Caz counts it down

cazmanian_minx

He's currently overtired but refusing to go to sleep, which has resulted in him coming in from the garden, taking a flying leap onto the sofa and then promptly peeing on it. However, he does have his cute moments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDag99C6xag

(He won possession of Ducky in the end!)

I am ridiculously tired, but have had a fair bit of work on this week, so hopefully good for the finances.

Knit_Witch

a lot of the time Jura was in the front end down back end up play position:D

milasavesmoney

Those two are really cute together.

JustAboutThere

If the new puppy is Jack and the tractor is female, then perhaps the tractor needs to be called Jill.

cazmanian_minx

Obligatory puppy photo - the day we got him versus two and a half weeks later. He's growing fast!



It has been an extraordinarily expensive week and I don't actually know how much it's going to cost yet, but I needed antibiotic and vitamin injections for two lambs (one of which very sadly didn't make it, but the other has improved massively and is now giving me a merry dance round the vegetable patch each morning when I try and catch her for her jab - last one tomorrow, thank goodness!), Jack had his second vaccinations and then my laptop decided it wasn't going to play sound any more. It had been an intermittent fault for a few weeks which became permanent in the early part of this week, so I suspect a hardware failure somewhere, though I did try re-downloading the latest sound drivers for it.

All the vet stuff has gone on my account, so I won't know the damage until I get my bill early next month, but I've spent more than I've ever spent in my life on a piece of tech for the laptop. The problem is that most laptop keyboards now are chiclet-style - a bit like calculator keys with space around each key and not much depth when you press them. These make it difficult to touch-type at high speed, so I was looking for a replacement with a proper keyboard and though I'd have happily bought another ThinkPad, the place I bought the current one from didn't have a good enough one in stock and the lead time on a new one for the spec I wanted was 17-19 working days!

So last night I bit the bullet and bought myself a Microsoft Surface Pro 4, at an eye-watering £960. I'm hoping it will last longer than the two-year average I get out of the reconditioned laptops I've been buying! I was grumbling about it to Mr RPC during our catch-up call this morning and he astonished me by promptly telling me to invoice him for half of it. After triple-checking he was sure, I shall be adding 50% of it to this month's invoice for him and am very, very grateful to him.

cazmanian_minx

It's been a while since I did a monthly scores on the doors and I need to get back into the habit, because my income is slipping. So here's October:

Mr RPC - £708.20
NEL - £175.00
Journalist #4 - £125.25
Journalist #5 (new client!) - £64.50

Total - £1072.95

Bit of a comedown from the £1500-£1800 I was doing regularly earlier in the year, so I need to pull my socks up.

List of things I want to get done this month:

1. Clear some bead stock. Doesn't matter if I get below cost price for it, it's at least money in the bank rather than stuff taking up space in the annexe.
2. Go through my books and DVDs, weed out the ones I don't want, send off the ones that are sellable to webuybooks and donate the rest to Cancer Research.
3. Complete the decrofting application for Ethel's House.
4. Find a simple beanie hat knitting pattern, knit a tester in some old wool I have lying around and then spin enough fleece to knit one from my own sheep and see if I'm spinning a smooth enough yarn for it not to fall apart.

EssexHebridean

Just catching up here - sorry!

Jack is still utterly gorgeous then! And good news on the laptop - I can't see beyond that giving you decent service. I know exactly what you mean about modern keyboards - I'm dreading my work one going kaput because you can be sure they'll insist on buying me one of the "modern" ones...but I don't want one! I like a nice, positive, clicky, PROPER keyboard! :rotfl:

Nice list for the month too - I've made a start on sorting DVD's myself but not sure how much more I can do with books - I think I've stripped mine pretty much back to minimums now. I may just have to accept that on that side of things, I'm as decluttered as I'm going to get! :rotfl:

cazmanian_minx

1,550 Christmas-related resin flatbacks now listed on eBay in packs of 50 Fingers crossed for some sales...I've put them on with best offer available for anyone who wants more than one pack, and I'm offering free postage, so I hope they'll shift. Mr Minx is away tonight, so I'll come back out to the office after I've sorted out the livestock and try and get some more listed. Apparently I'm able to do 100 free listings a day for the whole of November!

cazmanian_minx

Mr RPC is in meetings all day, so I can have a relatively quiet one, which is good, because I didn't sleep too well last night - my own fault, I was up late trying to cast on 100 stitches on a circular needle using the long tail method and then join them together without twisting them and then knit 2" of rib. Gave up about 11pm after the third attempt when I got to the fourth round of rib and realised I'd managed to add an extra stitch somewhere in the middle! I started again this morning and after a bit of a dodgy start where I only managed to cast on 80 stitches before running out of long tail (fortunately that's the next size down on the pattern), have got four rows of rib knitted without anything going wrong.

I've also got another four lines of stock listed on eBay - bees, caterpillars, chickens and crocodiles in flatback form - and will try to do the next four later, four little drawer being the maximum I can safely carry down the spiral staircase without risking dropping them everywhere. I'm counting and bagging up as I go now, so when (being positive!) they sell, it's just a case of throwing them in a padded envelope and taking them to the post office.

Nationwide sent me a letter yesterday offering to nearly double the credit limit on my card. As it's the lowest one of the lot, I've accepted it - I'm not going to use it, but it brings my ratio of amount borrowed to total credit limit down a bit, which is a good thing.

EssexHebridean

Nice work....but yes, definitely DON'T drop those drawers - (as it were!) - I can hardly begin to imagine the time-consuming mess that would ensue! :rotfl:

Good plan to count and bag them as you go along, too.