Life Without a Car and a Little Announcement

Ok, first for the bad stuff. My car failed it's MOT on Wednesday. It needed 2 new tyres and it failed the emissions test. The garage suspected that it was an engine mis-fire that was causing the problem and after doing all the obvious stuff to sort it out, and failing, the garage finally came to the conclusion that it's not going to be financially viable to find and fix the problem and that the car is now basically only good for scrap. As you can imagine, I am really, really REALLY upset about this, not least because I had to pay the garage for the work they had done trying to fix the car and now I am £170 poorer and I still have no car. 

For most people, although it would be an inconvenience they would at least be able to hop on a bus or a train to get to where they needed to go but as I live in the middle of nowhere, it's a 20 minute walk to my nearest bus stop and a 45 minute walk to the nearest train station. Ok, I know there will be people out there saying it's my own fault for choosing to live where I live and I appreciate that fact but nevertheless, with no money to buy another car it's going to be a difficult time over the next few weeks until I have scraped enough together to figure something out. Anyhow, as I have said before, I'm all for making lemonade when life chucks me a bag of lemons and with this in mind, I thought I would write a few blog posts about how I manage to live without a car living in the depths of Cornwall.

As my MOT doesn't officially run out until midnight tonight, I have spent the morning running around trying to get a few things sorted that I probably won't be able to do when the car is gone. I fetched 6 more 56ltr bags of compost so I can get my veg potted on into their final tubs, buckets and beds and I stocked up on loo roll, bread for freezer, milk, pasta and pesto and a few more essentials that I thought might be useful but from now on, all my shopping is going to have to be done online from the supermarket and delivered by a man in a van. I am going to have to be super organised too so I don't run out of anything because there will be no nipping to the shops if that happens. Not ideal I know, but not much I can do about it.

The main problem is going to arise when I try and do my monthly animal food shop. At the start of each month, on payday, I go and I buy everything I will need to keep my animals fed and happy. This means enough llama food, chicken food, dog food and cat food to last a whole month along with cat litter, dog treats, sawdust and hay. I know it sounds a bit bizarre but I at least have the peace of mind then, knowing that if things go a bit pear shaped financially, the animals will all be cared for. I also then know exactly how much I have in the kitty to budget with for that month. I have no idea how I am going to manage to get to the 4 different shops it takes to sort all this out. The bags of dog food weigh 12kg each, the llama food bags are 25kg each and the big slabs of cat food I buy have 12 cans in each and I buy 9 slabs each month .... and that's just for starters. It's going to be a total nightmare but it will be interesting to see how I manage. So ........ tomorrow will be day one without a car. 

And now to the announcement. 

Yesterday, I became a Granny for the first time :-) My daughter and her husband welcomed little Archie into the world just after lunchtime yesterday and although my poor daughter had to have a cesarean after being in labour for 36 hours, both mum and baby are doing brilliantly. 

He weighed in at a healthy 8lb15oz :-)

Trouble With My Tits!

At the moment, I'm sat at home resting a very swollen knee, which involves a lot of sitting on the sofa with my leg propped on a cushion and not much else. As a result, I have been very bored. So bored, in fact, that I have moved a chair over to the window and I have been snapping away at the birds on my gate posts with my zoom lens. Ahhhhhh I hear you say, a post about birds, not about boobs :-) Anyway, each morning, I put food out for them and I sit watching them as they hop excitedly around, rootling through the bird food to find the bits they like. Yesterday, on a whim, I rather rashly signed up to do the RSPB bird counting thingy at the end of January and as I was reading through the downloaded instruction booklet, it suddenly dawned on me that, other than the basics, like blackbirds, sparrows, robins and blue tits etc, I know virtually nothing about birds ..... a slight hiccup in my bird counting if I don't actually know what it is I'm counting so I decided to have a bit of a practice run. I uploaded the photos that I had taken over a couple of mornings and set about identifying them with the help of the RSPB bird identification page. I think (hopefully!!) I managed to identify a bullfinch, both male and female, a blue tit, a great tit, a robin, a chaffinch, a jay although he flew away before I managed to get a picture of him and a wren, although again, I didn't manage to get a picture of it. There were also a couple of other little birds that I couldn't quite seem to get the identification of. At first I though it was a great tit but it doesn't have the white blob on the top of it's head and so, after much internet searching and much close inspection of my pictures from as many angles as possible, it seems that the little birds are either willow tits or marsh tits. The only slight hiccup is that the only reliable way to tell which is which is either by seeing a small, pale grey spot on the beak of the marsh tit or by listening to them sing! Luckily, the mother of a friend of mine, who is a bit of a bird enthusiast, has informed me that she thinks it is a marsh tit. Sooooo, many thanks Jo's mum :-) you saved me from looking like even more of a lunatic than I usually do because I had come to the conclusion that the only way to listen to the bloomin' things sing, without disturbing them, was to listen through the letterbox. It would have been just my luck that a passing neighbour would have spotted me and thought I had finally flipped! I'm just very grateful that I didn't have to resort to sticking my ear through the letterbox.

Anyway, here are a couple of pictures of the little blighters and some of the other birds I spotted. 

Please feel free to weigh in if you have any other theories about the species :-)

 Bullfinch ....hopefully?

 Marsh Tit .... probably 

 Great Tit ..... maybe, Female Bullfinch ...... possibly 

and 

another cute little birdy on the left of the photo that I can't remember .... Chaffinch but possibly not?? ...... you can see my dilemma :-)

(A massive thank you to Christine who has left a very helpful comment saying that the bird on the right is a male chaffinch and the one on the left is a female one .... many thanks Christine)

 Blue tit .... definitely .... phew

Robin .... positively ..... thank goodness :-)

On a much more exciting note, there has been a wonderful development since I last posted anything .......

I'm going to be a granny :-)

Baby ....... Absolutely, Positively, Definitely a Baby :-)

My eldest daughter and her husband are expecting their first baby, my first grandchild and my mum's first great grandchild ..... Haha mum, does it make you feel old? It does me slightly but then again, next month I will be reaching a BIG birthday age .... one with a zero on the end so I might need therapy!

I am so happy for them. The baby is due at the end of May and it's very exciting. 

Congratulations to you both XxX