Caz counts it down

cazmanian_minx

Flatbacks priced, photographed and part-listed. It's very encouraging that some of them have multiple watchers already after less than 3 hours on the site I'll get the last ones done tomorrow morning.

My beloved comfy pair of second hand Fat Face jeans are about to give up the ghost. I've been trying to find a replacement pair on eBay for ages, but the one pair I bought last year turned out to be completely different and much smaller, so I'm searching for a pair of Oasis Scarlet jeans instead, which I know fit me really well. They're £45-ish new, I've set myself a budget of £7.50 or less including P&P.

I also need to find a fleece cooler rug for Mr Merlin. He's at that in between stage with his coat at the moment - the long, waterproof guard hairs from his winter coat are all gone, but his summer coat isn't quite through so he's mostly covered in the dark brown fluff that sits under the guard hairs and it's being very slow to come out. Last night we were supposed to have a short shower around 1am but dry for the rest of the night. It rained cats and dogs for about 7 hours with a 30mph wind and low temperatures and I went down to the field this morning to find my poor horse soaked to the skin and shivering :(:(:( (He'd eventually had the sense to take himself into one of the field shelters, but not before he'd got drenched). Finn has a fabulous wicking rug which I bought cheaply on eBay last year, but it's too small for M, so he needs his own and if I've interpreted Terapeak correctly I should be able to get one for about a tenner. (I put his lightest - in terms of weight, not warmth - turnout rug on him this morning and he warmed up and dried out pretty fast.)

cazmanian_minx

Ooof, what a day. Resin flatbacks all listed, first two sales made and I managed to catch up with my to-do list, so by 4.30 I was completely up to date with everything.

Then Billy the postman turned up with a box from one of my UK suppliers which had 10 new items to be photographed and listed as well as the top-ups for other stock and I checked the tracking number on the glass beads to find that they'd arrived in the UK yesterday and had spent the day trundling up the A9 from Perth to Inverness. If they come up from Inverness to Thurso overnight, they'll be delivered tomorrow - so it could be a VERY busy day.

I've had the renewal quote through for the buildings insurance. Not bad at £139.20, but I shall have a shop around tomorrow and see if I can do better. It's an unusual house to insure in that the rebuild costs are higher than its market value, so we'll see what we get.

The dog had her first bath today after deciding to dip her ears in a puddle of horse wee this morning (I'm sure there used to be a vomit smiley!). I did try just washing her ears, but the smell was still bad enough by the time Mr Minx got home to turn him a pale green, so we had to go for the full Monty. The problem is that we don't have a bath, only a double shower cubicle with a fixed rainfall shower head. I ended up having to strip off and get under the water (turned down to tepid *shiver*) while Jura kept her head to the outside and got her shampoo and set. Rinsing off was a bit of a problem, but I found I could get the water to flow down my arm and pour off my hand in a fairly steady stream. She was very good in the end, bless her, and after drenching two bath sheets getting dried off she's now finishing off the last bits of damp in front of the woodburner.

Mara_uk7

Smelly dogs huh ? Mine spent a happy afternoon rolling in piles of goose poo ! Never seen a green Jack Russell before ! Got in from work at 6 and had to bath her before I could even start cooking dinner ! She's now snuggled up under my blanky on the sofa glowering at me ! I swear she Disna appreciate me !

cazmanian_minx

Goose poo? Urgghhhh, I can imagine how that smelt! The worst thing Smokey ever rolled in was a decomposing seal carcass - I haven't found anything to beat that yet for stench. And when Mr Smokes rolled, he *really* rolled! This is what happened the day I had my phone on me when he found a dead gannet: http://youtu.be/QiCyY4o8gM8 (Can't believe it's nearly a year since he died )

My beads did arrive today and it's the first time I've ever opened a box of new stock and gone 'Oh WOW!' They are seriously, seriously gorgeous, but I had to get the UK delivery finished first as I had some stuff in it specially ordered for a customer who was waiting for it. That's all listed now, so I can get cracking on the beads tomorrow.

Our croft purchase is now in the hands of our solicitor. As long as it all goes smoothly, then the croft becomes ours on 5th June. It's currently owner-occupied rather than a tenancy, so the landlordship is going in Mr Minx's name and then he'll grant me a tenancy. That way we don't leave a vacant tenancy that, technically, the Crofters' Commission could fill if they were minded (highly, highly unlikely, but better to cover all bases). They don't have to approve the sale of the croft because it's owner-occupied, but I'll have to apply to them for the common grazing shares and peat-cutting rights.

brizzledfw

Oooh very exciting about the croft..I am getting vicariously (of course) very excited about the thought of you being a land owner wth grazing rights!!:rotfl:

Every time we go to Scotland (most years) I get a hankering to stay...

cazmanian_minx

Hello Friday - I'm happy to report that things are moving in the right direction again

(last week/this week/ + or - amount)
Business
Overdraft: -£-8050.63 / -£6983.54 +£1067.09

Business total: -£-8050.63 / -£6983.54 +£1067.09

Personal
Overdraft: -£0.00 / £-83.37 -£83.37
Egg card: -£3420.36 / -£3420.36 no change
Barclaycard: -£2655.00 / -£2615.00 +£40.00
Nationwide card: £2741.85 / £2741.85 no change

Personal total: -£8817.21 / -£8860.58 -£43.37

Grand total: -£16,867.84 / -£15,844.12 +£1023.72

The one small cloud on the horizon is that after paying the Barclaycard this morning I have the grand total of £7.43 in the First Direct account and that's got to pay the £27.41 to Nationwide next week plus the £12.12 TV licence on the 1st. I'm going to have to pay myself a bit extra this month to cover it - at the moment I'm thinking I'll put £50 into FD and £100 into NatWest so I don't go outside the buffer zone. It's been an expensive month for interest and charges with the balance transfer fee (£138.00 all in :eek:) but with the current account within the buffer zone for a whole month plus £3k shifted to 0%, next month's interest bill should be about £20 - MUCH better than the C.£100 it's been for the past few months

cazmanian_minx

It's been a quiet day. I spent all morning editing pictures of new stock, then nipped into town with Mr Minx this afternoon. I bumped into the heating engineer in Tesco, which was handy as I'd pinged him on Facebook last week to remind him he'd never let us know how much we owed him for sorting out the boiler after Easter - he'd replied saying call it £25 so I was able to hand him the cash in person.

We went to see Mr Minx's mum as well and she's given us four cuttings for the back garden. I have no idea what they are (I think one may be a hebe), but they're bushes of some sort so I shall plant them in my empty border and hope they grow enough to prevent me having to do too much weeding this summer

I've got some new jeans as well - managed to snag a pair of Oasis Scarlet dark wash for £2.99, so they should arrive next week. No joy with Merlin's rug yet and I have a horrible feeling I may need to buy Finn a new rainsheet as well because the cheap one I bought on eBay last summer doesn't have a tail flap and he had a soaking wet bottom yesterday which can't be too comfortable He's back in his turnout tonight, he might be a little warm but at least he'll be dry. According to the forecast, this is the last of the non-stop rain for a while, so the rugs can be put away again from tomorrow morning

cazmanian_minx

As days go, today has not been one of the better ones

It started off fairly promisingly. I set to work finishing off the photo editing and was humming along with them nicely, taking a break every so often to work on a post for the business blog to give my hand a rest. I finished the blog post at 11.30, posted it, tried to share the link on the business Facebook page - nothing. Facebook wouldn't allow me to post on my own business's page. I had to settle for adding it as a comment to the previous day's link to the blog.

Then I accidentally hit a short command key twice in Photoshop, which changed the tool I was using so it didn't do what I needed it to do. It took me half an hour to figure out what I'd done and how to undo it.

But never mind, I was nearly finished on the photo editing - just one more to go and that was it. Hang on, what's this message? File could not be saved due to device error. Bit weird. I can see it there with the correct name, I'll double click on it. Please insert disc in drive F: Uh-oh.....

Yes, you guessed it, the memory stick had died. Proper died - five of my IT professional friends have now tried to help me retrieve the data off it and each of them has reached the conclusion that it's a hardware failure and will cost around £150 to get recovered by a specialist. What's on it? Oh, nothing important, just ALL the photo files for the business.... :wall::wall::wall:

Actually, it's not as bad as it sounds All those files are duplicated, at full resolution, in a separate directory on the shop's webspace, so I've not lost the lot. Just the ones I'd given up my entire weekend to edit, had saved to the stick but hadn't uploaded yet because I hadn't quite finished them. I've also lost a few bits and pieces carried forward from old PCs. Yup, the same old PCs I took to the recycling centre a few weeks ago (please imagine your own eyerolling smiley here).

The really annoying thing is that I have an online back-up service, called Carbonite, which automatically backs up everything on my PC as soon as it notices a change. When I renewed it a couple of weeks ago, I upgraded the subscription to include an external hard drive, planning to get a bigger external drive (my 120GB one for pictures is at 111GB) and move the business pictures onto it as well. The backup's been chugging away ever since the upgrade, but I hadn't got round to buying a new drive and making the switch.

So off I trotted to 7dayshop (via Quidco ) to buy a big external drive. Got to checkout and it wanted me to register for Verified By Visa, which is fair enough, but RBS Business debit cards can't be registered, you just get an error message saying 'Call this number' - and the number isn't staffed at weekends. I eventually managed to pay using PayPal, but that's taken £70 out of the kitty which I'd rather not have spent. 2 terabytes should sort me out for a while though

Anyway, that's my day, more or less, with a bit of very angry gardening thrown in while I was trying to see if the memory stick was recoverable or not. The horses have had a lovely lazy day in the sun and Merlin seems to be attempting to shed the rest of his winter coat in a single day because the amount of fur coming off him this evening had to be seen to be believed! I should really be in the annexe right now, starting the photography again, but Mr Minx has put his foot down and told me to chill out for the rest of the evening, so I'll put my feet up on the sofa instead.

I did post a couple of them to Facebook actually, so this is what I've been working on all weekend:

Mara_uk7

Oh my ! Love some of those beads, may have to get back into jewellery making again very very soon ..... Caz , you're a bad influence !

cazmanian_minx

Mara_uk7 wrote: »

Oh my ! Love some of those beads, may have to get back into jewellery making again very very soon ..... Caz , you're a bad influence !

:D:D:D:D:D

See why I went "WOW!!!!" when I opened the boxes now?