Financial faux pas and other disasterous decisions

moo2moo

22 auctions now started on flea bay totalling over 100 items. Bored, bored, bored. Stil got loads to go but I'm sick of listing stuff.

moo2moo

Finally eneded yesterday on 26 auctions. Even the DDs had had enough by then. Of course theres always something screamingly obvious that you mis and in this case it was a specialist hifi speaker that OH retrieved from the loft and I bunged on top of the chilli cage and then promptly forgot about. Still one item has bids and another couple have watchers.

OH is now starting a run of 8 days off. I'm hoping thats 8 days of project land rovering. he finally seems to be getting on with it and mutterings about attaching thia and that can frequently be heard. Can't begin to explain how exciting it is to finally have some light at the end of the very long tunnel. More boxes have been turfed into the garden as their contents are sorted and amalgamated. Can't help feeling rather clueless though. it still looks like a pile of rusty nuts and bolts to me and dispatching me on a search for a specific missing bolt is rather pointless as they all look pretty much the same. No matter how many times he explains the difference between bolts A, B and C I still get 'em all mixed up. Still I'm getting excited at the thought of more pearts exiting the building than arriving in it. I'll be throwing a bon voyage party at the point all the surplus bits hit E-bay. So uncharitable of me. I am a closet !!!!! (minus the closet).

moo2moo

Plans for today:

• Wash, clean, iron , tidy, tidy some more, locate the DDs bedroom floors and retireve laundry then wash even more.
• Add air to car tyre and visit puncture repair place.
• DooYoos. 3 more will take me to £90

moo2moo

Nothing ever goes according to plan. The very slow puncture wasn't a puncture at all but a geriatric tyre with a leak. Since I bought it at the same time as its companion on t'other side that one was on its way too. Fortunately having friends in all the right places (in this case protruding from my chest) I wangled a 20% discount and merely forked out £80. Chuffing expensive puncture that wasn't. Still at least I can now waffle away about tyres on DooYoo. Not that I'm in the right frame of mind.

Had a listing removed from Flea-bay thanks to a breach of intelectual property right. I merely retyped what was onthe packaging of the item in question but it appears that this is not allowed. Still I now have bids on 2 items and have had lots of e-mails from wierdos asking very very strange questions.

Plans for today:

• Make it through the next 24 hours without resorting to wallopping the OH around the head with the frying pan. Note to self: He was only trying to be helpful when he ironed the tea towels and the pillow cases and my sodding underwear.
• Purchase food having worked out what OH purchased yesterday
• Yet more housework. Kim & Aggie woul d have a heart attack if they set foot in here
• Turf cardboard from back garden into cardboard bin prior to arrival of bin men at 7:30
• Laundry. It really is never ending
• Continue negotiations with DD1 about todays visit to High School. Some eejot told her class they could take money for the vending machines.
• Avoid the DDs school bags which contain £10 of raffle tickets to be sold, £30 each for letters about football clubs on friday nights which clash with the free clubs and more letters about cake sales and donations for Children in Need. I am not a bottomless money pit.

mooomin

moo2moo wrote: »

• Avoid the DDs school bags which contain £10 of raffle tickets to be sold, £30 each for letters about football clubs on friday nights which clash with the free clubs and more letters about cake sales and donations for Children in Need. I am not a bottomless money pit.

Crikey!

Can you not offload the tat you can't sell on Ebay to the CIN appeal? I'm assuming some kind of local sale will be held anyway...

lucielle

Sounds like a plan. Hope you get to the bottom of your list. So know the feeling of the never ending washing.
L

moo2moo

:hello: Hello Helen!

Yesterdays plans went swooping straight out the window. TOld OH I needed to buy chicken feed amongst other things but agreed to give him a hand with project Land Rover as it was a two man job. What started out as a gloriously sunny day descended into a rain storm worthy of Noahs flood. Still we'd started and it wasn't a job we could anbandon at any point for any reason. Phase A invovled a mere two bolts. Simply Bung the gear box on the chassis and fasten the bolts. Simple. Apart from the gear box weighing twice as much as I do and having lots of sharp edges. Out with the engine crane. Rope it up, hoist it into position, plonk it over the chassis and lower into position. Easy. Clean out several decades of slimey grime using neon coloured grime eater and a brush. 20 minutes or so later it was clean and I was liberally oil splattered. No matter OH was on to Phase B. Fitting the clutch.

The instructions for fitting a clutch are easy. In fact it defies belief why garages charge several hundred pounds for this (or at least that was my thought at the time). Simply undo 6 bolts and one retaining clip and slap the new one in. Unfortunately stage 14 of the pretty pictures insite we required a spline alignment tool. Hmm. No way of botching that one. Quick phone call later to our very friendly garage and I was down there to collect one. Apparntely they don't use it cos they don't do clutches. Alarm bells are ringing. These guys do everything. They're car nuts and obsessively and talentedly so... but they don't do clutches??? Anyhow returned clutching the nescesary tooling and complex instructions. Put it in , line it up, pull it out, push it in again , tighten a bit a wiggle a lot. How hard can that be???? MMM. Attempt two got it sorted. Attempt 1 resulted in the tool being wedged firmly in the clutch. Anyhow that being done we moved swiftly on to phase 3.

Alligning the clutch with the gearbox. Only 8 bolts unfortuately the 8 bolts in question are attached (along with the clutch) to the engine. Simply align the engine on a round protruding stick the size of a stick of rock and slide into position whilst keeping perfectly horizontal and alligning up 6 sticky out bits of metal. Engine is at this point swinging about on the end of an engine crane. Drive slopes which adds to the fun and the gear box pivots as you try to convince the lot to mate. Some time later (3 hours or so no that we were keeping track) we resorte to plan B. Remove gear box minus the crane but using a cunning array of milk crates and a jack with wheels. Move engine into position and bolt to chassis then attempt to align the smaller and considerably more maneuverable gear box into position.

Note at this point all things car related are foreign to me. Engine is slightly larger than a giant space hopper with lots of fragile sticky out bits dangling in the way whilst gear box is the size and shape of a small dolphin. Their mating compatibility is about the same too. Anyway something happened and it all slid smoothly together and was bolted such that nothing could move. More bolts were done and I dashed inside to look at the clock bearing in my my stomach had been telling me it was past lunch time for quite some time.

B*gger. Not only late for work but perilously close to being late collecting the DDs from school too. Washed my face in record time using that patented technique of all small children out there. Lots of water, quick swoosh with a flannel, smear most of the grime onto a white towel and run. Made it to school 5 minutes late although nobody had noticed, right up until the point my boss walked past and one of the cleaners said very loudly you're late. Cue the boss turning round and saying whos late and them chorusing she is. He took one look at me and said "car trouble?". Ummm something like that.

moo2moo

So plans for today..... everything I didn't do yesterday plus a major de-engine oiling of the bathroom and the kitchen. Its windy so hopefully OH can be persuaded to assist after all he made most of the mess. Also need to purchase caffeine, return the tools I borrowed to the garage along with a dozen fresh eggs (payment is made in food or beer) remebering to take along OH and his ball joint so that can be bunged in their hydraulic press rather than OH battering it with a hammer and hoping it goes in square without bending. Once perhaps but 3 times on wierd shaped bits of metal.... perhaps not.

Off to turf the DDs from their pits and attempt to persuade them to get dressed without me doing most of it for them.

Nice idea On C.I.N. Lucielle but school favour the £1 for this and another one for this and a third for this approach and to say the place has an affluent catchment area would be like saying the Queen lives in a large house (yes folks years 3 and 4 are learning about similies and metaphors).

moo2moo

Popped to Mr Ts yesterday for a few bits and pieces. OH helpfully decided to come with me. The resulting bill was marginally bigger than the last one. £6 of it is going back though as DDs head is smaller than mine and the junior sized bike helmet which fits me very nicely is too small for her. Will be taking her with me to get one the right size. Another big chunk was promotional tat for x-mas and birthdays which hopefully menas we've got all the DDs stocking fillers and my lil sisters birthday prezzie and we've treated DD1 to her very own hairdryer as our current one (a 14th birthday prezzie way back in 1991) won't tolerate being repaired again. Turns out none of DD1s other friends have hairdryers held together with gaffa tape. Can't think why.

So confessions of a spendaholic commence. It is now day 80 of the alternative 4K challenge. I have £29.99 left and the council tax is due tomorrow along with the electricity DD and yesterdays coal delivery. I do believe its safe to say I've failed spectacularly with a mere 41 days to go. Still if you're going to screw something up its always best to do it dramatically.

I'm hovering at the 50/50 mark. Half disappointed I've been so far out with my calculations and part impressed that despite blowing things on a holiday the moneys stretched this far. Still it could be much better but it does go to show just how much I under estimate our day to day spending and how unrealistic my goals are especially as I can happily add another £1500+ in land rover parts and OHs fuel and fag bill to those figures. On a very positive note it does mean that theres money left at the end of the month rather than the other way round. There are lots of places I can cut back but they're mostly the things which make life fun.

Still we're hovering perilously close to the sub-20K mark. Which is a giant leap in the right direction despite everything else.

I'm going to continue doing what I'm doing at the mo until the last day of Novemeber as I have enough additional funds raised from flea bay and the like to cheat and balance the books until then. On Dec 1st I'll be back with a brand new one month only super deluxe master plan, actually it'll probably be before then as I'm a very impatient person and it'll have some spectacularly unachievable goals to rein in my christmas spending. Still thinking a DS each for the DDs is totally and utterly ridiculously extravagent but the peace will be so worth it.

butler_helen

Morning moo I'm saddened to read that you too have a magical under the stairs cupboard which never gets full, I thought I was the only lucky one! Xh