General Chat

Quite a nice idea to have a mixed hedge Linda. Is Quick thorn, Hawthorne? If so the birds will like it. when we had hawthorne in a previous house we used to get a lot of Bullfinches.

It was supposed to be raining here today Ann , but it has held off until now. We have been out to tackle the hedge which is probably a good twenty metres long. On closer inspection, it is about ninety percent ivy. There are a few valiant bits of the original trees poking through, trying to survive. We have done quite a long section, sawing the thick ivy trunks off at the bottom and pulling it out. What is left is decidedly see through, but if we keep destroying the ivy at the bottom, hopefully the spindly trees will have a chance to thicken up. There is a long section where the trees have collapsed all together, so there is just a gap. We are going to buy some quick thorn and see how that goes. If we can, we will put some in among the sparse hedge as well.

good afternoon. I thought it was going to be a pleasant day today but although it started off dry it has drizzled off and on since about 11.30 this morning. It is 10 degrees but feel colder. I needed to go out and post a letter, got halfway there and it started to rain so I got a bit wet. Not doing much else today.

Has everyone run away from the thread? I hope everyone is OK.

It is another really cold day today. I am psyching myself up to go outside after lunch and tackle the hedge

Good morning, although technically it is afternoon. It is bitterly cold here, it says it is eight degrees, but it isn’t, it is much colder. I have just put some bubble wrap over the seeds in the greenhouse to try and protect them a bit.

The painter is here, painting away, I want to put the heating on, but he would be too warm, so I can’t :-(

I hope you feel better soon Sylvia. It is usually bunged up ears which make me feel dizzy. Having hearing aids doesn’t help as it tends to keep the wax in.

I had a lovely day out today with my friend at the seaside where she used to live as a child. We went for a very long bracing walk along the beach. I was very cosy in my padded coat. It has a hood with a very good drawstring which keeps my head very warm. She had a woolly hat, but it didn’t cover her ears, so she was cold. We treated ourselves to fish and chips in a restaurant, delicious, but not good for my diet.

The painter didn’t turn up until 10.30 as he had to take his dog to the vets . I nearly replied to his text by asking him if our plumber was there as well as that is the excuse he uses when he is going to be late. I refrained as it was his first day. Apparently he only worked until one o’clock when he went to the dentist. He painted the walls of the lounge and dining room, but they definitely need a second coat, so I hope he will be doing that tomorrow. OH wasn’t pleased because he got paint all over the curtain rail supports, so he is going to have words with him tomorrow :-(

You get a P60 for each of your sources of income, except the state pension, Florence.

I have two tiny work pensions (one of them pays £2.24 per month!) and a small annuity, and I receive a P60 for each of them.

Ah names, yes you are correct as I remember now I have 2 private pensions as don't get the state pension yet and they send me one but I do get a benefit which is taxable so I thought my P60 showed all my income? Last year I got a letter from the tax office saying they owed me £28 which I claimed online and that stated my total earnings.

It’s the employer or the pension provider that does the P60. You don’t get one if you only get a state pension.
My ones from my private pensions have started to arrive.

Afternoon all.
Well first thing it was grey and overcast and felt chilly but suddenly, the sun has come out...yay :-D

I may just take a gander round and see how the plants are doing and get some much needed fresh air.

Oh Sylvia, how lucky you didn't fall down the stairs! Gosh you were very lucky indeed. Thinking about what you said, yes I agree the salt does affect BP and maybe that was the cause unless you have an ear infection and your balance was off?

Aw you will be looking forward to your daughter's visit in may, how lovely.

I'm glad you spoke about tax affairs as it reminded me that I haven't received my annual P60 showing my earnings and tax deductions but then I remembered I think the tax office don't send them anymore. You can go online and access them to print out so I did.

Hmm it said the P60 for 23/24 hasn't been produced yet as too early but it has reminded me to check back in a months time and look so ty for that.

I have seen an offer at Tesco for compost peat free 40 litre bags 2 for £9.00 with club card but online it says sold out so my friend who is taking me out on Thursday is in town with her son today and will go and have a look and if they have it, she will get me 4 bags, such a good bargain compared to what I paid online!

Linda, so glad to hear you live up high! At least you have one chatty neighbour.

Well my supplies for my crafts came today so shall be busy at the weekend making more candle centrepieces. Hope we have enough this time to finish off.

Well Im off into the garden as the sun is now shining brightly.

Hope everyone else is well today

Florence in the hebrides

I've been off-colour since Thursday last week, not sure what with, may be a couple of things! It started as I was turning off the house alarm in the early morning. It is at the top of the basement stairs, and I've always been wary of the fact that you are standing at the top of a flight of stairs! Anyway, as I punched in the last number, I started to feel funny and woozy but managed to move myself backwards away from the stairs until I could lean against the door jamb of the bedroom (it's a bungalow with basement).

I felt woozy and occasionally slightly dizzy for the rest of that day but have gradually got better. The only thing I can think of as a possibility is that I opened a new pack of rice crisps to have with lunch and it wasn't until I ate the first one that I realised that they were VERY salty. I hadn't looked at the pack just assumed it was my usual Unsalted type, but these had Sea Salt. Stupid me continued to eat them although I'm not supposed to eat salt.

I did wonder whether too much salt had caused the problem. My bp was very high that day!

Whatever, I feel much better today, and even managed to screw up my courage to turn off the alarm this morning for the first time since last week.

But as a result, I cancelled my appointment for last Friday for my Covid booster, re-booked it for today, but then cancelled that, and have now booked it for April 29th. I thought it wasn't a good idea to have any kind of vaccination if I wasn't feeling too well! I really should have booked for Monday last week, as OH did, and then it would be over and done with!

We also got our tax information all finished yesterday and our financial people agreed to send a courier to pick up the package today to save OH having to go downtown. Our taxes have to be filed by April 30th, and we have quite a lot of forms to get together, plus all medical receipts. It doesn't usually take long, but OH is getting a bit less able to do his part of collating his necessary information so I had to do double duty. I was exhausted mentally by the end of yesterday afternoon!

Anyway we have something nice to look forward to ............. our daughter will be arriving for a short visit on May 2. She has to go to a meeting in Toronto around May 10 or so, has got a cheap one-way ticket (on a sale) from Nova Scotia to us, but the organisers of the meeting will pay her way from here to Toronto and then from Toronto to her home. They'll pay about the same amount as if she had done the trip from home!

She'll take the chance to spend one day with her very best friend from high school, who will come up from her home down near Seattle in the US, and take the ferry another day to visit with a long-time family friend on Vancouver Island, but we will see her for 3-4 days out of the 6. She'll stay in a near-by hotel as our place is so small, but she's looking forward to helping us with some things, including getting in the garden with her dad. There are some maple seedlings (from the street tree just outside) and wild rose seedlings to grub up! The rose is a native one, which is why OH planted it, but it likes the garden too much and is trying to take it over!

The weather is lovely here, but far too warm for April! We have had several sunny days since April 14th with temperatures up around 17/18C, although the nights have been going down to as low as 3C or 4C, because of the clear nights. We had rain from late Saturday afternoon until very early Sunday morning, but then the sun came back and seems likely to last to one extent or another until the end of the week.

But temperatures in the high teens are really unusual ..... just another example of climate change. There are also already some wildfires causing problems, as in evacuation alerts, but much further north as of yet.

Take care everyone.

We are up very high Florence, the river would have to rise about a hundred feet to get to us, so that isn’t going to happen.
It has been really cold here today. I went to the supermarket this morning, but other than that have been inside. Even OH was complaining about the cold and was happy to put the heating on after lunch. It has rained on and off all day. I wanted to get out to start cutting the ivy off the hedge which forms the boundary of our property. Down the right hand side of the house is the wide mud footpath which goes down to the river. There is no fence, just a very old hedge which is absolutely choked with ivy. In one part the ivy is so heavy that the trees have collapsed, so there is quite a gap. You can just see the original trees making a valiant effort to poke out of the top of the ivy. We need to snip through as much of the ivy as possible at ground level and hope that the trees underneath are not dead. It is a very long length so if it needs a fence, it will be very expensive

We have met some of the neighbours, one couple over the road seem to be nice and friendly, but the couple opposite don’t seem to want to bother. Our next door neighbour is a pretty dour man. He seems to work from home and is just coming up to retirement. Sadly his wife is in a care home , he says with a neurological condition which won’t get better. The chatty neighbours over the road said that she has severe dementia of some type. I think that she has been sectioned, she seemed to have been causing problems with her behaviour before she went away.

On a brighter note I am having a day out with my old neighbour tomorrow . We are going to make a fairly long trek north to Whitely Bay, a seaside town where she spent a lot of her childhood. I remember going there quite a lot when I was young. We would get the train from Newcastle . I found a photo of me in a rock pool wearing a woollen bathing costume. We always used to get badly sunburnt :-(. Sunburn won't be a problem tomorrow, but at least there is no rain forecast so we can have a long walk on the beach.

Good morning everyone looking in today.

I woke at 6.45 and decided to get up. Had a coffee and into the shower etc. Then around 8am whilst full of energy lol decided to clean the kitchen and mop the floor and all before 8.30. So whilst it was drying, went off to dry my hair.

Its misty and damp today with drizzle so not great but good for the ground. Bin went out last night but thankfully no wind to blow it away.

Linda hope Eves herbs grow well

I meant to say the other day, how lucky to have a walk along the river bank close by and somewhere to stop for a drink or bite to eat. In summer, it will be lovely but I hope you are not so close that you may be at risk of flooding at any time? Have you spoken to any of your neighbours yet or got to know them? Always difficult moving to a new place.

When I moved hear nearly 3 years ago, the lady 2 doors down came over and introduced herself and straightaway, I could tell she was going to be a lovely neighbour and she is. She pops over sometimes on a Sunday afternoon for coffee whilst her hubby is watching the football and she's taking me to another bingo on Fri night. So we have indeed struck lucky with our neighbours.

Well whilst I still have a burst of energy, I had better crack on with some chores as per before 11's morning coffee lol.

Hope all is well with everyone today :-D

Well, the large shed came apart very easily and it has now gone. The garden looks so much better without it, partly because it had been painted with orange decking paint. Someone is coming this evening to take the other shed as well

Eve planted all of her herb seeds this morning, there were eight different types. Some of them, I haven’t got, so I hope they germinate. It is very cold today, but they should be OK in the greenhouse.

OH will have to be up early tomorrow as the plasterer says he his coming about 8.15. The painter was supposed to be starting tomorrow as well, but he has put it off until Tuesday

Good morning, unicorn bookmarks sound good. It is a strange craze, but Esme loves unicorns as well

Later this morning, I am going to bring Eve here so she can plant her herb seeds. She has had them for a while, but hasn’t done anything with them. We will get them going in the greenhouse.

Later on, someone is coming to dismantle the shed next to the greenhouse and take it away. I put it on the free Facebook site and have had lots of people wanting it. I hope it comes apart easily as there seem to be an awful lot of nails in it. We actually have two sheds, so once this one is gone, I will offer the other one to one of the unlucky losers. We don’t need any of them as we have a double garage, so plenty of storage. The back garden is on a slope, so OH is going to use the flagstones which are under the shed to make some steps to get down to the bottom level where the greenhouse is. At the moment, there is a gentle lawned slope, but it is slippy and muddy when it rains. The area where the shed is and another section behind the garage will become a veg patch when he gets round to it.

Morning everyone sun out but cold


If hands are okay will carryon doing the unicorn book marks that I am doing for Caitlin Sian and Savannah but are all the same.

Also may put laptop on. Print some cross stitching pattern out.

My son Duane is at racing his remote control car hope weather stays dry.



Have a good day one snd all

It wasn’t me who stole the page, honestly :-D
It is sunny here, but very chilly. I wanted some potting compost , so this morning I drove to Aldi because theirs is cheapest, but as I drove into the car park, I could see that they didn’t have any, so I didn’t stop, but continued on to Morrisons. That meant going through the town centre, the traffic was dreadful, so it took ages. I only wanted a few bits in the actual shop, but they have an outside gardening section with its own till. I got three bags of potting compost as they were on offer and two grow bags for the greenhouse. I ended up being charged three pounds less than it should have been, naughtily, I didn’t say anything :-D

This afternoon there was a community event at one of the local schools, there were supposed to be lots of community groups there, so I thought that it might be a good place to find some volunteering opportunities. We drove part of the way and parked up, then walked the rest. There wasn’t much of interest to us when we got there, so we walked into the town centre and indulged in coffee and cake. I bought some wall planters to put on the side of the garage and some tomato plants. They are in the greenhouse, so hopefully will be protected and will survive until they are large enough to plant.

We had just got back home when my daughter, SIL and the two girls dropped in. They had been to the local retail park to buy a side table for their sofa. Esme had a new Barbie doll, not that she needed one, given the huge number she already has. She was just winging to go home , so they just stayed for a quick cup of tea. That was a nuisance as I hoped SIL would have time to sort out an IT problem for me. He will have to do it later on

Of course you had to buy things in M&S Ann, it would have been rude not to :-D

We have our Covid jabs booked in for April 30th. After we had booked them through the NHS app, we got texts from the doctors surgery, but they are only doing them on one date much later in May. It would be a nightmare trying to go to that as we need to drive and they only have a little carpark. We have booked a pharmacy in the town centre, so can either walk or park up nearby for free and walk the last bit .

It's sunny here and very little wind, so quite hot outside. I have been rigging up our new hosepipe, and was removing layers of clothing!

I had never noticed how many pages there are. When I open the thread it says 1-10 at the top, then I click on "post date" and the last entry comes to the top and the pages are still 1-10, just in reverse order. As I look in most days there are rarely enough new posts to fill more than one page.

We received our appointment letters about covid boosters at the end of March, with the actual jabs on 30 April at the local surgery in the village. All very efficient - for a change.

Well I thought I was going mad lol as yes I thought there was a page missing too not that it matters but we are all creatures of habit I guess and when we visit here most days, we do notice the page numbers etc.

Daughter washed her fleece duvet with minimal laundry liquid after the last disaster! It is on the line as there is a good breeze but oh my, its absolutely freezing now and very grey and overcast.

Earlier, I went round the garden back and front with my grabber and a bag and amazingly, I found a few bits of rubbish like broken pegs behind the bins, broken bungees and some litter that must have blown over from a neighbours as I dont eat chewing gum! Anyone a wee job well done.

Trying to decide what to make for tonight's evening meal and right now neither of us can make up our minds, decisions, decisions.
I'm also going to have to put the heating on a bit later which I was hoping not to but I'm just too cold.

Right off to the freezer and cupboards to make a decision, a curry might warm us up!

Maybe somebody else deleted a page AG. Strange.

Sunny here now and 12 degrees. I popped into town on the 0930 bus and it was not busy then, but by the time I left there at 11.30 it was beginning to get much busier. I mainly wanted to go to the post office and it was lovely as I didn't have to queue. Stopped and had a coffee and pastry, then really only visited Boots, Holland and Barratt and M&S. The latter seem to have a lot of spring stuff in so just had to buy a T shirt and a three quarter sleeved top.