Caz counts it down

gallygirl

I agree, regular bills don't count with me, nor does diesel as that is an unavoidable expense.

cazmanian_minx

OK, I'm not going to count the TV licence, but I will count the oil since it's not a regular expense - only the annexe building where I work runs off an oil fired boiler, the main house has a wood burning stove, three night storage heaters and four panel heaters (no mains gas up here) and now that Mr Minx has fitted a shower he likes in the main house, he's not in here every day having a Man Shower in the power shower! I just have the heating on for 15-30 minutes morning and evening to keep the system ticking over and stick on extra sweaters the rest of the time, so 500 litres of oil lasts us about a year and a half and we take turns to pay for it. (And is why I got a shock at paying £329 this time round when the last bill for the same amount was £194!!!)

Business is ticking over nicely, for the quiet time of year. All the money taken over the weekend is in my account now and I've got £770.87 from eBay and my own website. The Amazon money turns up in a lump every fortnight with their (very high!) fees already deducted, so they sent me £623.97 yesterday as well and the business account is looking relatively healthy with nearly £2,500 available before I hit the bottom of the overdraft limit (at only 6.5% I tend to utilise it as much as possible because it's so much cheaper than most of my other debt). That said, I've got £550 due to a supplier, £680 to Royal Mail for last month's postage, £94.50 to BT for the last quarter's broadband (another downside of living where we do - those headline 'broadband for £6.99 a month' offers aren't available in our area), about £350 to eBay and another £75-ish to various companies for the business phone line, the credit card processing, the website shop software and the payment gateway (the bit that transfers card information securely between the website and the processor). And I need to order stock from two suppliers today as well, though one of them is on account and won't be due for payment for 30 days.

Anyone reading here from the MFW blog may remember my intense irritation with one of my UK suppliers for doubling the price of one of my best-sellers (necklace chains), making them so expensive that I had to stop stocking them, and the subsequent joy when I finally found a factory in the Far East that sent me a nickel free sample that was actually nickel free. Well, I still hadn't got the money together to order from them when I received an email from the company in Hong Kong who makes my charm bracelets, showing off their newest item - a snake chain. I immediately wrote back and asked them if they could make me trace or curb chains, they got a sample done for me over the weekend and I'll be ordering from them instead It's a huge relief because I can be certain that they'll be good quality and plated well (the plating on the sample I got from the other factory wasn't a good colour and they wanted to more to make it a bright silver). Now I just need to magic up another £3k to place an order...

cazmanian_minx

£1.40 on a magazine, so no NSD today (I got hooked on Closer a few years ago - it's the only one I buy).

I've been good today and started auctioning off my returns box. I sorted it out last month into 'unopened' (which all got put back into stock straight away), 'broken' (which all got chucked - very little, thankfully) and, by far the biggest pile, 'opened but as new or still sellable' - this is things like reels of cord where the wrapping has been removed and maybe half a metre of a 10 metre reel has been used or the packaging is damaged but the contents are fine. I've got 9 items photographed out of I dread to think how many and 5 of them listed. It's going to be a long job!

I've also taken my three evening dresses out of the cupboard in the spare room and put them on eBay on my personal account. They're old - all mid-90s Monsoon dresses - but classic styles and with 99p starts for dresses which all cost around £100 originally, I'm hopeful that they'll sell. I've got a load of sheet music to put on as well, but I have a few friends who are professional singers and may want the choral stuff, so I'll make a list tomorrow and offer it to them first.

Since no-one has called or emailed to say I've won a holiday yet, I'm back off to the competitions board for the rest of the evening

cazmanian_minx

OK, place your bets now on whether the payment I've just made to the Post Office card actually makes it - the last time I tried to pay them electronically they never got it thanks to me misunderstanding an early version of NatWest's online banking system and putting 'POST OFFICE CARD' in the reference box instead of my account number The First Direct system is a little more straightforward, so fingers crossed and I've made a note in my diary to check it's been credited on Friday.

Not a lot to do today except list more auction stock, so I may be popping back on here fairly frequently, unless they finish shearing early at the farm and come to do the flock next door today - I've promised my neighbours I'll go and help roll the fleeces (and probably get told to jump up and down in the wool sacks - as the youngest and lightest it's easiest for me to climb up the frames and get in!).

Two of my Monsoon dresses got bids this morning

cazmanian_minx

36 pieces of sheet music sold to a friend for £20

cazmanian_minx

OOOOH, I got a PM from the MSE forum team saying I might have won one of the copies of Polish for Dummies They're sending them to three times more people than prizes because they've found so many people don't answer and the first 10 to email in with their forum name and address will get the prize. Fingers crossed I'm one of them, the message said I'd know in about 2 weeks

OK, it's not a holiday, but at least now if I win one to Poland I'll be able to make myself understood

Exotic

Truly an enjoyable read, I'll be following this diary with great interest

cazmanian_minx

I've been thwarted in my attempts to skive off this afternoon. :wall:

I'm really not feeling like working, so I told myself that I was going to have an afternoon off and headed over to the Big Fish Games website to download one of their hour long trial games to amuse myself. Picked a brainless match-3 game (I'm not even feeling alert enough to play a hidden object!) and thought I'd be good and list the five auction items I had sitting on my desk while it was downloading. Did that, went back to the download and it's one I've played before so it's just showing up as 'Trial expired' - that'll teach me to try and be lazy :rotfl:

Finn, the pony, arrived with a bit of a rash on his bottom which I thought I'd got rid of, but it came back last week, so it's being attacked with green gooey gunge again. He was eyeing up the gate post with intent to scratch when I came back from dropping the orders at the post office, so I grabbed the pot and went to re-gunge him. There's a spot on the back of his left thigh where if you scratch it for him, he'll stick his head in the air and flap his top lip at you - he quite often does it when I'm shoulder-deep under his tail greasing his thighs, so you can imagine how my reputation is in the village right now :eek: I must try and get some video of it though, because it's very funny to watch.

cazmanian_minx

Morning!

We did end up shearing last night, 96 sheep, one shearer and me and my two neighbours shifting sheep and baling fleeces. All good fun, even if I did end up covered in wool and sheep poo! I'm back in the same clothes this morning, despite being a bit niffy, as I want to go and get my bottom field sprayed while the weather's nice, so as soon as this morning haar lifts I'll be strapping on my Ghostbusters back pack with something deadly to thistles, docks and bracken in it (though pretty much everything deadly to bracken is now illegal - thank you EU, you've just condemned most of the grazing land in the Highlands :mad:)

Another NSD yesterday, so that's 2/31 for July now. The 5th is when the biggest lump of money comes out of the bills account, as the mortgage is paid (it went through successfully today, thank goodness) - and LOOK at that outstanding balance figure in my sig: £121,002.68. Even though it's a low rate debt at 1.6%, how am I going to be able to resist making a rounding payment on that for Payment A Day??? :rotfl:

And I did manage to get some wobbly phone footage of Finn the pony pulling faces, so if you want to see how much pleasure a simple scratch on the back of the thigh can give:
http://youtu.be/T4BXFty_gCg
(This is why my reputation is going downhill in the village - I was scratching him there, but he does the same thing when I'm in up to the elbow under his tail to grease the chapped skin between his thighs, usually with his willy stuck out as well, and that's guaranteed to make someone drive past )

cazmanian_minx

I'm knackered.com. The bottom field is all sprayed apart from the shallower of the two slopes (I did the near-vertical one without falling down it, which is no small achievement when you're wearing a sprayer backpack that's about 25% of your bodyweight, can't see where you're putting your feet because you're wading through bracken and have a lousy sense of balance!) which I'll do next week along with catching the bits I missed today. I've also mowed the lawn, which Mr Minx was very pleased about when he got home because it means he doesn't have to do it.

I'm a bit concerned about this laptop, I think it's caught something I have Avast on it and there's a daily scheduled quick scan with a full scan every weekend, but when I booted it up this morning the text kept disappearing off the start button and all the window titles. I got Avast to do a boot scan and then did a system restore back to last week and scanned again and fingers crossed it's not done anything weird for the past half hour.

I've had another PM from the MSE team and Polish for Dummies will be winging its way to me in the next couple of weeks I'm back off to the Competitions forum to see if I can win myself a new laptop as well as a holiday Today has also been a NSD, so now 3/31 for July.