19: Happy Halloween! It's a leaky brain jelly mould

Well it was good while it lasted!

I've always liked making Halloween food. I get a lot of the recipes from this book, 'Ghoulish Goodies', and the kids like to join in and help, which makes for a nice family Halloween activity.

This brain shaped jelly mould cost me about a pound from ASDA a couple of years ago and has done good work producing lime jelly brains in the past.

Unfortunately, this year it had sprung a leak and produced a lime jelly fridge shelf as well as the lovely green and orange jelly brain.

So it's off to the bin, sadly. Maybe I'll find something different for next year.

But in the meantime, Happy (late) Halloween!

18: Bag of office supplies and work books returning to the office

Well the big day is finally here: I'm back in the office for the first time since the Covid lockdowns started.

Strictly speaking, I'm actually in a different office as they've been moving people around. 

The old office was in a lovely modern building with lots of white walls, views over a golf course and surprisingly loud sounds of wind through the ceiling whenever there was the slightest bit of weather.

The new office is in a much older building with light beige walls and display cases of rocks and fossils out in the corridor.

There's a window with some very nice trees behind me 

I haven't found the kitchen yet and the women's toilets are being refurbished, which is a bit tricky.

Other than that, I'm just putting these things in my new desk drawers, setting up the computer equipment etc.

I brought in some Halloween treats for my IT team mate who rescued my computer equipment from the old office, where the locks have changed.

I had a look around outside, saw which shops were still open, went for lunch in what had been my favourite cafe at work. Nice to be back there again, although I'd forgotten how much the food wasn't as good as the amazing hipster decor!

There are a few small teething issues still - I had to get a different door key, and I'll need a web cam and a key for my desk drawers.

Mostly though, after a year and a half of working in our busy and crowded family home, it's the quiet that will take the most getting used to: the silence in the office is deafening!

17: Colouring and activity books

My kids have had some really great colouring and activity books, some of which they've used more than others, and some of which I wish they'd use more instead of staring into their iPads.

Meanwhile, they keep growing up, and growing out of the Cat in the Hat and times tables for ages 5-7.

But I did manage to get them all round the table to go through the colouring books together, which was actually quite a nice companionable time for us all, talking and bringing back memories.

My oldest son picked out a few old treasures he wanted to keep: mostly origami, but also Steampunk devices and a cute Japanese colouring book from the years from age 6 when we first moved to America and he decided he loved everything Japanese. A couple of summer camps in a Japanese garden were wonderful for this.

Middle son also went through his, which were mostly activities about maps, and the older boys' favourites went up to their room.

Youngest son weeded out the books that were too young for him, and they all found a few that they just didn't like: the book from a Christmas activity pack whose pages were too shiny, the intricate repeating patterns that were actually hard to look at, the books based on shows and characters they weren't that keen on, and so on.

Those that were unused went into the bag for the charity shop. 

A few suitable favourites went into a bag for car trips. 

A bigger pile were put aside while I ask around for somewhere to re-home them, and if that's not possible they'll be recycled.

A few seasonal activity books were put out on a table as Halloween and Christmas activities.

That left a much reduced pile of mostly my youngest son's favourites to go back on the shelf. Hopefully now he's been reminded of what's there he might do more of them.

16: Horrible worn out old boots

I had forgotten how worn out and horrible these boots were: not only do they look creased and cardboardy on the outside, but they've worn out enough to have sharp fins on the inside.

I won't even put them in the shoe recycling charity box, because I'd hate for someone who needs them to miss out on their chance of decent winter boots by getting these ankle shredders instead.

I will at least take the laces out and keep those.

I know I'm breaking my own rules slightly by posting these boots on the blog when I'm replacing them. But I'm doing that to make the point that I bought these only 4 years ago for about £20 - £30 and now they're too worn out to be usable.

Now that I've been working in a proper job for 2 years, I can afford to buy some new boots that will be much better quality, and hopefully last much longer.

So I've ordered these fantastic looking Doc Martens boots with furry linings - they should be arriving today, and I really hope they fit! 

(I've ordered them from Office because it's easier to return them to a shop if they don't).

It's got me thinking though:

1: At what price point is it worth spending more on better quality, longer lasting shoes?

2: How much difference does it make to the environment if you buy shoes less often?

3: Is it only worth spending more on shoes that you know won't go out of fashion?

4: If you're spending more to get better quality shoes, how do you know that that's what they are?

Aside from being much much nicer, would my £160 new boots have to last for 21-32 years to be worth buying instead of the old ones (or possibly 16-24 years as I think they were too worn out to wear last year as well)?

How much of a financial disadvantage is this for people like the me from 4 years ago, who can only afford £20 boots?

These aren't even the worst shoes you can get: I've bought kid's shoes from ASDA that disintegrated within weeks, and sandals from Primark that broke apart on the second day of wearing them. 

How is it fair or justifiable to fill up landfills and waste hard up people's money like that, not to mention the labour of whatever people in the third world had to make this crap? It really isn't right.

But...

New boots are on their way! 

Lovely new boots! 

I'm looking forward to it😀

15: Years overdue library books

This all started when Youngest Son found a copy of Roald Dahl's 'The Witches'. 

He had been reading the same book at school, so when I saw this copy I didn't recognise, I assumed it was that one - but no, it was from the high school library.

Hapless Oldest Son, who left high school this year, has never been great at finishing his reading books and turned out to have quite a collection of old school library books in his room. 

It's a bit strange they hadn't asked for them back, but perhaps the pandemic had something to do with it.

This left Middle Son with the unenviable job of returning them, but he took it on bravely, and luckily it turned out there was a box for returning books at the library door. Job done, to relief all round!

Meanwhile, youngest son has become so enthusiastic about reading more Roald Dahl books that he looked up Roald Dahl's website and found it was Roald Dahl Story Day on September 13th.

He's a great organiser, and he came up with a whole day of activities for this: cooking with the help of Oldest Son and their Roald Dahl Revolting Recipes book, story times, and printable crafts from the Roald Dahl website. I was still laid up with Covid so all I had to do was printing and encouragement. 

I'm sure this could be said better, but we have the full range of organisational habits in this family, and I'm so lucky with all of them. To use the stereotypical blogger hashtag for the first time, #soblessed...

14: Replacing the boiler

Finally, after 3 years of increasingly unreliable hot water, our boiler broke enough for the insurance to pay us £500 towards a new one. Hooray!

We found our new boiler and engineer to replace it through the British Gas Local Heroes scheme. Having had such bad luck with the old boiler, the extra guarantees you get for the installation seemed like a  very good idea.

Unfortunately, the first engineer we found through Local Heroes tried to talk us into going behind their backs so he'd get to keep the extra commission. This confused us for long enough that Covid hit us before we were able to get the boiler replaced. 

While my husband was ill, I did some more research online and it seemed like the typical guarantee for boilers only covers manufacturing defects. One of my team mates at work had had a very expensively bad experience with a faulty boiler installation job by a company that went out of business, so I definitely wanted to get the installation work covered too.

It's been a month without hot water, so it's been really nice to have hot baths and showers again, and great that they took the old boiler and other rubbish away, saving us from having to get them to the tip.

Apparently, being more efficient, our new boiler will also be good for our energy bills, so I'm looking forward to that as well.

Hopefully this can bring an end to this unfortunate chapter of life when we had a whole family's worth of Covid, no hot water and (my) sprained ankle all at the same time. Surely better times are just around the corner, or even appearing already!

12? Voldemort gel

One of the few good things about Covid is it's kept me off my feet, giving my ankle more chance to heal.

Meanwhile, I've got through this whole tube of Voltarol gel, which I like to call Voldemort gel for that feeling of battling an enemy.

The foot is so much better :)