EH - Essex > Hebrides...the next step of the adventure?

EssexHebridean · 9 February 2017 at 2:08PM

Greying_Pilgrim wrote: »

EH - I was thinking of you this morning. I was wandering up the food aisle in h0me bargins and noticed that the EE brown basmati rice was in a *new* location on the shelves. It made no sense whatsoever, it was with the pesto and italian ingredients - but was clearly meant to be there, as there were about 8 packets and theSEL was in place. Mindful of what you had mentioned, I picked up a couple of packets. Summer is-a-coming, and I intend to get better at my 'salads' repertoire and if all else fails, it is bbe January 2019

Greying X

What an odd place to put it Greying - but thank you for thinking to let me know. I'll have a further look next time I'm in. Thankfully the two bags I bought last time will last me for a reasonable time anyway!

Angel at the moment I'm surprising myself!

Thank you!

EssexHebridean · 10 February 2017 at 6:18PM

Brrrrr - it's FREEZING here! Quite literally - the car told me earlier on that it hadn't managed to crawl about zero so far, and it's spent much of the day tying very hard to snow and not managing more than a few little fluffy flakes, and some rather nasty icy sort of drizzle this morning.

Still, the meal plan and the shopping is done - £2.21 I think it was in Al's, and then just over £21 in Sainsbugs, reduced to £18 something with a handy money off voucher, and then reduced still further to barely a murmur on the CC by my nectar points. As the freezer is now pretty much bare of anything vaguely meaty though we're heading to the farmers market tomorrow - need to sort out stopping somewhere to get cash out for that, but it comes from a different account from routine spending, so all good there.

Walked to Al's this morning and then went out again this afternoon and walked my "regular" circuit, and was gratified to find that my pace has indeed improved slightly on last week. :T Pedometer says 9,600 steps so far so my regular pottering about will see me over my 10k today.

The new casing for MrEH's car key arrived in the post this morning so I have switched the top half of the case over to see if that will do the trick. The key blank is a slightly different thickness so the old blank won't fit in that half of the new casing, but as the transponder bit is in that half anyway it makes sense to just leave that bit alone. the new front fits perfectly onto the old back, so when he gets home we'll see whether it works or not. If it works then that will be £2.98 well spent.

My purse still contains £10 and with nothing spendy planned for the weekend I have no need to go to the cashpoint that I can think of. I've also got money sitting in my tin so for the following weekend when I DO have spendy stuff planned I'll raid that, and transfer the money straight over to my airshow account from the current account.

Need to book some train tickets for next Friday, and also need to buy the ink cartridges for the printer, but both of those things are going to hold off until tomorrow so that they hit the new credit card month. Better the money in my pocket, than theirs!

Bobarella · 10 February 2017 at 8:36PM

Do you find you earn a lot of nectar points by using your card to spend on? I have a Sains credit card I'm about to clear, in my signature. I know you get £5 a month if you spend £200. But how many nectar points do you earn as well?

EssexHebridean · 11 February 2017 at 6:57PM

Bobarella wrote: »

Do you find you earn a lot of nectar points by using your card to spend on? I have a Sains credit card I'm about to clear, in my signature. I know you get £5 a month if you spend £200. But how many nectar points do you earn as well?

My Sainsbugs card was purely for the 0% balance transfer Bob - I've not made any purchases on it at all - we have the Nationwide Select card which pays cashback for all routine stuff - none of the straight "points earning" cards can touch that from what I've seen, and I don't *think* mind includes the £5 a month deal either.

Bobarella · 11 February 2017 at 7:17PM

Thank you EH I've never paid attention before as I have not used the Sains card for shopping only as a 0% card. But as I do the majority of my shopping there for proximity reasons it occured to me that using it to get the £5 and nectar points each month might be useful. Thanks for the answer.

MistyMountainTop · 13 February 2017 at 11:50AM

I was looking online at some houses for sale on Lewis - you sure get a lot for your money up there! I hadn't realised quite how beautiful it was. One was on a little island with only one other house on it, very nice:

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-64271561.html

angelpye · 13 February 2017 at 12:45PM

Endless pool and sauna...done, I am there! I have a goal to be living as hermit by by the time I am 50 and DD is grown. What would growing your own food yields be like in such a climate?

EssexHebridean · 14 February 2017 at 2:04PM

Oooooh will you look at that house - Great Bernera is lovely too! Lewis is a bit North of where we're looking at for the long term - but that place is amazing! The Island we're looking at - North Uist - generally commands slightly lower prices for property, so even MORE for your money, but there aren't so many places of that type there - not though we'd be looking for a place of that type, mind you!

Food growing - umm, well it's not easy - have a look at some of Pippi's earlier diaries to see her struggles with such things - the Orkney climate is pretty similar to the Hebrides. Wind is the big problem, realistically with a polytunnel you can do OK but finding a way of anchoring the polytunnel down so it doesn't end up wrapped around the neighbouring property can be tricky!
Anything that grows close to or under the ground stands a better chance as long as you can get the ground to drain OK - the Hebrides is brilliant for growing potatoes on the Western side because of the sandy soil.

MrEH's car key repair did indeed work perfectly so hurrah to fixing that problem for the grand sum of £2.98 :T Good thing too as his pesky car set us back another £148 when it went in for the second bit of its service on saturday. :mad: Service costs have risen - I'd not realised but the garage have now started charging pretty much ALL the parts as extras. In fairness it does look as though they were charging less than they should have been before, but this does mean rather a steep increase. I've increased the amount going into our car account each month by £10 and that should pretty much cover the increase I hope.

Weekly update:

Surveys:
OnePoll £2.55 (Cash-out £40) £40 claimed 8/2/17
PC £3
Populus Live £20 (Cash-out £50)
Opinion Outpost 120 points (previously cashed out on 25/1/17 £5)
Power of opinions (Cashes out to vouchers at 1,000 points) 675 points
YouGov 600 points (cashed out £50 at 5,000 points)

TCB: £5.07 claimed - waiting for it to hit the bank.

Ticking over. I think next month is going to be a lean one on additional payments to the card, as there's not a lot of big stuff that's likely to come through for a while now I don't think. Once the TCB money and the OnePoll hits my bank it will get paid straight over though, so hopefully still a bit more this month. :T

I'm viewing Toluna as almost pointless - I am logging in occasionally but it's going to take so long to get to payout I suspect I will have lost interest with it before I get there.
Prolific Academic isn't working for me either - I've had nothing whatsoever from them as yet. Just tells me there is nothing available each time I log in.

angelpye · 14 February 2017 at 2:59PM

Hi Essex, yes I thought the wind would be a problem. Would love my own little retreat with kitchen garden

I have been doing PA and I have made £25 in a few weeks but I do seem to need to click on randomly throughout the day etc in order to get any. I haven't had any at all for a few days now though. I haven't worked out if I can cause it give me notices...someone said you can make it ping on the PA thread. Rest of your totals looking pretty healthy.

What a win with the car key!! Well done you! Hate to give money away on things like that because we all know they don't need to charge a premium like that.

Scott_Weiland_2 · 15 February 2017 at 5:59AM

EssexHebridean wrote: »

Oooooh will you look at that house - Great Bernera is lovely too! Lewis is a bit North of where we're looking at for the long term - but that place is amazing! The Island we're looking at - North Uist - generally commands slightly lower prices for property, so even MORE for your money, but there aren't so many places of that type there - not though we'd be looking for a place of that type, mind you!

Food growing - umm, well it's not easy - have a look at some of Pippi's earlier diaries to see her struggles with such things - the Orkney climate is pretty similar to the Hebrides. Wind is the big problem, realistically with a polytunnel you can do OK but finding a way of anchoring the polytunnel down so it doesn't end up wrapped around the neighbouring property can be tricky!
Anything that grows close to or under the ground stands a better chance as long as you can get the ground to drain OK - the Hebrides is brilliant for growing potatoes on the Western side because of the sandy soil.

MrEH's car key repair did indeed work perfectly so hurrah to fixing that problem for the grand sum of £2.98 :T Good thing too as his pesky car set us back another £148 when it went in for the second bit of its service on saturday. :mad: Service costs have risen - I'd not realised but the garage have now started charging pretty much ALL the parts as extras. In fairness it does look as though they were charging less than they should have been before, but this does mean rather a steep increase. I've increased the amount going into our car account each month by £10 and that should pretty much cover the increase I hope.

Weekly update:

Surveys:
OnePoll £2.55 (Cash-out £40) £40 claimed 8/2/17
PC £3
Populus Live £20 (Cash-out £50)
Opinion Outpost 120 points (previously cashed out on 25/1/17 £5)
Power of opinions (Cashes out to vouchers at 1,000 points) 675 points
YouGov 600 points (cashed out £50 at 5,000 points)

TCB: £5.07 claimed - waiting for it to hit the bank.

Ticking over. I think next month is going to be a lean one on additional payments to the card, as there's not a lot of big stuff that's likely to come through for a while now I don't think. Once the TCB money and the OnePoll hits my bank it will get paid straight over though, so hopefully still a bit more this month. :T

I'm viewing Toluna as almost pointless - I am logging in occasionally but it's going to take so long to get to payout I suspect I will have lost interest with it before I get there.
Prolific Academic isn't working for me either - I've had nothing whatsoever from them as yet. Just tells me there is nothing available each time I log in.

With uktoluna it can be endless, i am on 109000 points and i used to do really well on it but lately i try to just make sure i do one survey a day on it. Its takes so long to build up even doing the tiny surveys on the mobile app it takes an eternity

EH - Essex > Hebrides...the next step of the adventure?

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