Free Books from your local Library

I don’t know about you, but I do love a good book, it doesn’t matter whether fact or fiction, I love them all. But I recently calculated that over the years I must have spent thousands of pounds (pre miser days) on buying books, and apart from a very special handful, most would have been read just once and then relegated to a bit of bookcase shelf to gather dust.

Obviously now I’m a bit more wiser (or should that be miser) than I used to be, but there is a certain pleasure to be had from just the handling of a book, reading every word, turning page after page, and whilst the internet is a great source of information and entertainment, it’s not the same as holding that book in your hands.

But, being a miser, a wiser miser, doesn’t deprive me of that pleasure. In Britain, and a lot of other countries too I suspect, but don’t know for certain, there is a great resource, free resource, at the local library where you can get these books for free, great! (on loan obviously) you can also get access to magazines, cd’s, dvd’s, etc although they sometimes do make a charge for these items, so I won't be borrowing any of them then.

I have always used the library, and have encouraged my children to do so too, although it's not the same today as it was when I was young, as instead of having a plastic card that was scanned you literally had six small cardboard tickets, little pouches to hold the library card inside that was kept inside each book, so they knew who had which book, these cards were then returned to you when you returned the books.

And you had to be ‘silent’ a short sharp ‘Shhhh’ from a sour faced librarian terrified the young socks off me, but now, crickey, what a racket, it ain't the same, noisy beggars”

Until next time: I’m going to check out the online search facility at our local library to see what new books they’ve had in recently,

Free some cash from Christmas

It won't be long now, one of the biggest expenses of the year, bah humbug! Christmas is nearly here. Now don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas and as I've said before, my name is not Scrooge, I’m just Scrooge like (in some things), what I detest though about Christmas is all the excessive consumerism, Christmas now starts in August for goodness sake, just how much stuff do they think we need to buy that it has to be available for 5 months – nearly half the year!

“How much did you spend on Christmas?” asked one person
“We spent £600 this year” the other replied,
“Oh is that all? We spent £2,000 this year” the first replied smugly!

There are always people who think it’s a competition, it’s not, it’s a celebration for the birth of Jesus, and to show love and affection by giving and receiving of small valuable gifts, ‘valuable’ in terms of sentiment rather than cost. Each gift should be something meaningful, not just a box of something grabbed from a late shop at 11 o’clock on Christmas Eve and a thought of ‘oh it’ll do’, well I’m sorry but it won't do, for me that’s not good enough.
If you really want to start thinking of Christmas early, start in January when the sales are on, buy all things like cards, wrapping paper, etc, for a fraction of the price and save them (that’s only if you really must send cards and wrap presents, and that’s if you give presents!).
But, on the subject of cards and presents, why not make your own? Throughout the year, bits and pieces suitable for card making will be thrown away, bits of card, foil etc. I’ve opened my eyes a little to rubbish and alternative uses, well a lot really, as I want to eliminate all waste from the bin, but that’s for another day.
So from now on I’ll look for a Christmas use from waste bits and pieces with the view of making my own cards.
As for presents, I’m seeing if something handmade would be more beneficial to someone rather than an over priced something or other from the vast cavernous evil den that is the supermarket, that may be used once or twice then relegated to the cupboard ready to be brought out and dusted and sold at a boot sale in a year or two (or worse still get it back as a present sometime down the line because they've forgotten who gave it to them), No thank you. Call me mean if you want to but I’m stepping off this Christmas commercial train and letting it pass me by.

Until next time: I’m going to search the loft for anything I may have bought in the sales last January that I’ve probably forgotten about.

Money Saving Miser Tips – Cash in the Pocket

So far this week I’ve looked at some areas of my life that can be changed to simplify things and make them better for me and my family, to make my food choices more healthy and cheaper, but I haven’t really dug deep enough with money savings tips and actions and that was the biggest reason for starting this in the first place.

So, today, I’m looking to immediate things I can do to save some money and make things cheaper or even free – even better, so here goes;

I think the easiest way to do this I think is to go from room to room and assess what’s costing me money in each of those rooms.

To start – the lounge – standard fare – TV, TV recorder, dvd, freeview box (I’m too tight to pay monthly subscriptions to get more drivel I don’t want to watch), standby lights glowing happily, what! Lights left on when there’s nobody there! TV blaring out! Central heating thermostat mid twenties, cor blimey, do they think I’m made of money?

This is not open to debate; I’m turning down the heating to 20oC (to start with, then it’ll be down to 18oC or less – put a jumper on if you’re cold for goodness sake, when I was a young lad there was no central heating for us, we had two coal fires downstairs, one in the front room, rarely used as we kept to the kitchen/diner/living room where we did most things. When it was bed time you rushed to get into your PJ’s and slipped shivering into a very cold bed – we were used to it – we didn’t know any different. Kids of today eh? Don’t know they’re born really.

Anyway, heating turned down, television off, all off unless recording something, will start to read the meters to see what difference this is making.

That reminds me, I must look into changing the utility companies to see what savings I can make there.

Until next time: I’ll stand in each room in the dark to check for little standby lights shining back at me, as they are not all obvious when its light, and unless they are essential like the fridge, then off they will be turned and save me some cash.

Glorious Tea Time – always time for tea and maybe a slice of homemade cake

The Americans didn’t know what they were doing (and ultimately missing) in Boston in 1773 when they dumped the tea over the ships side.

Tea, greatest discovery ever in my book, always have a cup on the go, but my love of the stuff has cost me a fortune up to now, its not cheap, well, the ‘dust’ you get in some tea bags can be, but they’re putrid. No, I’m talking the quality stuff that actually looks like and tastes like, tea!
Being the person that I am, I have very rarely paid full price for any product and tea is no exception, always buy when on offer, 50% free, 100% free, buy 1 get 1 free, 3 for the price of 2 etc but the sneaky so and so's need watching, don’t just take the supermarkets word for it that you’re having a bargain - check it yourself, I recently came across an offer where you could buy one for £2.85 or have 2 for £6.00?????? Who fell for that one? I’m sure a fair few did - you have to watch for things like this, just because it’s got a big flash sign saying offer doesn’t mean you are getting the best deal.
These offers are all well and good, but sometimes you have to go beyond offers and use the products more than once to get the best value from them and tea bags are perfect for this, coffee is dissolvable so is useless for repeat use, but tea can be used over and over.

Making the most of a tea bag

Cup 1: boil the kettle with just enough water for your needs or enough to cover the element in the kettle, don’t want the kettle to explode, (I need to investigate which is cheaper to boil a kettle – gas or electric?), put a new tea bag in a mug and fill with boiling water, spoon the tea bag out after a few seconds and put into a different mug and set aside for later, then you can add your milk to the tea, don’t do it before as the tea bag will start smelling of sour milk after awhile.

Cup 2: boil the kettle again, but this time pour onto the previously used tea bag you set aside earlier, fish out the bag after the water’s turned the colour you want (bear in mind it will get weaker as you go on so you’ll need to leave for slightly longer each time) and put into another mug and set aside for later, now add milk (if you wish).

Cup 3: repeat as for cup 2 but this time fish out the tea bag and put into a tea pot, or mug again if you prefer.

Cup 4: pour boiling water into the teapot, or mug, and leave for 5 minutes or so, then pour and drink.

I find that if you squeeze the tea bag each time it does retain some flavour for the next one, but by cup 4 it’s starting to get pretty weak so you may have to add a few used bags together – (that’s why I use the teapot as mugs get full pretty quick if you’re trying to use two or three bags at the same time), but only use them from the same day otherwise you’ll not enjoy the experience.

Loose tea works to a similar extent but you’ll need to use one of those tea ball thingy’s and you’ll only get 2 or 3 mugs from each spoonful but as I do prefer loose to bags I will indulge now and again and splash out on a spoonful of loose tea rather than a bag.

And that’s what I’m after, making every last thing earn its keep and go as far as possible, saving me money into the bargain.

And then when you’ve finished totally with the tea bags, throw them on the compost heap which will rot them down for compost the following year. Great!

Until next time: I’m going to try for more than 4, we’ll see how that works – aim: one bag per day!

What are we eating today? Hidden dangers in processed foods.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to trust the food we eat, the very essence of life itself. The debate has raged for years:

‘How do we know what the manufacturers are doing to our food before we tuck into it on our plates?’

Processed food has been blamed for a variety of illnesses from allergies to fatal cancers, maybe not the food itself but the chemical additives added back to raw foods they have messed about with.
Therefore, the only way to by-pass all the potential deadly additives and pesticides etc in and on our food is to ‘Grow our own’! and indeed, there is a growing (pardon the pun) resurgence in organic gardening: people all over the country are growing their own food, some using no more than a few pots on the patio to grow carrots, salad leaves and the like, and highly productive it can be too.
Others are going the whole hog down on the allotment, growing a whole array of fruit and veg, maybe not to be wholly self-sufficient, but as near as can be with the amount of time and land available, which obviously varies from person to person. This then provides them with valuable fresh, unadulterated, food for their efforts.
The two main benefits people are getting from all this work, hard work at that, is to get the freshest food, without chemicals, and best of all very cheaply, in terms of money but not necessarily in terms of time. (I’m only a miser with my money and not my time so that fits nicely).
One of the aims with my blog is to document my journey from being reliant on huge, impersonal supermarkets and food flown thousands of miles ‘food miles’ across the globe all year round, and get away from processed food altogether and try to produce as much of it as possible by my own efforts and at the cheapest possible cost. I know this may seem like an impossible dream and a lot of hard work and will definitely take many years to accomplish, but hey! The way forward I feel is to approach this philosophically and take one small step forward each day knowing that it’ll be worth the effort in the end.

Until next time: I’ll be taking a look at all food labels and asking a) what am I eating and what do all these numbers and long unpronounceable names really mean, and b) can I produce something similar to this product from scratch which will be better for me and be cheaper?

Live Simply with Less Material Possessions

Having finished sorting through the cupboards, I realised I was approaching this the wrong way entirely. What we needed to do was to see what we had in the cupboards (and fridge / freezer) then decide what the menus for that week were going to be, not the other way around as some things in the cupboards may never get used.
So, we have changed things a bit and we are working with what we have and adding pieces as we need them, and when we go shopping we’ll only buy things on offer and try never to pay full price for anything ever again.

I have long been fascinated by the concept of simple living, downshifting, living the good life, etc, whatever tag you want to put on it, it all comes down to the same thing, escaping the rat race, jumping off the treadmill, living a more enjoyable life without the constant 9-5 scramble to work to earn more money for more material things, that only have a short life before being discarded for the next whim, want, fad, etc, that don’t really add any value to my, or anyone’s, life.

There are numerous websites I’ve come across advocating this as a way of life but none of them give a complete package, so what I’ve had to do is take bits from each and piece them together to fit my situation and paint the picture I want to create for my life and that’s exactly what I’ll continue to do as I add bits, take bits away, redraw my picture as things change, develop along the path. I realise my picture will never be finished but I have a rough idea of what I want it to look like, how about you? What does your picture look like? What would you have in your life that you don’t have now? Drop me a comment; I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time: I’m going to be thinking, thinking about how to redraw my picture, and fit in all the elements that I want to do rather than have to do. Why don’t you think about your life too, do you want your life to stay as it is right now, forever? If not, then it’s up to you to paint your own picture and see what you really want out of life!

Healthy Food from Scratch – without processed food Part 2

OMG – you’d be amazed, nay shocked, in what I’ve found lurking in one our kitchen cupboards, Christmas cake stuff, (we always make our own Christmas cake - which we need to be making around now actually), Christmas cake stuff, almonds, dried fruit, half packet of marzipan, all almost a year out of date! How can this have happened? No one knows! Anyway, after I wipe away the tears (I absolutely hate wasting anything – don’t you? I think it’s the war time influence of my mother and grandmother and the make do and mend and waste not want not philosophies coming through there), I say that that must be the last time that happens and allow ourselves to waste stuff and have to throw it away.

I think the process is getting a bit more involved than I at first thought it was going to be, anyway, we’re on the road to freedom (so to speak), more healthy food and hopefully more time to sort the other stuff I need to look at.

Until next time: I’m checking out the recipe books again before they go on Ebay or the car boot.