Log Fires and multi-tasking

My multi-fuel burner is now going full tilt; central heating turned right down to save oil; electricity use is to a minimum and a few candles are burning - great for giving me a wonderful complexion - should anyone be around to notice.

A week spent with daughter and granddaughter - doing lots of DIY jobs around the house and garden. Their help has been just what I've needed to get my life organised again and to take my mind off a letter that arrived at the beginning of the week. A certain organisation has supposedly sorted out Mr Nasty... Ha! The two page letter points out in a thinly veiled way that I am putting everyone to a lot of trouble and causing a lot of extra expense, and why oh why (it asks) did I go down the 'formal' route instead of just discussing the unimportant little episode over a cup of tea"? The TV advert for Oxfam comes to mind... shouting out No to injustice!

Onwards and upwards from now on. Life is too short for all of this. I shall look for something else to do when not sitting in front of my log fire stroking my two cats, drinking tea and listening to soft music while reading by candlelight. Now that's what I call multi-tasking.

Dahlias under threat

This coming week will see the end of my dahlias - there's frost on the way, and due to living in an exposed area that receives the gales straight from the Bristol channel, there will be no respite for my little garden.

The clocks have gone back and it's taken me all day to reset all eight of them! I was hungry at five instead of six, the cats wanted their meal at four instead of five, and my washing got damp because I left it out too long! Now I'm knackered at ten instead of eleven.

Tomorrow I pick up my daughter and my grand-daughter who will be staying with me for most of the half-term holiday. Not much money to spend this time as my reserves are dwindling and I may find myself in real financial difficulty soon.

So, it will be jacket spuds with baked beans or tinned tuna - all from Tesco - rather than Sainsburys or Waitrose. I will be roasting a chicken, then making soup the following day and making a stir fry from left overs. I'm batch cooking and loading the freezer with meals for one to see me up to at least Christmas. I have pumpkins galore which will be turned into soup. However, I have discovered these last three lonely years that I can live quite frugally on my own. In fact the cats get more spent on their food than I do!

If only I could find a lumberjack who could supply me with logs all winter. I'd also like to find a man who could do massage properly; another who could cook and another who could make me laugh. Ah well, I shall have to just flex my muscles and do everything myself, although the massage bit is difficult.

I've cut the last of my dahlias and roses and brought them indoors to brighten the house. And so ends the summer... not that it had begun. I enter another long, dark, lonely winter of uncertainty, but being an optimist at heart, I'm always looking for what might be.