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21st September 2011

95 Days to Christmas

Today’s task is to create a master gift list.
Mine’s already done. I just copied the page on my Christmas spreadsheet from last year, the year before, and the year before that!
I kept the gift lists from the past three years so I don’t give any duplicate gifts 🙂
The fun part now is doing lots of surfing to find just the right gift for each person!

The versatile blogger award

I went to check out Amy’s award and was surprised and happy to see she had tagged me 🙂
I’d not heard of this award before so had to go and find out a bit more about it.
Firstly, you have to thank the blogger who tagged you – Done 🙂
Then you have to share 7 things about yourself – Hmmmm *thinking*
And lastly, you have to tag 15 other people – Oh blimey! I’m going to have problems finding 15.
My 7 things are:
  1. I can’t get rid of books. We have shelves and bookcases and boxes of them and no space left to put them but I can’t get rid of any. I love books and can’t imagine a home without them.
  2. I’m a new gardener and I’m absolutely loving it. I never thought I’d ever spend money on a gardening magazine and now I subscribe to a weekly one!
  3. I wanted 6 children when I was younger. I stopped at 3, by choice!
  4. I worry a lot about spelling and grammar. If I’m not sure I’m using a word correctly, I’ll rearrange the sentence so I don’t have to use it. I also have little ways to remember the difference between words like brought and bought; if I pay for something I’ve bought it but if, for example, I go to a party and take a dessert with me, I’ve brought it. There are a few more words that get me confused and I have similar ways to know the difference. I hope I’ve not made any errors in this post after talking about it!
  5. I was a huge Buffy and Angel fan and I can still remember how excited I got when Thursday came around and I could settle down and watch them, one after the other.
  6. I watch too much T.V. but I can’t help it. There are too many shows I want to see and new ones coming out all the time!
  7. I’m currently watching the last Medium and I’m sad that they’ve cancelled it.
Ok, I’ve not made it to 15, here are my 5 🙂
Confessions of a SAHM
Purple Mum
The Blunt Truth

The Gallery – Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasures

I have to be honest when I say that this is my second choice of guilty pleasures.
My first choice doesn’t last long in this house….ice cream. Any kind, almost any flavour (not coffee….urghh!) and for once, on the day I needed to take a picture, the freezer is empty of all and any kind of ice cream! There isn’t even a lone choc ice floating around, which is very mysterious, to say the least!

So, my next guilty pleasure is….

Coffee and chocolate guilty pleasures

I love a caramel-flavoured coffee with chocolate. Again, any chocolate will do. Kit Kat chunky and Mint Aero are the 2 I’d first pick but I wouldn’t say no to a Cadbury’s Flake or Twirl either.
When the husband has gone to work and the kids have gone to school, I make a coffee, grab a bar and relax with either my gardening magazine or Facebook!

I’m probably sharing a chocolatey guilty pleasure with almost everyone who joins in the linky today!
I’m heading on over to check out all the entries. If you want to do the same, click the button 🙂

ASDA Chosen by You – Not by me!

I’m usually a Tesco online customer. I’ve been having my shopping delivered by Tesco since I was pregnant with KayCee (now 6) and will continue to be a Tesco customer while I continue to get great service.
However, if we have to actually go out to the shops, we go to ASDA. It’s closer and out of town.
We went in the summer holidays to get the back-to-school stationery and some other stuff for Aiden and ended up spending far too much on impulse buys!
The next morning, I checked ASDA’s price guarantee and they gave us back over £6 because we could have got our shopping cheaper elsewhere.
What’s all this got to do with ASDA’s Chosen by You range I hear you ask?
Well, because we got this money back, sent as online vouchers to my ASDA account, I decided to have an ASDA delivery this week and ordered much the same as I usually do from Tesco.

We love Tesco’s expensive sausages range but when we can’t afford those, we have frozen Irish sausages.
They taste lovely, although not as meaty as the expensive ones, obviously, and don’t shrink when they’ve been cooked.

In comparison, the frozen Irish sausages we got from ASDA were in a completely different league. I thought I’d bought value ones by mistake but I checked and they were the Chosen by You ones.
I can’t actually believe that anyone would choose to eat these sausages, let alone describe them as having met the high standard of ASDA customers….

Here’s ASDA’s blurb about their Chosen by you, frozen Irish sausages:

Lightly seasoned No artificial colours, flavours or hydrogenated fat Lightly seasoned pork sausages. CHOSEN BY YOU We believe customers are the best judges of the quality of our food. That’s why every ‘Chosen by you’ product has been tried and tested by you. It’s only when our products meet your high standards that we put them in our ‘Chosen by you’ range. Source: Cambridge Market Research 2010

Now don’t get me wrong, I know that £1.50 for 20 sausages is not going to get me gold standard ones but the least I expect is for them to taste nice, not to shrink to half their size and not leave behind this amount of fat from 8 sausages…

I certainly won’t be buying them again and I won’t be taking any notice of the ‘Chosen by you’ strip on any of the products sold by ASDA, but to be fair, this is the first time I’ve felt so let down by an ASDA product (if you don’t count shoes from George, a George manager who made me feel about 10cm tall and a mini battle of wills to get what was rightfully mine!) and I will continue to shop there.

After all, it’s one product out of thousands I’ve bought over the years and I do enjoy shopping at my local ASDA. The staff are all lovely (except those on the customer desk!) and there are sometimes great bargains to be had, especially when a season is coming to an end, like when the gardening stock went on sale. Compost was half price so we stocked up!

Anyway, that’s my little moan for the week.
Don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of those sausages!

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