Keeping up appearances.......

HappyNow

Dolphin1 wrote: »

Oh dear, I've only just seen this Mrs H, if only I'd seen it before the bank holiday weekend!

Anyway, I'm a bit late to the party but I'm going to join in with Marvellous May if you'll have me.

After a lot of thinking, my targets for Marvellous May are...

1) No chocolate, sweets or biscuits.
I have this target every month. I usually manage to the 4th
Hope you do better than me!!
2) No cake. (Need to list this one seperately as it is my biggest weakness. Hello, my name is Dolphin1 and I am a cakeaholic! ) Ooh ooh **hand shoots up enthusiastically** Me too!! My favourite is chocolate, then carrot (one of my five a day), then lemon, then anything else I can lay my hands on. Marks and Spencer for preference (although I can't remember the last time I had one from there) but any will do just fine.

3) Switch light off no later than 11pm Sunday to Thursday and midnight on Friday and Saturday.


4) Meal plan at the end of every week for the following week. (At the moment, I am only meal planning for the following day so I am going to the shops far too often for bits and pieces which is so time consuming and probably costs me more.)
I have never, ever done any meal planning. I might copy you for next month.

5) Cut back on the money that I spend on gifts for other people. (I am far too generous especially with my nieces and nephews and need to start setting limits and sticking to them.) For May, this is going to be £30 although should be £20 really, £10 for one niece's birthday and £10 for one nephew's birthday but I have already given my niece £20 (ooops). I will stick to the £10 for my nephew though because he's only young and won't know the difference anyway. I am not going to spend anything besides.

And that is it for Marvellous May. Let's see how it goes.

Dolphin1

Dolphin! :) Lovely to have you joining in. I think you will find it helps you keep to your goals. Honey and I are reformed characters since Fab Feb. Super-women almost. ( :rotfl:)

HappyNow

Wah, Mr H is home and I've run out of time to do my update. Back later

HappyNow

This update covers the last two days.

• Finances. The biggie and the one that I'm obsessing over. My YNAB is showing red figures of £707. This month's rent is due in - £450 - but there will still be petrol/groceries to buy before next payday on 15th. I will end the month on a red. It's just a blip, ebb and flow, so I mustn't get too down about it. Loads of huge unforeseen expenses coming at the same time. Had I known, I wouldn't have booked our holiday, but there it is and I don't regret it. There's some good stuff on the horizon, namely that Mr H has been offered paid overtime for the next few weeks. Normally he doesn't get paid for extra hours, but this is a special task and I have asked him to grab all the hours he can. In return, I will do everything around the house so he will just need to work then relax. He will be working seven days a week and doing long days, until 25th May. Not ideal, but it will get us back on track. I will pay just the minimums of £596 on the credit cards in May and hopefully we will be back in the black for June. The minimum payments still reduce the unsecured debt by £100 per week, so it's not a disaster.
• Diet pretty good. Lots of water drunk but I did demolish half a packet of McVities chocolate digestives over the two days. Until payday I will be eating pretty much what we have in the house, so it will be somewhat out of my control. We've got plenty of fruit in at the moment though so I'm not expecting scurvy.
• Only slept two hours on Monday - that blasted YNAB again!! Last night I caught up though, so I feel fine again now.
• LOADS of spring cleaning done on Monday. All the base kitchen units are done and they look great. They were really grotty at the back. I found dead spiders in some glasses! Just a bit more waxing to do, then it's the wall units (only three) and then I can move on to the floor/windows/table. Might finish that room this weekend!
• No sit-ups yesterday because I forgot, but I will do them now .

HappyNow

BIG RED LETTERS!
I'm calling this early because I need a financial cheer-up! Nine days to payday, but all the statements are in so I have done the calculations.

NEXT FRIDAY I WILL HAVE PAID OFF:


ONE THIRD OF MY UNSECURED DEBT
AND
ONE QUARTER OF THE OVERALL DEBT

PinotGrigio41

HappyNow wrote: »

BIG RED LETTERS!
I'm calling this early because I need a financial cheer-up! Nine days to payday, but all the statements are in so I have done the calculations.

NEXT FRIDAY I WILL HAVE PAID OFF:


ONE THIRD OF MY UNSECURED DEBT
AND
ONE QUARTER OF THE OVERALL DEBT

Way to go Happy !! Well done you, what an amazing achievement ! xx :T:T

Honey_Bear

This is all marvellous stuff!

It's lovely to see you joining in Dolphin and have someone else to play with! Yay! I love your goals and the amazingthing about setting them is that although I don't sometimes make my target 100%, the discipline of knowing I've made the commitment means that the improvement over time is steady and well worth the effort.

I'm so pleased for your upcoming Red Letter Day Happy! Having that point fixed is well worth celebrating, especially as you've had a thumper of a month on the balances front; you've still made progress, even if there are red figures on YNAB. I think you are absolutely right about the holiday - of course you wouldn't have booked it if you'd known you were going to be hit with so many one-off unexpected bills, but we all need something to look forward to and you need to have something lovely to share with Mr Happy, especially as he's going to be head down/bottom up working for the forseeable future.

Mr Bear has an absolute gem of a mantra that keeps us going when we're working (usually individually) on a project which gets us through every time: 'Everything feels like failure in the middle.' We're now so utterly convinced of it's veracity that we've got to the point where we now know when we've reached the mid-point, because it does, always, feel like failure. (I've just googled it to see if Churchill was the originator and my quoting it appears on the first page of search results - on the Flylady thread two years ago!)

I'd love to quote every comment you've made that made me laugh out loud this morning, but there are so many! These are for you: :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Honey_Bear

Second attempt to get the aquasorb today; I've got rather a lot to buy food-wise for tomorrow so I may forget some things and unless I start off at PaH the cloth is the most likely.

1. I was right about grooming him. He's fine as long as I use the bristle side of the brush, but the minute I was to actually start with the business end of it he's on his back saying 'I submit, enough, stop, please.' Back to basics and happiness I think, with one stroke in 10 with the effective side to build up his confidence.
2. Nothing on insurance again.
3. Two hobnobs and the edge bits of cheese pastry before I put the quiche in the oven, because they'd only have burnt and gone to waste and my cheese pastry is the business thanks to Delia.
4. Lights needing to be switched out by well before midnight as I am really, really knac*ered by all the dog-walking. He's loving the Hoe!
5. No Flying. The floors need attention but I haven't got any energy. With at least 10 in for something to eat tomorrow night I'm going to have to do a bit, even if I make sure the brightest lights aren't on. (Sneaky, moi?) Your kitchen sounds massive!

Honey_Bear

The dog is doing amazingly well all things considered and I'm not upset or disappointed by anything he's done so far. He's gentle and friendly towards everyone, tail waggy, happy, people-orientated and just plain good. The two tiny tinkles were obviously him making his mark and both occured in the rooms where he spends least time; he's clearly trying to work out what the rules are here and coping as best he can and it was only a splash both times.

He's learning that no matter how excited he is barking means that all the good things stop instantly and he has to wait until I feel like interacting with him again. He's already realised that what I expect is a dog sitting quietly so he's doing his best to be good.

I have relented on the food front. For five days I've tried everything I can think of to get him to eat dog food and he is as resistant as a dog can be. In rescue he picked at the diet food apparently and he won't touch it here, and the only crackcrunching of it was the cat. I happen to have three different varieties of wet food around and chap*ie biscuits, all of which he has eaten half-heartedly once and then refused. I reckon it's the real symptom of his stress. As he arrived with a slightly upset tummy and yesterday was Day 5 it was time to change tactics.

The first really great sign of change was that he accepted a yoghurt pot and went mad trying to get all of it out; I make yoghurt so it's live and relatively fresh, so full of great bacteria. Within eight hours his output had stablized and this morning it was as healthy as I could ever have hoped. I also cooked him some fresh chicken and rice last night and he ate like a starving thing (which of course he was) so this morning breakfast was yoghurt covered cha*pie biscuits with chicken and rice. He ate a goodly amount, I'm pleased to say. When I'm very stressed I lose my appetite so I'm working on the basis that after at least five weeks in rescue of not wanting to eat and five days here of not finding the food appetising but being as well-behaved as he can be, he deserves a fullish stomach that feels settled.

As soon as I can get some longlife milk the slow-cooker will be going 24 hours a day because I need to build up the stocks to fill a couple of kongs to freeze. I've found this dog's achilles heel and I am going to crate train him as soon as I can now that I know what he reallly loves.

I skipped the brushing this morning, washed his face and ran my hands up and down his front legs for slightly longer than he would have liked but he coped manfully. That's massive progress for him, so all in all I'm rather chuffed. I need him to practice going to the vet tomorrow because he's due a vaccination on Friday and I don't want him upset by that experience. Fingers crossed.

Dolphin1

HappyNow wrote: »

BIG RED LETTERS!
I'm calling this early because I need a financial cheer-up! Nine days to payday, but all the statements are in so I have done the calculations.

NEXT FRIDAY I WILL HAVE PAID OFF:


ONE THIRD OF MY UNSECURED DEBT
AND
ONE QUARTER OF THE OVERALL DEBT

Fantastic Mrs H!!! :j:j:j

Dolphin1

PinotGrigio41 wrote: »

Way to go Happy !! Well done you, what an amazing achievement ! xx :T:T

Hey Mrs PG! :wave: Nice to see you posting, hope all is well with you!