Caz counts it down

cazmanian_minx

Scores on the doors

NEL: £88.50
Large agency: £28.00
Mr RPC: £203.20

Total: £319.70 (£30.30 short of target)

eBay sales less postage less 25%: £107.02

Total: £426.72

Could be better, could be worse

Did a bit of bargain tack shopping on Saturday - someone posted a bitless bridle for sale on a local Facebook group for £10 and though it wasn't the clearest of pictures, it looked like it was all there and in reasonable nick and I had a suspicion I knew what make it was, so I nipped in and bought it. Picked it up yesterday and I was right - one Libby's Scawbrig, full size, black, with reins, RRP about £56 Still in the back of the car and looks okay at a quick glance (we were on our way to mother-in-law's birthday lunch, so didn't have time to check it over properly), a little bit of rust on the buckles, but the webbing seems perfect. Chuffed to bits and if it turns out not to fit, I've already had a message from a friend asking if she can buy it off me if it doesn't work out.

DebtFree2012

That's a cracking bargain, well done you.

I do enjoy the scores on the doors posts! I feel they are part of my routine now!

Any news on the croft?

cazmanian_minx

DebtFree2012 wrote: »

That's a cracking bargain, well done you.

I do enjoy the scores on the doors posts! I feel they are part of my routine now!

Any news on the croft?

Even better bargain now I've tried it on him and it fits Since the field I would be riding/lunging in is currently consistency of chocolate mousse, it's being lent to the person who would have bought it if it hadn't fit for a couple of weeks, so everyone's happy! No news on the croft, though I do log into the crofting register every so often to see if they've appeared as first registrations. If I've not heard anything by the first week of March, I'll ring them up again.

My new PC arrived yesterday (did I mention the new PC? Don't think I did - Dell Optiplex, refurbished business machine, would have been about £800 when it was new, £350 from Tier1) so I lost most of yesterday to getting it set up. I'd decided to upgrade it to Windows 10 from the get-go so I could avoid any further changes for a few years. It took about 2.5 hours to download, then told me I didn't have a valid copy of Windows 7 and exited the set-up process. Turns out I'd typed the licence key number in wrong and it hadn't registered, so sorted that out, went back to the upgrade page - and it made me download the whole damn thing again! :mad::mad::mad::mad: Having got it out of the box at 10am, I finally switched it off at 8.30pm.

So this morning it was the turn of a newer version of Microsoft Office, the sole reason I'd bought a new machine in the first place - the trigger was having to turn down three jobs in a week because they were .docx templates with graphics in the header or footer and I know from previous experience that my old Word 2000 and OpenOffice/LibreOffice etc. etc. will all totally knacker the formatting on them. All up and running now, though Word 2016 was a bit of a shock to the system! I'm still finding my way around it, but I've been able to wrestle it into submission so far, including getting rid of the annoying cursor smoothing animation which, if you type faster than about 80wpm, lags about 0.5mm behind the letter you're typing.

Anyway, it was a good thing that I got up this morning to this email from NEL:

I’ve been sent some priority files on a project that need a 24 hour turnaround. Would you be able to get one done for me today and return it by tomorrow lunch time? I’ve put it in the folder for you to have a listen to. I can offer you £1 per audio minute for this one for the quick turnaround. There will be a few more with quick turnaround on this project too if you think you can manage them?

If not don’t worry, I’ll re-assign it but I wanted to check with my “bestest” girl first.

53 minutes turned round and sent back today :D:D:D:D

DebtFree2012

Oooosh well done you!!!

Do you use autocorrect to your advantage ie, type wrt and it enters with regards to and if so, do you have to enter them all again as new config, or can you transfer them over somehow?

PITA about the croft still waiting around but at least it's not going anywhere if you don't complete timely!

Our bridelpaths here also resemble chocolate mousse, although we've had a frost last night so they may be passable today.

cazmanian_minx

I don't tend to use autocorrect for everyday phrases. I had a spate of files on the New Zealand government, so added nze in for that as for some reason I find that finger-twisting to type, and there was a complicated type of cancer that I had a 90-minute interview on, so put one in for that - I think those were the only two, to be honest! I do keep meaning to add bbb for blah, blah, blah, which is a tough one to type fast.

The really annoying thing about the croft taking so long is that the solicitors have had my £95,000 in escrow since November, which I'm paying £276 a month on in interest, but I'm not getting any income to cover it in the form of the subsidy payment that comes with the croft and there's now absolutely no way that we'll be able to get the house ready for our first guests this summer - we were supposed to be starting in November with an end of April finish.

January's vet bill arrived yesterday, which wasn't particularly happy reading. I thought it was going to be around the £150 mark, but it came in at £201 - didn't realise that horsey tetanus jabs were so expensive To be fair, that covered the dog's annual booster, a can of antibiotic spray for the sheep, call out fee to come and see the horses, examination fee for Merlin and two horse-size (literally!) injections.

Today's post brought the car insurance renewal. It's gone up £20 to £216, so I'll have a shop around to see if anyone can do better, but Privilege has been cheapest two years in a row now, I think.

cazmanian_minx

Right, some Sunday scores on doors

Large agency: £58.00
NEL: £162.00
Mr RPC: £152.60

Total: £372.60

Didn't realise I'd done quite that much for NEL this week, but I suppose that 53 minutes at £1 a minute really helped.

I am having a day off today Well, from work anyway, I've got some laundry on, I've planted the garlic (bit late, but never mind) and since it's stopped snowing again temporarily, I'm going to get my outdoor gear back on and go and clear out the cold frame.

EDIT: Ooh, forgot the eBay stuff. £86.86. At the moment I have three orders totalling less than £10 to go on Monday. I think it's reached the point where it's actually costing me money to send them out (if you factor in time taken to go the drop-off point for the mailbags) and eBay has notified me that all items in my selling category (Craft) will have to have a manufacturer/brand and item ID number from 29th Feb, which none of mine do, so I'll probably shut everything down after posting out on Friday 26th and have a think about how best to clear what's left in bulk.

cazmanian_minx

cazmanian_minx wrote: »

Today's post brought the car insurance renewal. It's gone up £20 to £216, so I'll have a shop around to see if anyone can do better, but Privilege has been cheapest two years in a row now, I think.

So, the renewal was actually £219. Quidco's own comparison service came back with £177 from Hastings Direct, GoCompare told me Privilege would insure me for £155.49 and Confused.com gets a special price for Privilege and could offer me £148.92! I can also get a quote from Privilege through Quidco with £20 cashback, so I'll see what the direct quote is as well, once I'm ready to buy. Whichever way I do it, I'm going to save about £70.

I have had a productive afternoon The cold frame was emptied, then Mr Minx helped me lift it up onto concrete blocks which will hopefully reduce the amount of grass growing up into it. I cleared all the vegetation from around the septic tank (our soakaway isn't soaking away very well when the ground is as saturated as it currently is, meaning it's a bit niffy round there - hoping this will help), weeded two out of four raised beds and have got the first 24 onion seeds into the propagator on the kitchen windowsill (only room for 24 at a time, they have to take their chances in the cold frame once they're up), so it's really starting to feel like spring is on its way.

DebtFree2012

That's great (and also really annoying) about the car insurance. Of course, they wouldn't offer you the lowest price on their renewal, no, that would be too much to ask. Another example of companies trying to rip us off. The thing is, some people wouldn't even shop around to try and get it cheaper - rant over


Great going on clearing the cold frame and getting things started off. Funny you should say about the septic tank, we have the whiffy smell too so I think DH might need to strim around that area and see what's what as it is all looking very overgrown. Ours is a soakaway I was told.


Made any soup lately? I haven't and must get back in to it. Also how's the hair growing going?

cazmanian_minx

Not made any soup since I dug up the parsnips, but then again, I've still got quite a lot of that left in the freezer! I'm seven months into growing out my grey now and I've done about three inches. Two feet still to go...

Work, work and more work this week. Mr Minx seemed slightly on edge this evening and he finally spat out what was bothering him about 8pm. "Darling, please don't take this the wrong way, but....would you mind if we got a cleaner? I'll pay." OF COURSE I DON'T MIND!! It's not cheap, there's only one company locally, and their charge for my village is £34+VAT for two hours, but they're good and they're in the area tomorrow, so they're going to pop round to have a look.

I had the farrier and the vet back today for a check-up on Merlin's foot. They're very pleased with his progress and reckon it should trim out at the farrier's next visit in four weeks' time. Farrier bill today for spending 90 minutes here, £30 - and I had to argue him up from the £20 he wanted to charge! Vet will be considerably more, but I need to check with the office that the January one is actually right, because it says 'Flu & tet vaccination' and I double-checked today and they've definitely only had the tetanus, not the flu.

Hay pick-up on Saturday and it's just up the road from the mart, where the farm implements auction is running this Saturday. Think we'd better go over in the afternoon after it's finished, otherwise knowing Mr Minx's love of boys' toys we might end up going home with more than 30 bales of hay!

brizzledfw

Love it. A cleaner you don't pay for...what a result