Spring is springing

I was thrilled to be able to hang laundry to dry outside on Saturday.
It was a cooler day … and some of the clothes still weren’t 100% dry by the time I brought them in around 8pm … but it felt brilliant to br able to not use the drier!!

I made homemade laundry detergent on Friday using my homemade bar soap as the base.
It was runnier than I expected, but that’s probably because I didn’t use as much bar soap as I should have.

I found a recipe for a more concentrated detergent that I think I’ll used next time. I like how it calls for soap in cups, rather than bars.

1 quart Water (boiling)
2 cups Bar soap (grated)
2 cups Borax
2 cups Washing Soda

■Add finely grated bar soap to the boiling water and stir until soap is melted. You can keep on low heat until soap is melted.
■Pour the soap water into a large, clean pail and add the Borax and Washing Soda. Stir well until all is dissolved.
■Add 2 gallons of water, stir until well mixed.
■Cover pail and use 1/4 cup for each load of laundry. Stir the soap each time you use it (will gel).

Moving back to the UK?

People have asked me a lot recently about any plans to move back to the UK, but we’re sill working on ‘making it’ over here.

I miss the UK. I really do.
But I have to also accept the fact that I’m looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Do I miss commuting to London? NO!
Do I miss the people traffic in London? NO!
Do I miss the weather? NO! (Well, actually, in an odd way, I do. Summers and winters both are so bloomin’ long here!! In contrast, spring and autumn are unbearably short. We still have snow on the ground at the moment! Spring doesn’t officially arrive until mid-May. So in that sense, I really do miss the fresh rains of spring/autumn.

Maybe one day, we’ll end up with a farm in Northumberland.

It’s been a strange path for us.
We moved to the US not knowing exactly what we wanted – only that we didn’t want to live where we did, nor work in London.
I had recently been doing family history research, which brought to our attention how vast amounts of wealth in Frank’s family’s past had just been thrown to the wind, so to speak. We wanted to change that and bring financial wealth back – and neither of us were under any illusion that it’d be really really tough to accomplish that in the UK.

So here we are now.
This is why I’ve been planning the garden as I have – everythnig is a very calculated step towards self-sufficiency/reliance.

We’ll see where it takes us.