much consolation at the moment. Also, his band are through to the next round of this year's Metal to the Masses competition following the first round gig that we attended in Canterbury on Tuesday. However, because he needs his tonsils removing due to repeated throat infections, the band may need to replace him as singer if his surgery clashes with the competition dates. Lots of ups and downs.

Now that DS2 isn't moving to the States it looks like DH and I will be using the sitting room of our new house as a bedroom for longer than anticipated. If the new job works out for him though I'm sure that, at nearly 24, he'll be wanting to get his own place pretty soon.

I think that's all for now. There's probably lots of little bits and pieces I could mention but I won't bore you with them.

Have a good weekend everybody. Love, Helen xx

A Homemade Valentine's Day

We had intended using a restaurant gift voucher from DD3 and BF to go out for a meal for Valentine's Day. Then we thought we might be moving this week so decided to save it for when we were more settled. The move is off for the time being but as we hadn't booked for tonight I did a homemade meal. I cooked DH his favourite sausages from the local butcher along with fried onions and we had them in rolls. I made another of his faves, a trifle using store cupboard ingredients, except for the cream from Aldi. I also made a choc and vanilla marble cake so the boys would have something nice as neither of them like trifle but I haven't taken a pic of it. As well as the food, I made DH a card that I knocked up using what remains of my craft supplies while he was at church on Sunday. 

Nothing OTT or overly romantic, just a way of saying I love you by doing something a little special. We tell each other 'I love you' on a regular basis; it's just nice to make a little extra effort every now and then.

I'd gained 2 lbs at my weigh in this week, and I'm now 1 lb over my top weight allowance. This is only the 4th time since I reached target 2.5 years ago that I've gone over my target. I'm not worrying too much because I've always managed to lose the extra by the following week. I know it's happened because of the stress of the house sale and the cold weather combined means I've been comfort eating too much sweet stuff and too many carbs. I'm going to try and eat more fruit and veg this week and less stodge...starting tomorrow since I already ate a sausage in a roll, some trifle and a piece of cake this evening! 

I'll also be walking more with DH off for half term; we already did a 5 mile walk yesterday up to the National Trust site on the cliff top. It's a long time since we climbed up the hill to the top and I did need to stop and catch my breath a few times, but we made it and despite a chilly wind and a bit of mist it was lovely to see the Exmoor ponies they use to control the vegetation, and the view over the docks and across to the opposite cliff. Unfortunately it was too misty to see the French coast which is visible on a clear day. Here's a pic of the ponies, a couple of the views across Dover Eastern Docks and the harbour and one of a windswept DH.

There's a community information day up at the church tomorrow morning so we might take a walk up there and grab a coffee before going into town. We can't go far tomorrow as we have a viewing in the afternoon, a cash buyer or so we're told. Fingers crossed yet again.

Enjoy your evening. Love, Helen xx

Woollies For The World

Firstly I must thank everyone for their commiserations over the problems with our house sale, and for sharing their stories about the process. It's truly a minefield and the advice seems to be to hold in there and hopefully it will eventually work out. Fingers crossed.

Now confession time. After my little moan yesterday about people holding up checkout queues, I was the one doing just that today. Morrison's had an offer on various varieties of tinned beans at 4 tins for £1 instead of 38p a can, but not all types were included in the offer. Red kidney beans were, white kidney beans were, apparently (although the same brand and on the same shelf) chickpeas were not. So having presented 2 tins of red kidney beans, one of white and one of chickpeas at the till and discovering that the discount had not been applied, the queue (well, the one person waiting behind me) had to wait while the checkout girl called the supervisor who then kindly swapped the chickpeas for a second can of white beans so I could meet the requirements of the offer. 

Of course, if they'd made the offer clearer on the shelf (or if I'd taken the time to read it more carefully!) the problem might not have arisen. In my defence, I did pack the remaining shopping away while the supervisor exchanged the chickpeas and I did have the correct money ready so the transaction was completed quickly after that. And I did also apologise to the person behind me. But maybe I shouldn't judge others so quickly in future...definitely a fault of mine.

Other than that little drama, there's not much to tell today. DH and I walked very quickly into town for coffee...it was freezing cold and threatening snow all day long but it never fell. This afternoon I've been finishing the knitting on a little baby jumper for charity, and I've just started on a strip of striped garter stitch knitting to make up a blanket. I've joined the Woollies for the World Facebook group after seeing an article in this week's Woman's Weekly magazine. I have quite a few jumpers and hats that I've knitted over the last year intending to send them to a charity but I've never gotten around to it so now they'll go off to Pam in Rhyl. 

The group also has a website here - http://woolliesfortheworld.wixsite.com/home

Dinner tonight was the pie I made yesterday. A yellow-sticker pack of puff pastry - 38p, 250g sausagemeat - 99p, a couple of tablespoons of spicy apple chutney - 20p, a little stuffing leftover from Xmas - 0p, served with 1/2 bag of Aldi fresh carrots - 23p, 1/2 bag of Aldi frozen peas - 35p, mashed potatoes made with 1/2 of a 2.5kg bag Aldi baking potatoes - 68p and a little milk and butter - 10p, plus gravy made from granules - approx 10p. A yummy filling dinner for £3.03 or 76p per person for 4 servings.  

DH is on half term holiday this week so I secretly whipped up a quick Valentine's Day card for him while he was at church this morning. We haven't planned anything because we expected to move house tomorrow and we'd hoped to be too busy settling in to celebrate the day. Instead of going out on the day I'll probably cook up something nice for dinner and then we might go to Deal at the end of the week and have a cream tea in the lovely little vintage tearooms.  

That's all for tonight. I hope you had a good weekend. Love, Helen xx  

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

Eating From The Freezer

Back to slimming club this week and I'd lost 1lb, probably because I had no appetite for most of last week. A good job too since I hardly left the house for several days so no walking done. Mind you, I've likely regained it tonight thanks to a full roast dinner followed by cheesecake brownies and cream courtesy of DS2. It was extremely unhealthy especially as my senile old brain forgot to remind me to cook extra veg to go with it. We had roast potatoes and parsnips but I forgot the green beans and carrots until I'd already started serving up. DD2 didn't mind, he's not a fan of veg, and there was plenty to eat without them but it was even less healthy than it should have been.

I'm really getting the freezer cleared now that I've used the chicken and most of the sausage meat and sliced bacon. I've also slow cooked a small gammon joint to have tomorrow with chips and beans and on Thursday with crusty rolls and pickles. The remains of the chicken will make another meal on Friday. There's very little left in there now to make a main meal so I'll have to buy things day by day until we finally move. 

And on the subject of the move, our buyer's application for a buy-to-let mortgage has been refused, but he's managed to talk the surveyor and building society into looking at his application again so we're awaiting the result of that. If it's still refused he wants us to wait until he's sold another property he owns so he can pay cash. That could take weeks or even months so we're not prepared to do that and we'll re-market our house instead. In fact, we have a cash buyer viewing tomorrow just in case. The good news is our buyer's solicitor has his search report back and there are no problems, so if his mortgage is approved then the process could still move fairly quickly and if a miracle happens the move could still possibly go ahead at the very end of next week. We're keeping our sellers up to date and have said that we'll quite understand if they want to try and find another buyer, but we really still want to buy if they are prepared to wait. Of course, that depends on whether their seller is also prepared to wait for them. 

To tell the truth I'm sick of the whole thing and at the moment I'm just trying to forget all about it and let things take their course. As much as we want to move from here at least we have a roof over our heads and the longer we're here the more we're paying off our current mortgage.

Tomorrow morning I'm meeting up with my old grammar school friend. I'm worried we won't find anything to talk about after not seeing each other for over 40 years. I've found an old black and white photo of our tutor group taken after we'd completed an 8 mile sponsored walk over the cliffs from Dover to Deal. I think we were in the 4th form, so about 14-15 years old, and it would have been around 1972. I was trying to put names to faces and managed about half the group. Hopefully my friend might know some more and it will give us something to chat about.

That's all for tonight. I'm tired out and will be in bed before long. Have a good evening, love Helen xx