Caz counts it down

DebtFree2012

Hope you had a good weekend and some time off

cazmanian_minx

I did, thank you, though I came back from my lambing evening covered in sand, water, hay, straw, poo, blood, afterbirth and colostrum (much of the latter in my hair after I'd stomach-tubed a lamb and then the bottle slipped off the tube!) - Mr Minx's expression when I turned up at the back door was enough to make me go to the annexe, undress into the washing machine and then run back to the house in my underwear and wellies!

It's been a bit of a spendy week I bought a brushcutter - it needed to be one that can cope with my 6-acre field, which is near-vertical in places and covered in rushes, some of them waist-height. So this thing has a 4-cylinder petrol engine, a seriously scary metal blade that does 10,000rpm, and a body harness to help take the weight when using it. It also cost nearly £400, but it will be a useful tool in field management for years to come - and that's about half what it would cost to get Mr Minx qualified to spray the fields now you need a licence to do so. Plus I like the idea of keeping the weeds down in a non-chemical manner, if possible.

Then today I bit the bullet and bought a new mobile phone. I've had a month without having a personal mobile that works at home now, and I've had to admit that I really could use one, as I've been playing telephone tag with tradesmen and haven't been able to support a friend who's going through a tough time as well as I would have liked to, because they don't do computers and I haven't been able to text.

So I did some research into all the options for calls/texts over broadband and whilst my preferred option would be WiFi Calling, as provided by EE and Vodafone, I've been using TUGo on the work iPhone Mr RPC gave me and it works well enough, it's just a bit clunky to answer calls in time (I have to tap in my PIN, scroll to the app, open it and hit answer within about 6 rings and I don't always make it!). I knew it was going to be a big leap from my current £40-a-year PAYG spend, but I was prepared to go up to £20 a month and up to £100 up front for the phone if I could get the phone I wanted (Samsung Galaxy S6), as I could use the camera and apps for the house blog/social media etc.

Google found me £60 up front and £19 a month on O2 via a Carphone Warehouse-owned website, so I popped it into my basket and went to compare with EE, as I'm currently with Orange. £49.99 up front and £28.49 per month for the same calls, texts and data bundle. I rang them to see if they could price match and the nice chap on the other end of the phone was very apologetic, but said that their stance was that they had a better network than the others and it was worth paying a premium for. I pointed out that they had no network whatsoever within a mile of the house, whereas I could pick up O2 at the top of my drive.

Long story short, they couldn't or wouldn't give me any better deal than the one on the website (which is a bit odd, because when I went into the store in London in September, they pulled up my account and offered me all sorts of deals), so I checked out with the O2 deal and the phone arrives on Monday. Rang Orange to get a PAC to take my number with me and their customer service team wasn't accepting any calls due to an issue with the 3G network! Quite glad to be moving really, even though it's a bit of a sad moment after 15+ years with the same network.

On the work front, good news in that the market research company I sometimes work for has been in touch to see if I could transcribe 20 hours of interviews between next Monday and the end of the month. Yes, I can, as that's £800 if all the interviews run the full length (quite often they don't)!

milasavesmoney

Oh that money will certainly help with your new purchases! Nice!

Verbatim

That's a "tidy sum " indeed.

cazmanian_minx

Turns out the project actually started on Friday, so I was slightly surprised to get an email on Friday mid-morning saying, 'Here are your first files, can you have them back by the end of the day?' Er, no, I can't, I'm working for someone else. I managed to fit in one around what I was doing for Mr RPC for 5pm, did the second yesterday and am currently about 2/3rds of the way through number three, with the fourth to do later.

I've spent all morning whacking old lime plaster off the walls down the road - it's now all off in the main, but my arm is really sore from the vibrations and I've still got these files to type, the ironing to do and the rest of the strawberry bed to sort out! Think I'm going to iron Mr Minx a shirt for tomorrow so he doesn't have to go to work naked and then see how I feel about doing any more.

DebtFree2012

Did Mr Minx go to work naked on Tuesday then? :D:D

cazmanian_minx

DebtFree2012 wrote: »

Did Mr Minx go to work naked on Tuesday then? :D:D

Nope, I went upstairs and found he had three shirts in the wardrobe - still haven't done the ironing, because he then decided to break out the short-sleeved ones for the first time this year!

This week has been blink-and-it's-Thursday. The project that started early ended up sending me 21 files with a deadline of noon today, so I have been pretty much glued to my keyboard.

In other news, my new phone has arrived and I have to admit, it's VERY nice. All set up with TUGo and my old number ported yesterday - I tested it out by making a call to Mr Minx as I was walking back home from checking the sheep, it's quite a novelty to be able to get a signal without having to jump in the car and drive for a couple of miles.

Another 20 files from the same project to go, the first ones will come in tomorrow and they need them all done by Thursday again, so I don't think next week is going to be any quieter, but it's very much a case of making hay while the sun shines, because Mr RPC is away quite a lot for the second half of the month and NEL doesn't have any work for me at the moment.

Verbatim

Absolutely. But will that mean a bit of a break for you? I guess you'll be using any spare time at the house.

DebtFree2012

Glad Mr Minx didn't have to go shirtless Happy Friday.


Sounds like another super busy week but at least it's balancing out the quieter period of NEL and Mr RPC, imagine they were throwing the work at you too!! Everything happens for a reason and all that

cazmanian_minx

We're actually at a standstill with the house, other than cleaning up all the knocked-off lime plaster now we have better breathing masks - it's ready to be handed over to the trades, though we could start doing some of the outside stuff. I need to go and discuss the bit that's fenced in that shouldn't be with the grazings committee though. It would be useful to keep the fence, but it's knackered and if I simply replace it without asking, I'll probably cause offence (previous resident fenced off a small area of common grazings!). I'm going to suggest that I replace the fence, but put a gate in the end of it and if I'm not actually moving sheep through it to get them to the byres, I'll leave the gate open so it's accessible to any sheep in the village. Hopefully that will be an acceptable solution to all concerned - it's certainly a better one than currently.

I've been having a bit of a head-scratch over all my new credit cards and YNAB. My pre-YNAB debt figure is still there, but doesn't match the card it's held on because of the additional balance transfers. I think what I'm going to do, since I still have all that 0% cash either sitting in the offset or on the Barclaycard, is to allocate all the minimum payments I'm making to the pre-YNAB debt figure on YNAB. Then when I start spending the stashed cash on the house, I can put the Work - Croft category into the red and put it back into credit when the mortgage comes in.