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Originally it looked like this was going to be a miniscule post. The charity shops in Cambridge, my usual haunt, have been very thin on the ground for good items recently. The students have all left by July and by August the place is swamped with tourists, so donations are thin on the ground (from what I can tell anyway). 

But as I had another week off it meant that I could take some time to stroll around Colchester, and me and my husband had a day out in Maldon with the in-laws so I had a little look around the charity shops there too.

Sadly there were no clothes this month, one or two things caught my eye but I just couldn't picture myself wearing them. There's no point buying clothes you like if you don't wear them, so I put both things back and moved on.

Books

My collection of works about women in history has expanded again this month! My main purchase was a biography on Cecily Neville, the mother of King Edward IV and King Richard III. She's one of those medieval women that used to only exist on the periphery of history, but recent works have really helped make people more aware of her. 

I've already sat down and read the whole thing and really enjoyed it, I liked the way Amy Licence really tried to focus on Cecily. I find that with many books about women there's a greater emphasis on the men in their lives, in order to bulk out the text as there's often very few resources about the women themselves. This book is a little short, but only because Licence doesn't fall in to that trap, and what information she does have on Cecily is really interesting!

DVDs

My aim to refill my DVD collection with stuff I'm missing from home continues apace! This month I bulked out my collection with the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie (I mistakenly thought I already had the second one, so now I need to keep an eye out for that too), Sense and Sensibility (which I always enjoy watching on a lazy afternoon).

I also bought one of the Family Guy "Star Wars" specials. I've never seen the Star Wars movies, to my husband's everlasting horror, but I'll happily watch this parody of them, even if a lot of the jokes go over my head.

I then went in to Colchester for a during in my week off, and what else did I find in a charity shop? The second Family Guy Star Wars parody DVD! So now I own both of them for the princely sum of £2, I wouldn't buy them at full price but I'll happily have them in the animation drawer to watch when the fancy takes me.

A week off in July

After a very busy period at work, and my last week off being for my honeymoon back in April, I was very relieved to have a week off this month. Well, technically it was four and a half days, but it was still time off work and I was grateful for it as my brain was starting to get a bit bogged down!

Monday

This was the half day part of my leave. Popped in to the office in the morning, which might have been a bit daft as I have a long commute (live near Colchester and work in Cambridge) but I had things to sort out around the office. Once I'd done everything on my list I then started my holiday by driving over to Cambridge's Grafton Centre, had a little lunch in Bella Italia (I had two starters, pork and beef meatballs in tomato sauce, and carbonara croquettes, delicious!) and then strolled around the charity shops outside the centre. I managed to get some DVDs and a nice top, so my next charity shop haul post will have some good bits in it! Keep an eye out next month.

Started the week with a good book!

Once I'd worn my little legs out with all the walking I drove home and had the rest of the afternoon with a nice cup of tea and a good book, heaven!

Tuesday

Sadly my car needed work done so I dropped it off at the garage Tuesday morning and spent the day confined to my town. But that's not too bad as the town isn't huge and the walk down the high street to the river is quite pleasant. There have been some changes in bin collections recently, which mean that we can now get free sacks for garden waste! Excellent news as they were £3.50 before. But you can only get them if you fill out a form online and get an emailed voucher. Unfortunately having jumped through the respective hoops, I got to the Town Council offices to find that they had run out of garden sacks.

Quite frustrating but there you go. I was asked to phone on Friday to check if sacks had arrived before walking down, and I walked back home to spend the rest of the day reading my book, playing online, and planning what to do with the rest of my week. I intended to go for a drive up to a village called Coggeshall, but when I went to pick up my car they showed me where my suspension coil had snapped! Not good, so I had to book the car in for Friday for more work and be careful with my driving for the rest of the week.

Wednesday

Mirror for £4? Yes please!

Despite the car trouble I used Wednesday to drive in to Colchester and have a long walk around. I popped in to numerous charity shops but sadly couldn't find anything I particularly wanted to buy, not even a book or two! However I did manage to get some nice hanging baskets from Wilko, for our garden, and a bathroom mirror for only £4! We've been really struggling to find a bathroom mirror we both like, so at only £4 I figured this will be a handy placeholder to use, and then we won't rush in to buying something we don't like just because we need to fill the space.

I also managed to get some nice birthday presents for one of my sisters. Her birthday isn't until September, but I think I might have all her gifts sorted now, getting that done early is a big bonus!

Thursday

I decided to call off my trip to Coggeshall due to the car problem, and instead went up to Marks Tey. I drive by Poplar Nurseries here every day, and it looks like such a big garden centre that I've wanted to go inside for months. Now I had my hanging baskets I decided it was time to get some plants and get gardening!

I wasn't disappointed, it was a lovely big shop. I spent quite a lot of time mooching around the "grow your own fruit and veg" section before coming to my senses and realising it was far too late to be planting tomatoes and strawberries (but I'll try to find a budget for them next year) and instead wandered over to the outdoor section to see what flowers I wanted. I knew I wanted some lavender plants, and then something nice for the hanging baskets. 

Tiny lavender and little petunias!

But there were so many other beautiful plants that in the end I had to go eat some lunch as I was just wandering around in circles trying to work out what I wanted to buy. After filling up with a lovely cheese scone and a nice cup of tea, I had my head on straight and went back out with a trolley. Three small lavender plants for £1.50 each, a box of six dark pink petunias for £4.50, two small trough pots, and two bags of compost, and I was ready to come home! Buy not before I popped back in to their farm shops to get two enormous slices of cake for me and my husband (chocolate loaf for me, carrot and walnut for my husband). I really liked the nursery so I think a second visit is on the cards so I can write a proper review of it!

Once I got home I got everything potted up and placed, ready to surprise my husband when we came home. I ended up putting two petunias each in the hanging basket, and the other two in the smaller trough. The three lavender plants fitted nicely in the larger trough, despite being quite small and spindly. I've been told in the past that lavender can get quite larger so hopefully they'll grow a bit and won't stay quite so small.

Friday

Car went back in the garage in the morning, and then a quick call to the Town Council meant that I could hurry down and pick up some newly arrived garden waste bags! Then all I had to do for the day was wait for the call to say my car was done. I decided to use the time to sort out my clothes, we out our wardrobe from IKEA back in June and my clothes were still in bags in the spare room. I sorted through them I realised there was a lot there that I hadn't even missed despite not seeing them for a few months. I ended up filling a few bags to donate to a charity shop and then hung up the rest, so now all my clothes are sorted out and the spare room looks a lot clearer!

So that was my somewhat productive week off! I didn't get as much done as I'd intended (sending off more forms to change my surname for example) but I'm especially happy about getting the plants sorted. Gardening doesn't come naturally to me so getting plants potted is an achievement to me!

My next week off is at the end of August, and since this week off really wasn't long enough I'm really looking forward to it XD

Charity Shop Haul - May 2017

I've been a devotee of charity shops for months now, as they were my primary source of crockery for our wedding. One thing I've said to my husband is that now we've had the wedding, I'm looking forward to it consuming less of my daily life. Even thought we were only having a small wedding, the need to find as much of our crockery in charity shops as possible, meant that I was just going in and out of them to look at the bric-a-brac shelves, before moving on to the next one. I was also trying to save as much money towards it as possible, so if I wasn't buying something for the wedding, I felt that it was wasted money.

But now I can go in to a charity shop and look for things that aren't teapots and cups! I'm also enjoying the loosening of the purse strings, although not too much since we still have to buy a lot of things for the house. May was my first month of being able to buy things, and I'm quite happy with my little haul for the month!

Clothes

I got a really lovely blue long-sleeved top from a Cancer Research UK shop. The material is super soft, and it's from Marks and Spencers so it's really good quality, although thankfully this top doesn't like like it's aimed at the over-sixties XD It'll be good for either work or home, but it's a little thin so I may not get away with it in the winter unless I layer it with both a vest underneath and a tunic over the top.

I also spotted a few skirts that I liked, but if I wasn't overawed with them then I didn't buy them. I've come to regret letting one of them go though as the material was lovely and soft, and I'm sure I would have found something to wear with it if I had tried, so I think I need to be a little bolder about buying such things when I see them!

Books

I've been struggling to get through my history reads recently, and I think it's because I need to wind my brain down a little bit. Sometimes when work is busy and life is hectic, you just need some easy-read to fiction to distract you from everything else.

I'm always a bit "meh" about historical fiction, as I tend to dislike the lack of proper context, or just all-out poor use of history (you can probably guess which author in particular I'm thinking of here). Nowadays I tend to by historical fiction set in the Georgian period as it's a point of history I know very little about, and so I find very little to annoy me in books XD So "How to Marry a Marquis" seemed to fit the bill perfectly, and I then added to it with "Mrs Fytton's Country Life" and "The Runaway Princess", neither of which are historical but both of which seem to come under the heading of "easy fiction". However I have yet to read any of these, as I also bought "What Would Mary Berry Do?" by Claire Sandy, and it was so good that I read it in two and a half days!

Despite aiming to get just fiction books I couldn't help but also purchase "Princesses: The Daughters of George III" as the hardback copy was only £5 in Oxfam. I read a really good biography of George III and his family last year, and I've wanted to read more on his daughters for a while now, so I'm hoping this will prove to be an equally interesting book.

Anything Else?
I was hoping to be able to buy a DVD or two that we could save to one side for a future date night, but despite lots of searching I couldn't find any that I wanted to buy. I'm a bit picky with films, and I tend to find that the ones in charity shops are not brilliant films anyway (otherwise people would keep the DVD to watch again!) I also kept my eye out for any kitchenwares (cake tins and storage pots being the two main ones) but again, nothing really caught my eye.

But that's okay, I don't want to go mad in my first month of buying, we'll see what June brings!