Caz counts it down

cazmanian_minx

EssexHebridean wrote: »

I can vouch for the enormity of that slice of cake - you made a manful effort with it, but there was only ever going to be one winner I fear! Lovely to meet you anyway - there was a brief moment when we were on our way round to Scrabster where we wondered if turning down a lift was going to be proved foolish, thankfully though the light shower blew over quite fast and we arrived at the ferry as dry as we'd left the cafe, so all good! (And after those brownies the leg-stretch was very definitely required!)

Veg beds and coldframes look fantastic. Funny how the amount of soil/compost/manure required to fill such things is always about double what you expect, though. I remember this phenomenon well from the allotment! :rotfl:

It took about three days to come down from the sugar high afterwards as well :rotfl:

I've finished filling the beds today (hooray!) though the first one has already settled down to level with the frame and they're going to need topping up (boo!) - I'm now wondering whether to get sowing or wait until we've had some rain and top them up. I'm leaning towards cracking on with things.

I whizzed through my two files this morning - nice clear one-to-one interviews, £25.20 earned for three hours of work Good thing too, only seven eBay orders to go, although one of those was for 100 necklace chains, so that bumped the total up a bit. I'm hoping tomorrow's file will be similarly quick as I managed to swap the two days of horse sitting I won for two sessions helping me get over my nervousness about getting on Finn and she's coming for the first one tomorrow afternoon. (Once I'm up, I'm fine, I just get very nervous about mounting and of course he picks up on this and starts to worry and the whole thing becomes a vicious circle )

cazmanian_minx

Well, it's a good thing that the typing jobs keep rolling in because at the moment I have one order to go tomorrow for a grand total of £3.79 :eek: Today's transcription client was one I'd worked for before and their interviewee, who was French, made my day by exclaiming 'Zut Alors!' at one point - I didn't think that phrase actually existed outside of the textbooks I learnt French from at school! Still, it's another £27.00 on the invoice, so vive la France

Dire sales figures aside, today's actually been a very good day. I have the return leg of my bus journey on the sleeper coach (though I missed the cheap bed and had to pay the full £50), Mr Minx has said I can use the Tesco vouchers against the train parts of the journey (via Red Spotted Hanky), I've got through to the final assessment test for the proofreading work (which I shall take tomorrow) and the lady who came over this afternoon to help me with my confidence around Finn was so brilliant that by the end of the 45 minutes I was hopping on and off him with no problems at all

DebtFree2012

Sounds fantastic.

Any tips learnt for confidence boosting? It's always good to know.

Happy Friday!

cazmanian_minx

DebtFree2012 wrote: »

Sounds fantastic.

Any tips learnt for confidence boosting? It's always good to know.

Happy Friday!

Take your time. She said all I really needed was someone on the ground to talk to and reassure me that I was doing the right things and it was going to be okay. I think it was just knowing that there was someone there to scoop me up and call an ambulance if needed that helped :rotfl:

Anyway, apologies for some very late scores on the doors, but I had to get the transcription and the eBay orders (all eight of them ) packed before my brother-in-law arrived and then after he left I had to do the proofreading assessment, so I've only just got round to looking at the numbers. They weren't really worth waiting for!

Business
Overdraft: -£-9940.90 / -£9933.18 +£7.72

Business total: -£9940.90 / -£9933.18 +£7.72

Personal
Egg card: -£4830.00 / -£4830.00 no change
Barclaycard: -£2190.00 / -£2190.00 no change
Nationwide card: -£2405.00 / -£2405.00 no change

Personal total: -£9425.00 / -£9425.00 no change

Grand total: -£19,365.90 / -£19,358.18 +£7.72

It's nice to see green numbers every week though. The Nationwide card gets paid next week. I had an email from the book buying people to say they'd received my box as well, so hopefully that'll be some money in next week. It's going into the YNAB buffer though, rather than off a card - I'm nearly at the point where the money Mr Minx pays me on the first of each month can be allocated straight to the month after

cazmanian_minx

Drat, I'd hoped that Mr Minx's repayment of half of today's shopping bill could all be allocated to the buffer, but we went a bit over budget - I had £87 left in my groceries category and we spent £104, plus I needed another bag of Speedibeet for the horses, so that was an extra £13 needed in the horse category. Ah well, I can split it, allocate what I need to this month and put the rest into the buffer. From memory (not on the right computer at the moment), I'd allocated less than our normal £350 a month to the groceries category, so I'm not technically over...

I am not having a good night with my family and fish. Back story: thanks to an unfortunate vomiting incident when I was a child involving some cough mixture and fish fingers, even the smell of fish makes me feel sick. The dog has a tin of sardines in sunflower oil over her supper every Saturday (good for her coat) and straight after she'd eaten she came and sat on my lap and burped in my face. Now Mr Minx is making himself a tuna pizza for supper

brizzledfw

Ooh. feel sorry for you there Caz..but I love fish and seafood.. (if I lived where you do I would probably eat that (oh and lamb!) all day)

Those raised beds look fab, amazing as others have said. Well done Team Caz! :j :j

Have a good weekend and am liking the green figures also

cazmanian_minx

I had an email from Nationwide yesterday saying my statement was ready, so I paid another £25 off it this morning. I ended up with another £22 in the buffer after I'd rejigged the budget to account for the small overspends. There should be no more money going out now until next month, but hopefully I'll have a little bit coming in from selling the books and DVDs.

It's been quite a productive day, despite losing three hours or so to going out for Sunday lunch with mother-in-law and Mick's eldest brother, who is up visiting this weekend. I was determined to ride again today, so I got straight into my jods when I got up, had the horses fed by 8.30, ran round doing the chores (mainly laundry) and then went and fetched Finn at 10.30. He's usually the easiest pony to catch in the world, but 10.30 is normally pony snoozing time and he took one look at me in my hat carrying his headcollar and took off at a speed usually only seen when there's food involved

He gave up eventually and we had about fifteen minutes of pootling around and jumping on and off before I had to go and get cleaned up for lunch. When we got home, I opened Saturday's post and found a cheque for £103 from a website customer :T I'd had a phone call on Friday asking me if I accepted cheques, I'd explained how to place the order to pay by cheque, saw an order come in a few hours later and didn't bother checking it out, because cheque-paid orders usually tend to be low value (note to anyone thinking that paying by cheque is good for small businesses for low value orders - if they have a business account, it isn't, because we usually get charged an amount for paying in cheques PLUS an extra amount per cheque on the paying-in slip. Credit cards, which only charge a percentage, are the best option, followed by debit cards, which charge a small flat fee).

I've also started adjusting prices for free postage on eBay. I worked my way through the whole chain section this afternoon, fingers crossed it'll see some lift in sales.

cazmanian_minx

Hmmmmm, I am going to be cautiously optimistic and say that the repricing to free P&P seems to be working. Of the 11 orders waiting to be posted or paid for, 4 of them are for chain items - the only category I've worked through so far.

I also seem to have sold another perfume set, I accepted a best offer this morning, though they haven't paid for it yet. Fingers crossed they do.

No other news really, most of the day has been spent either packing up the weekend's orders or ironing. I'm up to date with The Following again though - last one tomorrow!

mfmaybe

Yay for big cheques, confidence and riding, and more orders :j

Pippilongstocking

This is indeed good news - ebay's a funny place isn't it sometimes its just perfect and other times a bit head scratching.

By the way I did like the look of those raised beds. Did you see beechgrove the other day it was all about the construction of them too.

Mucho impressed. N'er a seedling out here yet - far too early.

And, planting day for neeps here is 1st June - what's the crack in Caithness?