This week seemed to be full of little austerity pleasures, and I just wanted to share a few…
We were out of jam, so I rummaged around in the freezer and found some rhubarb leftover from a visit to an aunt last year. I made enough jam to last us through the next month, and even though I’d never made rhubarb jam before, Husband and Daughter are quite pleased… (I’m not really an accomplished jam maker anyway, but winging it worked out well in this case.)
Daughter has a birthday party this weekend, and somehow I managed to knit a lacy scarf as a gift with bamboo yarn I had in my stash. Daughter made a card, and now we’re set for a gift, without ever having left the house…
Daughter also decided, of her own accord, to make lavender water for the birthday gift. I added a slug of vodka to keep the solution from going off (you can’t smell it after a few hours), and then we labeled it and added it to the gift…
A gift from the heart – a handmade card, homemade lavender water, and a knitted scarf
I threw together this honey lavender cake with lemon-basil frosting with what I had laying about the house, with just a few hours warning. The cake is divine, and I’m even more impressed that I didn’t even have to go to the store…
Daughter starts a reading club soon, and the book isn’t available on Kindle or at any of the libraries here. I was gnashing my teeth about spending a ton of money for a book in English, but then I checked my list of books that Daughter has already read. It turns out that I bought the book for her at a charity shop on a trip to London, and she read it so quickly that we left it there for my nephews. She remembers the book well enough, so the problem was solved, without even leaving the house…
I’ve been trying to buy new cookie sheets, but had been having a really hard time getting the size that would fit in our oven. On the third trip to the store, I managed to return the second set of cookie sheets and get ones that were the correct size (I was clever enough this time to bring one of my old ones with me). It turns out that the store was having a big sale, and I ended up saving quite a lot, though it took me three trips to the store…
Over the summer, I found two new (to us) libraries with loads of English books for Daughter to read. They know us well enough now that they let us take out twice the number of books if we need to, which we did for our trip to Croatia last week. As I returned twenty books to various libraries, I was reminded of how little we pay for the privilege of reading all of those books.
Lastly, I managed to salvage a pair of Husband’s beige trousers by dying them black. They came out more of a very dark grey, but Husband is happy,
Austerity and Prosperity 