My New Toy and a Sweet Little Boy

I don't often show things I've bought whilst charity shopping (once, if I remember right) and this sweet little boy wasn't from a charity shop anyway, but from the car boot nirvana we in So'ton call Allington Lane. Cost - 50p.

He's about 6" high and is moulded all the way round...didn't photograph the back though, sorry. There's no maker's mark, it just says 'Foreign' underneath and he's hollow but I'm not sure what you would put inside to be completely honest. Flowers probably, but I think that'd look a bit odd personally. Maybe the remains of a tin of beans in the fridge like in the Heinz advert.  The painting of his skin is really delicate but with time his lips and inner eyes have chipped and almost come off...it wouldn't be too hard to repair with a bit of....mmm, probably enamel paint I'd say. Like boys painted their Stukas with back in the day.

Totally remedy-able worn-off pupils. 

How old are we thinking he might be? I'm saying 50s. Might he have cost 10/- new?

My new toy is something I've been after for a little while and is a useful tool (or so I told Big Man when he said 'don't start getting obsessive about this now!'). It's an OWL electricity monitor. I kept looking on eBay for one but got outbid a couple times; however driving to Wales we were listening to a talk-in about power price rises and someone was saying they had a monitor, which put the idea back in my head. Prices on eBay for BIN are generally anything up to £35 so when someone put this one on at £5 I pounced!!!

If you don't know what these little yokes do, you attach one part of it to the cable between your fuse box and electricity meter and it wirelessly sends data to this bit of the equipment - this shows either how much electricity you are using or what value you are using, depending what you want to see. Obviously you need to put in the price per kilowatt hour. I think it's going to give a very good 'rough' figure but because we have three different prices on our tariff I had to use an average so it won't be exact. In about 24 hours we used £2.25 (ish) worth of electricity. Hopefully it will show us what uses the most electricity, though I'm pretty sure it would be the tumble dryer, were I using it. The kids need training...this morning when I got up at 10:15 I discovered that Mr Charming's bedroom light had been left on since he and Big Man went out at 6:00. Smack hand Mr Charming!!!!