obnoxious neighbours

Well after we did the market yesterday we were pretty tired and just slobbed. It was a good day tho. Anyway this morning I went up the garden with my hounds trying to trip me up inbetween wrestling with each other - they are very active looney dogs believe me. Anyway I realised next door neighbour - the nosey one!!!- has yet again cut teh top off our hedge. Cheeky or what. So checked the time........well it is sunday..........and its 10:30 am so decided to go and tell her she has to stop this since shes ruining the look of our garden and it IS our hedge not hers. Anyway knocked on door and promise you I really did not shout but she did. Virtually strainght away. Apparently she works for a solicitor so I dont have a leg to stand on and she will cut my garden back when ever she feels like it. Then she shouts in my face Your garden is a MESS. the mess bit being shouted far to close to me. Very rude. Then I am told we are not good enough to be her neighbours. Who does she think she is. Honestly. So now we have to either accept her bullying us, cos bullying this certainly is, or see a solictor. Trouble is aside from the money aspects cos in the end its our garden and our land and we will afford it if we have to, but really if we go down this route I dont ever see us even getting along with this woman. Well personally I dont need to like my neighbour - tho in last house they were lovely really, but it would be good to just be able to live in peace with her if you see what I mean. And if we go and get solicitors involved I dont think even 10 years down the line we will be able to do that. She does have a point. The garden is a mess. Tho the hedge was fine till she touched in. Our efforts at demolishing the huge sheds have not helped the way the garden looks right now but it will get better and considering when we moved in it was full of rusty metal and rubbish everywhere which took us 2 skips to clear, I think shes beiong really nasty. It isnt that bad either. Its just she wants a wastleland with block paving and we want wildlife friendly hedging and arches made of trees - thats what we have. I will try to take some piccies to post cos really our garden is beautiful. Tho maybe not to block paving loving city types! She was scared of teh guy who used to own our house ( a big biker type) and we are just ordinary folk. She wont get away with this tho cos I wont be bullied!

Green peace

Just had to remove the link to greenpeace since i cant get it to work at all! Sorry if this causes anyone any inconvenience.

markets

Spent this weekend exploring possible markets and have decided to start with Wellingborough market( Northampton). Its busy but not too busy so I should be able to handle it. Also it is possible to become a perm reasonably quickly. There is no one selling my kind of products there either. I am also interested in Donnington market which is one of the biggest in the Midlands but to do that one I will need to buy a stall which is a minimum of £135 and really I also will need a van not a tiny Fiesta!. I cant wait now till next saturday so we can get going. Will be needing to buy some thermals tho by the looks of things. This really could be the beggining of my new life. my main problem discovered from my only other local village market is I cant add up! I really need to find or buy a new calculator. I have several but no idea if I will find them in time. Anyway got to sort this one by saturday to avoid the embarrassment. I am still waiting for my stock to be delivered too and have a backlog of orders for bath bombs which I cant fulfill. Luckilly the guy who placed the order will wait a little longer but its a right pain. I dont really want to change supplier after the last time when the ingredients were second rate and I ended up throwing loads of stock out cos that is just expensive. I have a real problem with this tho. If the order doesnt come by thursday we are going to be very short of my very popular mini bath bombs.
Tonight I have my last website lesson. I have to decide whether or not to do the second bit. I am very keen to do so but what if it runs on a market day. Assuming this gets seriously going by February ( as in I will be able to quit my boring hateful job!)I may end up not completing the second bit and that will be waste of money. On the other hand if I do complete it I will be in a much better position regarding building my own website from scratch which will save me hundreds or possibly even thousand of pounds which I dont have! I have actually managed to put a web page up. Its a bit rubbish really but has a link to my ooffoo advert. Atleast now if anyone goes there they will know where to go to buy my soaps!

Transition Towns

Read some seriously interesting stuff on Transition towns today. Started at the usual stops, Owls wings then Ran Prieur - very enlightened if you ask me.- cant say he has actually changed my beliefs- he just seems to put the words in the right place and explain what I already believe. Good reading - anyway there was a lead to another site on Transition towns. Cant honestly say never heard of em before today but very interesting concept of how a local cut off after no fuel town will cope and what to do to get round to coping when the carbon as in oil runs out. Some dicrepenciess and flaws but good reading anyway and informative. worth checking out. I will post a link tomorrow when not inebriated. Also today read about rainbow warrior. Infcat had the chance to go round her but simply could not get there either day sadly so have not done that. Anyway attaching a link doobrie now.

damp patches

Have some new problems with the house which is growing mould. Its only in the corner of one room but pretty bad. I bleached it all off last thursday and its already growing again. I cant understand it. We also get black mould from condensation but this is different. Its actually fur like. Nasty. I need to bleach it all again and try to kill it. It grows in the corner of our front bedroom. Currently we are sleeping in the back since the intention when we moved in was to do up the front and move in but we havent afforded it yet. Maybe its time we just moved in. Its full of stuff now anyway. I am inheriting loads of furniture from my Gran now too. One item is a pink(!!!) woven 1930s chest which will be a great replacement for the rubbish chest of drawers I bought to keep the spare sheets etc in. The real problem in this house is we have no airing cupboard and I am used to having a huge one the size of a double wardrobe. I really need to sort out where to store everything instead of just leaving in a pile on top of this broken chest of drawers- from Ikea but the cheapest they did and not worth the money. Or maybe it would be for a guest room or somewhere where there wasnt so much stuff in the drawer the bottom keeps falling out! Anyway that was a bad buy. Might be worth freecycling if someone can be bothered to fix it. Its less than a year old. Anyway hopefully when I get the sheet storage sorted there will be space to redecorate and sort out the damp patch. Most of the house has air vents but that room doesnt so maybe we need to put one in. Course \I thne have to find the time to actually do the decorating. We have picture rails but there are bits missing so we either need to replace with new or remove. Above the picture rails is the most awfully done artex you ever saw. I have been considering trying this smoothtex stuff to cover this over. my dad used it successfully so maybe it would do the job. Then shove some textured wallpaper over and paint it. Dont particularly like textured wall paper but the alternative with teh uneven walls is to lining paper the whole house and having justy put 2 layers of lining paper and then wallpaper on top of just the chimney breast I dont think I can handle doing that with the entire house. After all we dont even spend much time in the bedroom. Decorating is such hassle.

all work and no play make me a very dull boring git

Well sick to death of going to work 9-5 ( anyone who has ever stumbled upon thios blog before propbably is already aware of this. I was meant to check out some local markets last weekend but never got round to it!! Did manage to finally find a home for my ancient but almost mint condition flower faires collection. (Given to me aged 21 so never really played with!). They have gone to a friends daughts and I hope she enjoys playing with them. They are lovely dolls and really should be played with. i will post a few piccies infact later. Anyway going off at tangents here, Friends came round and we had a great day on saturday. Got very drunk saturday afternoon and woke up fully dressed and hungover on sunday and spent rest of sunday in recovery. has to be done occassionally. So now still have not checked out any markets. Going this saturday to both Wellingborough and also to see Loughborough so we will be doing lots of travelling. The idea is to decide which and then go for it the following week and get started truly trading. Advatage of Wellingborough is not too far from home and also not too close and its possible to beome permanent after 3 weeks whereas most markets its about a year before you can beome a perm. I have to sort this out now tho having spent ages making products so now its time to just do it and stop talking about it. Anyway have also decided to branch into organic unfragranced liquid soaps and shampoos which I didnt want to sell since not environmentallly frinedly but people keep asking me for. have to buy a laser printer tonight since inkjets cannot make good labels apparently. I need a new printer anyway. My lexmark keeps taking in 20+ sheets of paper and wont feed so I have to hand feed every sheet if printing in black and white. Strangely it works ok in colour! My canon photo printer gives good quality but is also an ink jet and currently I cant get any refills for some reason since everywhere has sold out! So anyway have to buy a laser printer. Then need to label everything up and launch business on the markets. Hoping that over xmas will make a reasonable anmount of money back to be able to buy new stock. If all goes to plan I shall be giving in my notice on 9-5 job around 3rd week of january and going it alone for real. Interestingly market traders generally only do 3-4 days a week and still manage to make a living so I am getting very keen on this. I can see it being freezing this winter but wonderful in summer so I cant wait to get started now. I suppose you spend the other 3 days a week doing the books, making new stock and packing stuff for the next market.

bsoaps on ooffoo

I have just been learning to upload files from Dreamweaver ( and other programs of similar types) in my website class only to discover - with considerable shock and also jubilation! that I have a web presence. Wow!! Or at least my soaps do. cant quite get over it. My soaps show up in a list of different addresses if you search for them. Its amazing. trouble is I still at the moment have no real website. I am on ooffoo tho. Here comes the soaps. I have to really knuckle down and do this website designing now since the web address doesnt point to anywhere right now which is a real pain. I could have hundreds of people looking to buy my products and no way to do so. Will they find ooffoo? will they buy from me. I have come to the conclusion the soap business is never going anywhere until I take the risk, chuck in my day job ( which pays the mortgage and bills!!) and go for it full time. Now other half is being laid off for a whole month tho I do not see how I can really do that. He working in the car industry ( what little we have left of it) and the company is shutting from 5th December to 5th january with no pay! How rubbish. No idea what we will do now and its right on christmas too. Well good thing we have no kids cos that would be even worse. We hopefully will get thru this. If its only a month we should be ok but if this goes on for longer I think we may well lose our house so not a time for me to be quitting my boring job. Thats not very secure either. Cant feel doom and gloom tho despite this. Seeing a list of links to Bsoaps was just so wild. Cant describe the happiness I feel right now or the fear cos what if it really takes off? Will I have enough soap to fill demands?? I suppose then it will be time to really go for it and quit the boring day job.............Bring it on............

funeral

Well today it finally happened. I already seem to have a cold coming on thru all the familly kissing. havent seen many of em for 20+ years tho so WHAT EVER! Grandma was seen off in style. Found I was later watching the clock knowing the crem gets switched on at 6pm. Frying tonight! Yes I am a sick human being! I cried. Hate myself but I did. havent heard anything from the job interview and that most likely means I didnt get it. Still not qualified so no idea why they even gave me the interview. Xmas market looming - approx a month till the big one and not sure I have anywhere near enough stock to even consider doing a proper xmas market. Tho I suppose in the end we can always retreat tails between legs etc. Other than that lots of different liqueurs started off for xmas drinking and we even found some sloes on a hedge when walking the hounds. Havent read any blogs recently but will catch up in next few days. My new ( celtic) year resolution is to get up to date with blogging! Met my cousin KAREN after about 30 years and shes really nice. Met lost of other relatives too. What can I say? Sadly didnt meet all who were there but didnt know who they all were. Never mind. Sadly there could be more funerals coming. I know of 4 people of my own age who died in this october and 3 of them committed suicide. Weird!