5 year plan

kittiej

Well heeellllloooo

I've ignored you dear diary just of late, I did have the flu though so my apologies :rotfl:

My new course has opened its forums and everyone is popping in to say their hellos. It looks quite interesting but will have to wait until we get into the nitty gritty gubbins of it all

Going to be a good day today as it's payday and my birthday and my youngest son has said I can choose myself a pressie from Poundw0rld! We'll have a look. He wants to go to McDonalds for lunch so we are having a day to ourselves today. Not very MSE though but hey it's only one day.

So that's ma day :T

lbnblbnb

kittiej wrote: »

Well heeellllloooo

I've ignored you dear diary just of late, I did have the flu though so my apologies :rotfl:

My new course has opened its forums and everyone is popping in to say their hellos. It looks quite interesting but will have to wait until we get into the nitty gritty gubbins of it all

Going to be a good day today as it's payday and my birthday and my youngest son has said I can choose myself a pressie from Poundw0rld! We'll have a look. He wants to go to McDonalds for lunch so we are having a day to ourselves today. Not very MSE though but hey it's only one day.

So that's ma day :T

Happy Birthday kittiej! Enjoy your day.

B-J-D

Happy birthday, I hope you'v had a lovely day

I have enjoyed my evening reading your up lifting and positive posts (although I am very sorry to hear about your friend) and want to say well done on your saving this month. I really hope you meet your targets and get to build your dream home.

eco_farmer

K J HAPPY BIRTHDAY! from the crazy farmer:j

eco

kittiej

Hey thanks ever so guys :T

I had a fab day with the youngest son - even if he did cost me £60 in Clarks shoe shop :eek: and I got to go to McDonald's for my birthday :j I'm such a child lol. I only had 1 card from my work mate but that's great in my books as it's less trees being destroyed and don't believe all you read about these toilet roll companies who plant trees for every roll sold, we need more native trees and not the Norway spruce type trees as they are really too acidic for our island and do more harm than good.

www.british-trees.com

I would love to own a piece of woodland for no other reason than to preserve our heritage. Where I live it was once covered in native trees with just the odd farm scattered here and there. Then the pits came and the landscape changed

I love trees, I think they are magical and today I am mostly being an 'eco-feminist'


Elsewhere, DH - who works for the same company as myself - told me there are a couple of area manager jobs advertised in work. I would love to apply for one but my boys are too young yet because you have to work Saturdays. Never mind there will be other opportunities

On a down note - 2 work colleagues have been told their jobs are being made redundant. There will be alternative jobs found for them - it all depends on whether they want to work in a factory or a shop instead of an office. I think one might retire as she is 62 and could have retired over 18 months ago. We'll see, redundancy can turn out to be a blessing for some people because it forces you to do something new and new experiences should be grasped with two hands I think sometimes.

And finally, the mortgage now stands at £12176.92 and the savings are a little behind budget however I have Feb and March council tax free so there is that to add to the pot over the coming months. I am hoping to trim a little off the petrol and food spends over the year so I'm not going to fret about it

I forgot to add earlier my budgets which go as follows:

Food sees a little increase which goes up to £130 and has to include cleaning stuff and TLW (take your lunch to work) items. So we went to Farmfoods earlier today and spent £48.91 though some of these items will be used over a number of weeks. I hate my DH coming shopping with me though because he throws 'stuff' into the trolley and of course all of it is necessary :rotfl:

Petrol is set at £100 and I will probably need all of this since we have a school holiday in Feb and for one week and a day I will do double the amount of miles that I would normally do to take the boys to out of school club. Both my DH and myself buy nursery vouchers through work before paying tax so the places are already accounted for

Phew I almost forgot me budgets so I shall now declare myself a geeky eco-feminist :T

Have a lovely evening all!

kittiej

Wooo-hoooo the snow is melting :j I know it's very pretty and all but it gets to be a right pain in the posterior eventually

Hope everything is lovely on this fine Sunday, the sun is shining in South Wales, thank you!

Well what news do I have to share today? I have made a study buddy for my next course with the OU and she only lives about 3 miles away from me which in OU terms is next door She's a retired teacher and wants to keep her mind active - don't think she's realised what the heck she has let herself in for asking me to be a buddy :rotfl:

Anyway we will be observing a high street to watch the way people interact with each other and the physical objects of the street. This should be much fun!

To other areas, eco I have seen your post re the food - what are you a man-mountain? Don't you grow any of your own food? You could grow loads of stuff very cheaply and don't tell me you don't have any space :rotfl: well done on the tb free cows btw - has this got anything to do with the weather we've had?

as for the electric - does the mangle machine you have release any gasses? Just wondered if you could get like a methane powered turbine to make electricity. Or what about something like a combined heat and power boiler/generator using wood chippings? Don't know if you have any trees on your land but this is classed as carbon neutral especially if you could grow your own fuel supply. If there are any properties close by they could run off your system too thereby earning you money (Just a thought).

Well that's me done for the minute - so until the next brainwave

Have a fabutastic day :j

Edit

Just been checking out my coin jars and in my £2 and 50p pot I have £38 and in my everything else jar I have £11.06 so I am quite pleased with that. I like to have enough to be able to fall back on should we ever be short of money so I need to double this amount ideally but it's not a bad start!

eco_farmer

hi K J,
sadly not a man mountain more like a slightly fatter version of my former self:D according to my fitbit i am burning off nearly 3000 calories a day and we are not even busy! really interested to see what it gets upto in mid march when we are doing 18hr days:eek:. i have just started growing are own veg in some raised beds i somehow managed to build:rotfl:. will try and grow more this year.the biggest problem being the planting season coinsides with are busiest period so mainly tiredness and mental attitude gets in the way!
As for t.b who knows why we have gone clear? So far we have spent nearly 10K on stopping are strippy friends from getting into the yards where our animals feed. T b is spread partially through urine and dung so when they are in the yards eating they can contaiminate areas the cows may come across and also if a strippy animal and one of my ladies where to sniff each other then obviously with tb also being an air borne bacteria they can spread it to each other:eek:. so we are doing are best to remove this possibility.
your right there are anarobic(sp) digesters that can turn methanie into electricity we don't produce enough to make it viable we do however grow willows on the banks of our brook which we copise to use as fire wood in our raburns and wood burning stoves this means between 3 houses we now only need 3 tons of coal and a 1000l of heating oil per winter which given the cost is a big plus.

Well done on finding a study buddy:j just be carefull people don't catch the pair of you staring at them walking down the street! otherwise you may become cell buddies too:eek:.

have a good week eco

kittiej

Thanks eco I shall try to avoid all eye contact with shoppers :rotfl:

I can just see the headlines on the OU site " OU study buddies ASBO'd for harassing shoppers"

Well we will find out on Wednesday, if I don't post for quite a while then you know what has happened - just hold this board KJ and smile for the camera

kittiej

Woo-hoo hello hello :T

Well good news about the 2 colleagues facing redundancy, as I suspected the one will retire and the other has plans to retrain as a teaching assistant which is something she has been going on about for a few years now. So both are very upbeat and I really hope the one gets her wish to be a TA as she is a lovely lady and deserves a break.

Whilst on the work front I discovered today that a computer programme I use on a weekly basis has disappeared and can only now be accessed by HO. It's another little bit of work which has been taken away from me so I suspect I will be on the redundancy list in the not too distant future :j I'm on a personal 2.5 year plan with work anyway because as soon as I am closer to graduation I will be looking for another job but if I were made redundant then I would have a nice tidy sum to pay for a Masters course as I've done 11 years service so far and that would be fantastic :T

Well I can keep dreaming

Have a lovely evening everyone!

kittiej

Afternoon

Just a little update for today

I met an absolutely lovely lady today who is my new study buddy. She even took me back to hers and made me a nice cup of tea and gave me a delicious piece of homemade cake :A and we talked Open University talk :j

Money speak - I withdrew my petrol and food budget money today and have all of my petrol money £100- but that will change tomorrow after I put £50 in the tank, and I have £61.44 of the food money left which has to last until 24th Feb. I went to FF and got 3 packs of chicken for a tenner and 2 lots of milk for £1.60, I got other bits n bobs for packed lunches so feeling OK about the food budget. I could really do with making some room in my freezers so I can defrost them properly and I might look into buying another one that way I can top up once a month :j

Elsewhere I paid my last instalment of Council Tax for 2012/2013 so I now have 2 months CT free = more money for the pot :j

Keep at it peeps :rotfl: