A frugal life is an easy life!

A typical Monday, everything everywhere. It started early - 6am - sprog1 was due at hospital for an outpatients appointment, had bad guts most of the night, very tired.

Got to the hospital just in time for his appointment, 7.30am, sat down and waited with sprog1 until he was finally called at 50 minutes late. On the way home, looking at all the traffic jams - over 2 miles long - going the other way (how many hours do people waste sat in traffic each week?) as the rat race continued it's winding tail over the hills.
Got back to hoover towers, sprog1 texted me to say he was taken to yet another waiting room (where he would stay for another 2 hours!) in my infinate wisdom, I decided to try some toast... a bad idea.
I ended up missing work and going back to bed!

Mother nature has a brilliant way of telling the body to stop, it aint clever nor pretty, but very effective!

After a few hours sleep I was woken up with the message sprog1 was ready to be picked up. More water was drunk and I nipped off to get him. He came out fine with a little patch on his wound, which gradually increased in pain as we got nearer to home. As you would expect from a 21 year old... it is amazing how pain increases the closer to someone sympathetic they get!
Pain killers taken and a quick bite to eat and he's straight to bed.
Sprog2 (The almost 10 week old) has been in a good mood today, sleeping for a couple of hours at a time.
There's a bit of a discussion in our house about feeding - Hoover is getting worried about feeding more and more, I just keep making the point that as sprog2 is getting bigger and taking more milk, it will take hoover a bit of time to catch up with producing extra.
I am not sure she agrees with me... we shall see.

Things still to do today:
Two payment protection (PPI) refund letters to write - one for us, one for a friend of the site.
Write out an official letter to a car dealership.
Go to our nearest post office and tax a car.
Put another load of washing and drying in.
Then we can rest up for the day me thinks.... oh and total amount spent today: £1.80 for hospital parking.

It is clear that everyone in the world would like to go "green" but why does everything concerned with "saving the planet" "protecting the environment" or "going green" always cost the people more money?

In the past few years, windfarms have sprung up all over the UK, offshore wave technology is creating energy and hydro electricity is growing in popularity, yet our energy bills continue to grow by a far higher percentage than our income.
Appliances for the home also shoot up in price.
A tumble dryer that has a hose hung out of the window, costs over £100 less than a condenser dryer with an A class energy rating.
This same condenser dryer also allows more water to be saved and put back into the "system" - reducing the need for more rain water.
A 5 litre vessel (every 2 drying cycles) is poured back into the water system, yet my water bills increased by 19% at their last "review" - national inflation was just 1.7% at the same time!

I pay electricity and gas by card meter, paying for energy in advance, yet I am charged a higher rate and "standing charges" that direct debit customers do not have to pay, even though both types of payment require the same - once per month - attention and direct debit customers do not pay in advance.

Did you know that the entire "climate change" argument, is about how to improve just 2% of the Earth's problems - the other 98% is natural and we can do nothing about it whatsoever! (Ask the scientists themselves!)

Exactly how are we all being encouraged and helped to use more energy saving, "green" methods in our daily lives?
Solar panels? - these have increased in price over the past 5 years, grants to install them have also been cut.
Energy efficient light bulbs? - you might have received some "free" bulbs? As a taxpayer, it is you that have paid over the odds for these bulbs. Have you seen the prices of them shoot up in the supermarkets?
The companies giving away "free" bulbs, are given grants by the government, who do you suppose fund the government? Of course, it is us, the public!
To dispose of these bulbs requires specialist methods, causing more damage to the environment than conventional bulbs that have been in our homes for decades.
Drive our cars less? - Most people now cannot walk to work, I'd even guess the majority of people cannot get a bus to work, due to working times, distances, no routes going to industrial estates, etc. So how does charging record taxes on petrol/diesel help those who have no choice but to use their cars?

The arguments for going "green" may well be strong, the evidence of "climate change" is, I believe, shakey at best, but all the measures the public have taken so far, have brought no savings, no improvement, etc, and have cost them heavily in their pockets.

Perhaps if we actually saw just one of these measures benefit us personally, we would be more inclined to believe the whole argument?

A woman has had her penalty notice fine of £75 for feeding ducks in the park with her son, dropped, by a local council.
Originally, the lady was fined for feeding the ducks in a "non designated area."

At first Sandwell Council defended the issuing of the penalty ticket, but back tracked when they suddenly decided to take "a common sense approach" - but only because "warning signs in the area are being sorted out."

Designated area - if a park with ducks isn't a designated area, what is?

It gets worse - in the future, all feeding of ducks at this particular park, will be banned!

You can pay your hard earned cash to bird charities and the powers that be can give away your taxes to help animals and birds, etc, yet when it comes to giving ducks/geese, etc, some old bread when attempting to show your children some compassion towards animals, in their natural environment, you are banned and fined for doing so?

In our house, we rarely use the fire. It has to be minus 10 outside and ice cold in the house before it gets turned on.
So, when we started the building work (which still needs plastering) I decided we should have a real coal fire.
Heating and water would still be in place via a new boiler (our current Baxi Potterton back boiler is almost 30 years old and still going strong) but with the option of long, dark winter evenings, being in front a snugg coal fire!

Well today, the plans for the new boiler and radiators have been put in place. It may take a few months to get the blokes out to physically do the work, but once it is in place, then the real fire will follow close behind.

We already have the hearth marble base and a fantastic wood fire mantelpiece, from a frugal job I did for a neighbour (who had a friend that wanted rid of the mantelpiece and base) so just the workings of the real coal fire to get, then it is up to the chimney sweep to prepare it all... I can't wait!
Small sacks of smoke free coal are only around £4 here, picked up from our nearby farms and are in plentiful supply.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been repaired after more than a year and could be "fired up" as soon as this weekend.

The LHC fascinates me, not because of the size of the thing/project, or where it is situated, or the costs involved... will they recoup any of the money they have have spent?
The thing about the large hadron collider, that makes me even take notice, is the conspiracy theorists!

There is a belief that the LHC was broken on purpose, by someone who has come from the future to "avert disaster for planet Earth!"
As daft as this sounds, let us say that the LHC reveals something about the cosmos, some previously unknown fact or way of doing something, or even a new chemical in the dust particles generated from a collision, that proceeds to be used in a weapon or a method of generating energy in huge amounts and their is an accident or it falls into criminal hands, etc.
In the future time travel maybe possible - look up at the stars in the night sky outside your house, you could be viewing a star that no longer exists, but is still visible to the nakid eye on Earth, due to the time take for the light of the image to reach our view - say there was a way to go back in time and destroy or break the LHC?
This could avert a future disaster could it not?

Who knows, amongst us there could be people going backwards and forwards in time already, how would us mere mortals know about it?