Making Good Use

Home Owners

Finally, yesterday, after some tense last-minute hitches, we've become proud home owners.  It's not the first time for me as I used to own a house in Bristol before but for P it is a new experience.  Sadly, it is not one he's going to get to relish for too long as we will be moving in next Thursday (the long-distance move takes place over two days) and on Friday - barring an absolute miracle - he will have to fly to the Far East. 

One of the jobs he was pinning his hopes on in Switzerland has turned out to be a 'no', but he is going over there for a whistle-stop visit on Monday and Tuesday for another interview.  We know he won't get an answer on that job very quickly (the recent 'no' decision from Switzerland took almost six weeks!!) so the Far East it will be - at least for a while.

We are both up to our hocks in cardboard boxes, bubble wrap and parcel tape, and in clearing eight-years worth of accumulated clutter and detritis from the house.  At the moment it seems like we're on a never-ending packing treadmill - with a scarily looming deadline of 8.00 am next Wednesday.  Still, it's quite good fun to put old items out on the pavement - two very ancient portable TV's and a clunky old microwave dug out of the loft - and see how long before someone takes them.  This evening the microwave lasted less than an hour and a half!!  We suspect most of it is being snaffled by the lad with the scrap metal lorry who lives across the road.  I've often wished him somewhere else when he's been out in the road loudly re-arranging his scrap in the back of the wagon at totally inconsiderate times like 8.00 am on a Sunday morning or 11.00 pm in the evening, but now he's saving us a fortune in 'special collection' fees from the council.   Plus he also took a rodent chewed sun lounger (with metal frame), two totally dangerous rickety old stools (with metal legs) and a rusted metal clothes rail (cheapo tat from Argos) which we dug out of the shed at the weekend.  If he'd like to knock, he could also have our totally knackered wooden garden bench with heavy cast iron ends, otherwise it'll have to stay where it is - if we tried to move it I think the wooden planks would disintegrate.

Last night, we were mentally going through what we've bought new in the eight years we've lived here - the list is pretty short.  Two TV's - one when we first moved in to replace a teeny portable TV and the second a few weeks ago to replace that, one laptop - bought in the summer, and a washing machine - bought when we moved in.  I'm pretty impressed with that - only four new, retail items bought for the house in all those years.  Plenty of other things have joined us here, of course, but they've all come from boot sales or charity shops.  And will we be buying anything new for our new abode - not if I can help it, no!!

Thank you all so much for your kind comments on my last post - it is lovely to know so many people are rooting for us during this crappity crap crap time.

Homeward Bound

Apologies for the scarcity of blog posts recently - there is an awful lot of upheaval and change going on for P and I at the moment - and it's led to a distinct shortage of time and little cheerful news to impart.

Very long story short, after two totally crappity crap crap crapulous years in which we have endured redundancy, unemployment, bereavement, health problems and being stuck in a crappity crapulous rented house for much longer than either of us had ever anticipated (we were two days away from cutting a deal on a beautiful house to buy when redundancy hit us as a bolt from the blue) I am heading back to Bristol to live whilst P has been forced to find work abroad.

Upsides of all this are: we are - finally - going to own our own house; I'll be just round the corner from my Mum (and Lily the cat;) my sister, nephew and brother-in-law are only a short car drive away; I know the area well and still have friends there.

Major downside, of course, is that P and I will have to live apart for however long it takes for him to find work in the UK again.  It is hard to believe, with unemployment apparently falling rapidly, that a specialised solicitor with years of industry experience, who speaks three languages fluently (and two more to a pretty high standard,) and who has more qualifications than you can shake a stick at has, after two years of exhaustive and relentless job applications, found it totally impossible to find work here. 

If it had happened to anyone else I would have thought they were not trying hard enough but I can honestly say that P has exhausted every avenue either he or I could think of.  He has been prepared to do any sort of legal work within his field of speciality, at any location within the UK.   He has written hundreds of speculative letters, 95% of which go completely unanswered, applied for any and every job he thought he might have any chance of getting - again, the vast majority of those applications go unanswered - and attended several dozen interviews (astonishingly enough, even after attending interviews he often never hears from the company again.  It is so rude and disheartening and when, exactly, did it become OK to treat people in such an appalling manner!!) 

Eventually, back in the summer, we knew we'd have to start thinking outside of the box (and, indeed, outside of the UK) and he has now been offered short-term contract work in the Far East.  He's also got a couple of applications still on the boil for legal jobs in Switzerland (where he was born and brought up) which we are desperately hoping will come to fruition as Switzerland is a darn sight nearer  to the UK than the Far East is.

So yeah, it's a difficult time and somewhat bittersweet.  Sweet because I'll be much nearer to my family but hellishly bitter because P won't be there with me.

Cheap Eats - For a Change

For some unknown reason, yesterday our local Co-op had a load of their own-brand organic eggs heavily reduced.  The display-until date was November 6th but the best-before date is not until November 12th.  I'm guessing good old 'elf and safety' regulations may have something to do with why they were selling them off so cheaply when they are good to eat for another week.  Whatever the reason, I was delighted to be able to buy half-a-dozen for only 99p instead of the usual £2.10.

I know I could buy non-organic, non-free-range eggs at 99p a half-dozen all the time but eggs are something I really would not want to eat unless they are free-range at the very least, and preferably organic to boot.  I'm the same with chicken - if it ain't at least free-range, we ain't eating it.   I just would not feel comfortable eating chicken or eggs from battery-farmed sources - no matter how cheap it might be - I'd rather have a vegetarian meal instead.

Anyhoo, the 99p eggs coupled with a bag of peppers, a tin of tomatoes and an onion made a very cheap evening meal of Chachouka.  (And very tasty it was too though the eggs were just a tad over-cooked as I got carried away watching Jamie's 15-Minute Meals on Channel 4+1, ahem!!)  Served with some part-baked crusty bread from Aldi, I reckon the total cost of an evening meal for the two of us was somewhere around £2.00.  As I'm always in total awe of those bloggers out there who manage to feed their families for around £1.00 per head day in, day out, I was really pleased to have managed - most unusually - to pull this off myself.  Seriously, I don't know how people manage to do that so successfully - I cook every meal from scratch, a lot of it is vegetarian and I shop mainly in Aldi,  but I'd hate to tell you how much our food bills are these days.  It's frankly scary!!