On Thursday between Christmas and new year, the sun was shining and I took myself off for a nice long wander through the woods. 

This path snakes ever so slightly uphill for a few miles, and as the trees thinned out, it got colder and the ground was covered with an increasing amount of snow. 

Eventually I reached the top of the hill, and stopped to drink my flask of hot chocolate. I was warm from climbing the hill, but the air was freezing, and as I turned the corner and left the trees behind me, the wind blew across the exposed road. 

I'll miss this route when we move. It's my ten mile running route (or at least it was, back when I was capable of running for ten miles...). On this occasion though the aim was scenery, and, after seven miles of walking I decided I didn't need to trek the last three miles through the suburban streets so I hopped on a bus.

The very next day I found myself doing the first part of the same walk with a friend, and this time all of it was in the snow. 

It's funny how much difference the snow can make to how the landscape feels. 

On this occasion we just walked for a couple of miles, then stopped for lunch at a cafe (along with half of the rest of the city population, it seemed). 

It's felt good to be out and about in the winter weather. Not the grey, rainy, gloomy weather (not all the time anyway), but give me a bright sky or a bit of snow and I'm itching to be outside. I can see a lot more being outside in my future... 

Happy new year! 

Each year I seem to start off thinking I won't go back over all my old blog posts, but that's always what I end up doing anyway. To start off, here are some previous posts

Looking back on 2016 - the year we started to decorate, and continued to decorate, and still didn't move
Looking back on 2015 - the year we started packing ready to move
Looking back on 2014 - a year of running and gardening

I started my review this time last year by laughing at how I'd thought we'd move house in the first half of 2016. I ended it by saying we'd definitely move in the first half of 2017. And now, here we are, 2018, still in the same old house... but at least there have been estate agents and solicitors and money changing hands and (dare I say it) we hope to move in the next few weeks...

So, without further ado - 2017. 

After starting with a review of 2016, I launched myself into Uber Frugal January, with posts about food, travel, and getting value for money. We went out and about quite a bit, and ended the month with a DIY update. 

In February, I did a round up of Uber Frugal January (I'm doing it again this year so I must make some time to write about it again). I got enthused about cycling before work, and did a catch up of the reading I'd done over the last few months. 

I started March with a 32 mile bike ride, in preparation for my 62 mile race. My weekends were filled with DIY, yet more cycling, and a little trip to York with some friends. I did some more DIY (of course), mended these socks (that I've had to mend twice since) and finally got out into the garden after the winter. We spent quite a bit of time looking round other people's houses, and I planned an epic cycling adventure after tonsillitis scuppered my 62 mile race. 

In April, my epic cycling adventure happened, and I spent a happy (if windy) two days cycling over the Trans Pennine Trail to see my sister. 

We then spent a week in Northumbria (where I did not even look at a bicycle, let alone get on one). 

In May, the garden started flowering, I did a little bit more reading, and spent a lot of time in the countryside, hiding from the appalling, half decorated mess that was our house. Surprisingly, there are no DIY posts from this time - odd as it felt like DIY occupied our entire lives. 

There are no posts in June. June was a month of chaos as we decorated, tidied, cleaned - and found a house we adored and put an offer in. At the start of July I despaired that it would ever get finished. But it did, and after marvelling at how pretty our current house and garden looked, by the 20th we had found a buyer, ditched the house we originally wanted to buy, and put an offer in on a second. 

Finally we were able to have a normal weekend while we waited for our buyers to sell their house. 

In August, I made jam, our buyers sold their house, and our offer on our second house was rejected. After yet more wandering, we finally found the place we will hopefully call home, and the legal and financial shenanigans began. 

I looked back on the changes we'd made to our house, and acquired a big load of fruit which I turned into jam. I ended the month with an evening wander out in the peak district. 

In September we got uncharacteristically adventurous and hopped on a plane to visit our friends in Berlin. I reflected on August in the garden, spent a lot of time in the woods as they turned slowly more autumnal, and we had a little day trip to Bakewell. 

In October, I finally finished one of the socks I'd started months before. We went on a little trip to the seaside, I cycled along the canal with a group of other women and visited some wildlife trust reserves - and I mended those pesky socks that I'd already mended earlier in the year. 

In November, I marvelled at there still being flowers in the garden, and drummed my fingers impatiently as we were still waiting for our mortgage offer three months after applying. Finally, it arrived, and for a day it seemed things would move quickly... but then our buyer had to put their house back on the market and we all had to settle back into endless waiting again. I visited my sister and her new dog in a bid to think about something cheerful. 

Fortunately, by the start of December, our buyers had found a new buyer (hooray!) and we visited our new house again, this time with a heating engineer in tow. Things were rather grey and muddy, and I tried not to be concerned about the amount of grass and mud we are buying... 

Back at our current home, it snowed (a tiny bit) and we spent a lot of time sitting in cafes. 

I ended the blogging year with a Christmas day wander and some knitting. 

It's good to look back. Of course, I don't record everything here, mostly only the more picturesque things that involve cake, scenery and knitting. It's been a rather trying year in real life and when that happens it's sometimes easy to forget that there have been cheerful things too. We finally sold our house! I cycled all the way to the other side of the country! And in amidst all the chaos there were still flowers, knitting, cakes and wanderings. Not a bad year.

Looking back though, one thing that was missing is running. I did a half marathon in January with my sister (which I seemingly didn't write about here) and then... nothing. For a while cycling took over, and then house nonsense has eaten up the rest of the year. I've started running again in the last couple of weeks and goodness me I've missed it. Look out for more running from me in 2018...  

I hope you all had a good festive season. We have been pretty quiet here, and I seem to have done a lot of snoozing. I think I'm just catching up on sleep after a long year. 

We spend Christmas day on our own, opening presents with a cup of tea, eating chocolate before (or in my case, instead of) breakfast, then preparing lunch in a leisurely way and eating mid afternoon. This year we sneaked out for a chilly walk in the park with a friend before lunch too. 

The rest of the afternoon was spent knitting while watching Harry Potter. I'm trying to finish a pair of socks for a friend - I've just started the second so clearly they are going to be rather late for Christmas... I'm planning to finish them before I go back to work though - good job all of the Harry Potter films are on the tv this week. 

It's rather chilly here, but I forced myself out for a wintry walk this afternoon. I'll post photos soon but right now I'm off to try to defrost my bones with a hot water bottle. 

It's been pretty chilly round here lately, and last weekend we were poised for a large flurry of snow, but... nothing. 

Well, not quite nothing, but also not the 'several inches' we were threatened with. 

Still, it was nice to walk (or rather slide) around the local park, and see who else had been out walking. 

I do like wandering about in the snow, but it doesn't do to stay out too long in such weather if you have the choice, and we quickly found ourselves in our favourite cafe.

It's been a bit of a week for staying inside, and yesterday we hosted our usual pre-Christmas festive gathering. More of an open house really, with people coming and going throughout the evening and bringing tasty goodies with them. 

I made these (supposedly) unbelievably easy mince pies. What a faff! The recipe boasts that they're so easy because you don't need to roll out the pastry, but I spent far longer squidging and squishing to get it into the tins and they looked rather 'rustic'. Still, they were quite delicious, so all is forgiven. 

They did look slightly better cooked, but somehow they vanished rather quickly and I didn't get a photograph. Not sure how that happened. 

No house news - our buyers' buyer is presumably now going through the same stress we all did we mortgages and surveys, and we're not really expecting to be ready to exchange until mid January at the earliest. In the meantime, we're decking our stacks of boxes with festive trimmings and settling in for a cosy few weeks here before we head out into the middle of nowhere. 

Oh! I should also tell you I'm planning to join in with Frugalwoods' Uber Frugal Month Challenge in January again. You can read about last year's efforts here (although you'll have to scroll past a bit of DIY first - that brought the memories flooding back!) It would be most cheerful if you joined in the challenge too - sign up (for free, of course) here. 

Will you join me for a celebratory cup of tea? Our house-buying adventure is back on, as our buyers found a new buyer for their house yesterday. Hooray! 

Of course, we won't be going anywhere before Christmas now, but that's no bad thing, as it gives us another few weeks to save (and to pack). And it means when we move it will be closer to spring, which is no bad thing, as it's pretty grey and bleak at our new house right now. 

(Well, of course, it's grey and bleak here in the city too, but somehow everything is more muddy and cold out in the countryside, which I suppose we'll get used to...)

This is me at our new house a couple of weeks ago in my fabulous blood-and-acid-proof wellies and my posh frock (I had to go to a work function straight after). As you can see, the neighbour's cows have been stomping around and I'm not sure I'd advise camping in this particular field right now.

I was striding about the fields photographing the ID numbers on the telegraph poles (there's a rumour from the solicitor that we may be able to get £5 a year from BT for giving them access to maintain them, and I'm not going to turn my nose up at free dosh). 

I was surprised how many telegraph poles there were - I'd been convinced there was only one. 

This one, in fact. However, it seems I was wrong, and turning my head in the opposite direction I spied this one. 

Oh! And what's this? 

Turns out that contraption is on our land too. Exciting! 

Now is probably a good time to confess that, until last week, I hadn't fully realised the extent of the land we were buying.  I mean, we have the plan, and we've looked on google maps, and on the Ordnance Survey map of course. But the first time we viewed the house the estate agent was late, and we had an appointment to view another house, so we just went inside and round the outbuildings and looked across the fields but didn't really go into them. 

I'd been back a couple of times since then to walk along the public footpaths, but had forgotten the plan of the land both times. 

This time, wearing wellies and armed with the title plan, I had a good look round. 

It seems we're buying quite a lot of mud. The neighbour's cows have been doing an excellent job of keeping the grass down, and have been thoughtfully making little (and large) puddles for us to splash through. At one point I thought I was going to lose a welly, and have a lot of explaining to do when I turned up at work covered in mud (I'm sure it won't be the last time).

Apparently this will be our field too, and those our dry stone walls. I love dry stone walls. I always have (except for a brief period as a teenager, when on a school trip to the Lake District we listed what we thought were the Most Boring Jobs in the World - number one was working in a shoe shop, and number two was building dry stone walls).  

I had a go at building a dry stone wall once - it was like doing an extremely heavy and complicated jigsaw. Fortunately I like jigsaws, and am planning to book myself onto a dry stone walling course as soon as we move.

I'm still not entirely sure what we're going to do with all those fields. Our friends and family are, of course, ready with a series of suggestions from the boring-and-sensible-but-wouldn't-be-allowed-in-a-national-park to the preposterous. I make no apology for not turning our particular corner of the Peak District into a festival site, caravan storage or pet cemetery. 

I think it's far more likely that we'll start with the field closest to the house, plant some veg, and then work outwards as we settle in. I don't want to make too many firm plans in case it all goes wrong... 

So it looks like we'll be spending much of the winter in the city, which I don't really mind, because the sun is shining here and there's a lot less mud. I've been tramping around and about the place and mostly taking photographs of trees. 

Our little garden bird table is attracting quite a few visitors, and now the leaves have all fallen off the lilac, we get quite a good view. This little goldfinch arrived yesterday morning as I was having breakfast. 

There's a robin there at the minute, and a couple of weeks ago (when the leaves were still around) a squirrel made several trips up and down, up and down, burying seeds in the ground. 

We've resigned ourselves to spending one last Christmas in our old house. It's not a bad thing really.  New year, new house. If it all goes to plan of course... 

There's a lot of this going on right now. Sitting in a cosy cafe with a cup of tea and a book, or the crossword, or with friends. 

We are trying to fend off our impatience that we still haven't moved house. Until Thursday, it was officially us causing the delay, and I was getting fed up with hectoring emails from our seller's estate agent, each one spelling my name wrong and containing more exclamation marks than any professional should use in their life, let alone one email. The main delay has been our mortgage - a combination of mistakes by the broker, inefficient communication by the lender, and us buying an unusual house (or rather an unusual number of fields). 

By Thursday this was all finally sorted, and we spent a happy hour and a half with the solicitor, going through the results of the searches (all fine, thank goodness) and signing all our documents. Hooray! 

Our celebration was short-lived. 

Less than twenty four hours later I received an email from our own estate agents, beginning 'Hate to tell you this but...'. Our buyers have put their house back on the market. Their buyers, first timers who had seemed nice enough, had waited until we were all just about ready, and had demanded a large price reduction. 

Our buyers (rightly) said no, and have re-advertised their house. 

Yesterday we were Very Grumpy Indeed. Not much work was done, and swear words were heard. We may have ended the evening (incidentally also our twelfth anniversary) on the sofa with a bottle of vodka.

But today we are more sanguine. The menaces who caused this trouble may change their minds over the weekend when they realise nobody will give in to their bullying tactics. If not, our buyers may find a new buyer very quickly (it only took them a few days the first time). 

We haven't told our sellers yet. This only happened yesterday, and we wanted to take a day or two to think clearly. We're going to measure up at our new house on Monday, so we'll explain then.

I hope they'll wait. They'd be daft not to. The house we're buying is rather rural, with an unwieldy amount of land and a fair bit of damp. It's been empty for six months, and the heating currently isn't working. The chances of them selling to someone else more quickly than our buyers can sell is very slim. 

All fingers are crossed that the pesky first time buyers come crawling back with their tails between their legs having learned a lesson, and we can all proceed as planned. If we have to start again with someone new at the top of the chain (who will need a new mortgage, and new searches), then it seems unlikely we'll be in by Christmas. 

We're trying to look on the bright side. If we lose the house we're trying to buy, yes we'll lose solicitor's fees and the cost of a survey, but we'll have a couple of extra months to save without a mortgage. If we need to find a new house, we can perhaps find one with slightly fewer fields, less damp, and a bigger kitchen (and perhaps a tiny bit cheaper and closer to work). 

In the meantime we're sitting in cafes and crossing our fingers, and I've been off to visit my sister and her brand new dog. Because a new cheery dog and a trip to the seaside make everything better. 

I haven't spent much time in the garden lately. Much of October felt soggy and grey, and not really the weather for sitting outside. 

As I walked past the garden to the car though, I did notice that there were still flowers. 

Quite a lot of flowers, actually. 

I've been out and done a bit of tidying up and yes, I did wrap up and have a cup of tea out there. I'll miss this little garden when we eventually move. It's changed a lot over the years, and while I curse about its smallness and lack of privacy, it's always surprised me just how many different corners you can have in such a tiny space. 

We still have no real house news. Apparently the building society now considers our new house to be 'acceptable' (an improvement on the 'not acceptable' status it's had for the last few weeks) and are now chewing their pens and drinking their tea for a few more days before they get round to giving us an offer on Wednesday. I'm not sure how many more stages they can invent, or how much more I can stand. 

Everyone else is ready, and it seems they are keen to inform me of this fact on a regular basis. I wish I had the influence over the building society that they seem to think I have. I'm told that once we have the mortgage offer, there isn't much else to do, so theoretically we could be moving this month. 

Again, I won't hold my breath. 

In the meantime, we are picking rosemary and lavender from the garden to put in with the reduced supermarket carnations and trying to live here for just a little bit longer. 

A few weeks ago, one of the pairs of socks that I knitted developed holes in the heels. I wasn't too outraged (they do get a lot of wear, after all) until I came across this blog post, and realised I only darned them back in March. At the time, I was grumpy that they'd only lasted six months before needing to be darned - and now they've only lasted another six before the darning needle had to come out again. 

You can see that my original darning is still there (in darker purple) so it's just another bit of knitting that has worn through. Soon these socks are going to be entirely made of darned bits. 

My other pair of hand knitted socks haven't developed a single hole, and I've had them for much longer. They're a slightly larger fit so perhaps they rub less, and they're also a different type of wool, which I suppose might be stronger.

Well, no use getting grumpy about it - instead I got out the darning needle and some purple wool (probably in the same place I left it after my last darning experience). I don't have a darning mushroom (and if I did, I imagine it would be packed away in a box by now anyway) so I used the closest thing I had to hand that was vaguely the right shape - an old cricket ball. 

This is probably the most useful thing it's ever done. 

I'm not sure whether I darn in the 'right' way. I don't think anyone ever showed me. I know you have to kind of weave new fabric over the hole so that's what I did, first one way, then weaving through in the other direction. Eventually the hole wasn't a hole any more. 

Hardly perfect, but given the socks seem determined to disintegrate within another few months anyway, it'll do. 

While I was on a mending mission, I sewed up the pocket on my coat, which I'd caught on a trolley in a shop a few weeks before. 

This was an awkward mend, as I'd basically ripped the pocket off, and in the process ripped the fabric the pocket attaches to as well. However, a bit of invisible thread seems to have done the trick, and so far my mending is holding up nicely, even with the amount I'm shoving my hands in my pockets now the cooler weather has arrived.

I like a bit of mending. It make me feel useful and practical - two things which I like very much. It also gives me a feeling of creativity, without actually having to create anything. Peter said the other day that a lot of his jackets are missing buttons, and while I don't consider it my job to sew them back on, I think once we move into our new house, we might have a joint button-sewing evening in front of the fire one night. 

Speaking of the new house... it's now nearly eleven weeks since we had our offer accepted. It feels like twenty years, and also feels like we will never move. I'm informed this week will bring some news... but I confess I'm not holding my breath. This is the first time I've either bought or sold a house - we are doing both simultaneously, and have vowed never to do either again. 

In the meantime, here's a picture of one of our fields (fingers crossed). A cheery farmer came bouncing down the drive on a tractor looking for his cows just after I took this. The gates are all open at the minute, so I can only assume they just wandered in, thinking the grass was greener over here. 

And no, I'm still not sure what we're going to do with all that grass. It's hard to make too many plans when things are still all up in the air. Right now I think the simplest thing would be to leave the gates open and let the neighbour's cows munch on it... 

A couple of weeks ago I went on an organised bike ride with a load of other women one Sunday morning. We gathered in the town centre and cycled out along the river to a nature reserve. 

In fact, we passed through two other nature reserves before we got to our final destination, which I was rather excited about as I remembered I had a plan (a long time ago) to visit all the Sheffield Wildlife Trust nature reserves, and I only ever made it to six - the last being in 2015. I'm pretty sure there were only eleven when I started, and it seems there are now thirteen. 

This is cheating slightly, as we only really skirted the edge of Blackburn Meadows, but I'm still claiming it. We also cycled through Salmon Pastures, the smallest of the Sheffield Wildlife Trust reserves (I've cycled through there before). 

Our final destination was the Centenary Riverside reserve, number eight on my list. It's on the site of a former steelworks, and you can see more pictures of the development of the site if you click the link. Apparently at one time during the war they used an ex circus elephant to haul steel around the site. 

It was a bit of a grey day, and apparently the site looks much more beautiful in the summer when the meadows are full of flowers. 

I did get a good look at a dragonfly though. 

We cycled about eighteen miles together, and I'd already cycled two to join the group at the start, so once we got back to town I was very ready for a lift back up the hill to home. Sadly (for me) I had stupidly left our only car key attached to my own key ring, so Peter couldn't get into the car, and I had to cycle another two uphill miles. I wasn't in the best of moods when I eventually made it home, and the rest of the day didn't involve much activity at all. 

I've got five Wildlife Trust reserves left to visit, and it would be nice to tick them all off before we move out of Sheffield (we're not going far, and I'll have to come back to the city for work anyway, but it seems wise to visit while we still live here). 

I do so love the seaside. Sadly we live nowhere near the sea, and so I don't go very often. I think I've only seen the sea twice this year, both when visiting my sister (who does live near the sea - I'm quite jealous). 

A couple of weeks ago the sun was shining and I declared that we needed to go to the seaside Right This Minute. Of course, being in England, we're never that far from the sea, and what feels like forever away is actually only about 70 miles. 

It was early October, and heading towards being out of season, but I still managed a (very chilly) paddle and of course at the seaside there's always a cafe (although on this occasion it wasn't very picturesque and I don't appear to have even taken a photo). 

We had a cup of tea, wandered up and down the pier and along the sand and had a paddle, then headed back to somewhere warmer. 

It was enough.