Silverbird's Diary

tigzem

Hi,

How are you today? Is it raining over there? It's been a miserable day so far over here. Yuk!!

Tigz xx

Silverbird

tigzem wrote: »

Hi,

How are you today? Is it raining over there? It's been a miserable day so far over here. Yuk!!

Tigz xx

Hi Tigz

I'm fine, thank you. And yourself?

It's not raining here yet, which is a miracle as it rained for the ENTIRE weekend. However, this did mean that I had no excuse not to sit and enter as many online competitions as I possibly could, as well as join loads of cashback/click-through sites, so it all worked out to the benefit of our debts!

Had a massive headache last night though, from all the PC usage.

I can't believe this weather. I can't believe this is JULY!

tigzem

Silverbird wrote: »

Hi Tigz

I'm fine, thank you. And yourself?

It's not raining here yet, which is a miracle as it rained for the ENTIRE weekend. However, this did mean that I had no excuse not to sit and enter as many online competitions as I possibly could, as well as join loads of cashback/click-through sites, so it all worked out to the benefit of our debts!

Had a massive headache last night though, from all the PC usage.

I can't believe this weather. I can't believe this is JULY!

Hi - am ok thanks, apart from conjunctivitis, in both eyes, very sore.

It didn't rain yest, but was very cold and windy. We went to Portsmouth.

Yay for you doing all that yest, more patient than me! I belong to pisgback and quidco but that's about it

xx

Silverbird

Yay! I have my first accepted Mystery Shopping visit for next Tuesday! It's for £10. I can do it in my lunch-hour.

There have been two I could have done before now, but as I've mentioned I'm away from home from tonight until Sunday night (and I checked in the area I'm visiting and no joy there!)

It's with Grass Roots and I'm so excited, although very nervous. I'm petrified I'll make a mess of things or forget something. Any tips from those in the know?

Silverbird

Unfortunately our trip to visit family etc was incredibly expensive. I had mistakenly thought it would save us a bit of money due to not paying for electric and food, but the travel costs were bad. All in all we've spent £200 since last Tuesday afternoon on travel costs. We hadn't been up since the first week of March and we told the parents we weren't coming up again until December. We told them that they could come down and visit if they wanted to see us sooner than that, but we couldn't afford the costs of coming up more often than that.

On a brighter note, hubby has his first Mystery Shop today and I have one tomorrow. I'm going with him to his and vice versa, because we're both a bit nervous and two pairs of eyes are better than one!

On an even brigher note, we came back from our trip last night to find an unexpected jiffy bag in my name ... I won a competition! It is a DVD and goes for about £10 to £12 on eBay. We're overjoyed and shall certainly continue comping as much as we possibly can.

Oh yeah, and I have a queue of 5 people waiting for my Menu Plan to be emailed to them! My mom in particular is intrigued and says we've done so well.

Silverbird

Hubby's Mystery Shopping went well yesterday and we had no problems forgetting anything etc.

Mine was less smooth today in that I was asked questions that I wasn't briefed on how to answer and so I was put on the spot and came out with an answer that didn't really add up if looked at in detail. I was hoping there would be a space for comments on the Grass Roots questionnaire so that I could inform them of this, but unfortunately there wasn't. I wanted to let them know that this question may be asked to other Shoppers and to prepare them to have an answer ready.

Went into Somerfields after the visit and I got a Hovis Wholemeal loaf for 24p because its best before date is today. I'll stick it in the freezer tonight and it'll be fine for our work lunches

Have been entering more competitions and we're both eagerly awaiting our next MS.

Silverbird

Guess what? Had an email this afternoon to say that I've won another competition. It's a Carbon Monoxide Detector and it's on its way to me! It goes for about £7 to £10 on eBay. Every little helps!

Spent around £15 on this week's total food. That includes buying some items in bulk or that will last us longer than a week (3 tins of beans, huge jar of mayo etc).

I'm so proud!

auntie_brenda

Well done, you're making great progress! And lucky you getting paid for mystery shopping - all I'm getting at the mo is 3 well known fast food outlets :mad: .

Well done on the comps too. I had a massive spurt last week but won nothing - not even some fishing tackle!!!!

Silverbird

Thanks Auntie Brenda! Oh, I wish we had fast food ones! We keep getting finance ones and we're bored already! LOL

Don't give up on the competitions - sometimes they can take 4 weeks to send you the item and sometimes they don't email you at all.

Silverbird

RESULT!

Hubby has been investigating other broadband/telephone packages due to BT's high prices and came across Virgin Media, which covered our area (we're out in the sticks so coverage isn't great). The package sounded really good and so he called BT to tell them we were cancelling the contract with them. We pay £37 per month for broadband (which isn't even that quick) and line rental.

Well ... we're staying with BT! We are now getting 6.5MB Broadband connection instead of the measly 516KB we were getting before his call; we are getting all evening and weekend calls free for an extra £1.50 per month; and they are going to install BT Vision on 30 July, which will mean we can pause and record live TV for FREE ... it's supposed to cost £199. Best of all, all of this and we're actually paying over £10 less per month than we are at the moment!

It makes me sick that they didn't offer us all of this before and that it took a call threatening to cancel for them to provide us with these features. Anyway, what a result!

Hubby is well pleased, as am I!