Always Pass on What You Have Learned

MuffinTops

Wishing you both luck wishus. I'm sorry to hear things have been quite low for you and your OH. Lots of people feeling down in January and I really hope the milder weather we have coming will, at the very least, take the edge off some bad feelings.

Your poor leg sounds terrible! Feel better soon!

Loving the sound of your own personal reward plan for slimming rather than giving that money to others. That sounds like a lovely incentive.

MT

wishus

Thank you, Muffin Tops!

OH had a much better day at work yesterday. I am still limping... much to the bemusement of the office. My good friend reckons I probably do have gout, although I am not the type according to NHS choices, and I don't think the symptoms are a match either. Still better safe than sorry - I've rung the doctors and am waiting for a call back for an appointment. Poor NHS - under enough strain, and there's me with my low-level pain bothering them again.

I'm proud of myself for having avoided buying a pointless glossy yesterday when I was feeling grumpy. I have books and the internet, what more do I need? :T

This weekend, I will be busy with work, seeing friends and spending as little as possible. We also have a Burns Night meal coming up with a friend, and can probably repeat as we have Aldi haggis too. Neeps and tatties! :j

wishus

Well food-wise this weekend I've definitely been :A but we've spent too much again and also been under a lot of pressure to be sociable. We can be a bit sociable, but money isn't the real issue here; it's the mental space we both need to recover properly for the working week. Depressives have to be very careful about trying too hard to cheer up!


My foot is still painful, but I had a word with the doc and she thought it was a sprain. Got to take ibuprofen and rest as much as possible and it should ease off.


I had to leave the house yesterday though to get my forms to replace my passport. A woman in the queue at the post office behind me was so horrid! Swearing about the length of the queue, about Eastern Europeans talking to each other in their own language, about the adverts on the TV, about children getting bored and restless. My word, she'd probably have moaned if there were a fun rollercoaster at the end of the line! Can't be any good for you, all that negativity.


Seeing her made me feel more determined to bless my lot and be cheerful about life, as much as I can. I think you do make your own luck to some extent, and it can only help to be pleasant and to see the good in any situation. And even though the post office was super busy, the lady I spoke to at the counter was extremely helpful and went out of her way to make things clear and easy for me. Nice that!

Tjh1412

Jut quick message to say thanks for the diary thoroughly enjoyed reading it; hope you feel better soon

wishus

Thanks, Tjh1412!

I overdid it a bit a couple of days ago, so I'm having to remind myself to be careful. Such a pity, I'd hoped to be better. I'm averaging about 8000 steps a day, still, though, and just got my Italy badge on Fitbit!:j
I'm avoiding intensive walks and too many stairs though which makes me feel .

Foodwise, well Burns night was a wicked one, but I knew that. Disappointed today though, as I got tempted into a free lunch at work. It was pizza and it smelled gorgeous, I couldn't resist. I only had one spicy slice, and do you know, that's 11 syns right there and then. :eek:
You're allowed up to 15, so that's... not so bad. But I think this weight will be a long time coming off without staying at the lower end of the syns range.
Lamb roast turned into lamb tikka masala plus rice plus raita tonight, I think!


I don't know how OH is feeling tonight, but he's had some rough days at work. It's like his head is full of warring butterflies. Things have had effects, and the effects are very annoyed.

At home I've downloaded a couple of useful free bits of software - Skype, one which I have already had a meeting to discuss my freelance work, and Freedom, which blocks social sites over a specified time so you can get on with that work, distraction free! :T

Speaking of which...

Tjh1412

You're most welcome, I really enjoyed reading it. Finding reading diaries is helping me stay inspired on the countdown to pay day, just want to start knocking things down now

wishus

I have :A for me.... but where is the devil or monkey to represent OH?

He brought me a cup of tea to me while I was in the bath last night... and he'd been raiding the biscuit barrel, so, full of guilt he brought 3 chocolate digestives up for me to have with it and plonked them on the tiles!:laugh: A guilt shared is a guilt halved it seems... :undecided

Well, the bathtub was the last place I wanted to eat such things, so I was feeling all :A until I picked them up to take them downstairs... and then all the melty chocolate got on my fingers. And that's my excuse m'lud. Like a vampire with a drop of blood, once I had the taste...

4 syns each, that! Good grief... maxing out again.

Today my :A is feeling fortified. Someone had a birthday in the office and bought in a load of cakes. I love a French Fancy... but it's a Friday and further temptations are bound to abound. Luckily I had a little tub to hand, so I have written 5 and half syns on a note and put them both inside and in my drawer. I'll have that next week, when it's safer.

How would I cope without even a teensy bit of sugar? I watched episode 1 of Sugar Free Farm the other night and felt so sorry for the people taking part. Week one rules: no sugar, no sweeteners, no honey, no syrup, no fizzy drinks, no fruit (!!!), no alcohol. Understandably, some of the participants who were used to consuming a lot of sugar became ill when this withdrawn. They weren't allowed even fruit in the first week so that they wouldn't have something sweet to fall back on... Going cold turkey on a massive Coke habit like Jennifer Ellison's was clearly not going to feel good... crashing from both the sugar and caffeine withdrawal. It's the kind of programme that probably didn't need to be made with a celebrity gimmick first, but that's ITV for you. And of course they played up on potential melodrama with clips out of context, which, when you got to them were not as snarky or grumpy as was initially made out. Groan...

It will be interesting to see if it gets better for them.

wishus

Well, a lot has been going on with me this February.

Weight loss has been slow, as I have been struggling to do steps with my foot, but my friends have rallied round and we have been doing weekend walks. My foot is better, but I seem to have affected my gait and it's hurting to walk in normal shoes. Hence I'm living in my walking boots. Need new ones too, they're a bit leaky! So, all in all hovering around 5lbs lost. Lent is here, and I'm giving up the 2 deadly Cs - chocolate and cider. Wine o'clock for me, then! :rotfl:

I just finished one mammoth project and am about to take on another n my freelancing life. Plus I've been asked to take part in a festival on a panel, which I'm really looking forward to. :beer:
I may sound pretty cheerful, and I am. I don't know why, everything else is going a bit to pot.

OH has been extremely anxious, as his management have increasingly shown they are unable to follow their own company's OH guidelines and deal sensitively with a man with mental health issues. Union is involved... to be honest, it's sounding like a 'managing out' situation, but the bullying has not been subtle enough.

So, we've come to a decision, and it's time for OH to go be his own man.

I've still got £19.5K to pay on my loan and he has almost £2K on his cc, so we are going to have to attack that £2K in the next few months.

Then my second income and savings can finance setting OH up as a market trader. We are doing research now to find out what the best area will be for him to go into. Hard work, being a market trader, and I think I will be carrying him financially, but it's clear he needs to have no managers to have to answer to. As his anxiety is entirely work-related, it stands to reason that we need to change the work.

We are very lucky that my freelancing involves entertainment, so we have not had to stop seeing friends from my industry or say no to every fun event. Occasionally, the old hedonist chimp of spontaneity makes us go a bit wild, though, so I'm reading The Chimp Paradox to see if that can help me manage my inner chimp. From the library, natch!

Oh yeah, two more bad things: the door fell off our tumble dryer and our boiler is a bit leaky :( so they are things I also need to tackle. More financial booboos.

I have been following the case of Adnan Syed in Maryland, USA. He has been at a hearing this week so a judge can rule on whether he received ineffective counsel during his trial. Adnan is the teenager jailed for life for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, which was the subject of the very popular Serial Podcast. I listened to that, and then started listening to Undisclosed, which was a bit more biased towards Syed, but as the podcasters were experts in law it's a lot more detailed, really drilling down into the problems with his attorney, the gathering and dismissal/obfuscation of vital evidence, incompetence in chain of custody of that evidence, and lots of other issues. Those poor kids!

You feel really sorry for Hae Min Lee, whose death was clearly not treated with sufficient seriousness by the police, who just wanted to close the case as quickly as possible. And then Adnan Syed, who definitely was not able to have committed the crime as the state claimed. Who knows, maybe he did... but it seems unlikely.

Anyway, that's something to listen to while you work. If you have listened to it, so you agree with me?

Tjh1412

Boiler wise have you thought about energy saving trust to see if you're eligible for help. Mine packed up, I phoned them and I'm eligible for £6000 towards cost of replacement and a free insulation top up. Well done you're doing great

wishus

Thanks, Tjh1412 . Luckily, I don't think this one is going to be expensive, think it will just be swapping some pipes out. It's not old and the heating is still working, just leaking from inside the actual boiler. Engineer said if anything was drastically wrong it would short.


But there might be other stuff on that site which will help us. Like the idea of getting a smart meter, and we need to replace our windows eventually too. I think we may have made a significant saving already just by buying a Neil Gaiman book, as I often come home now to find OH reading... and the TV is off.


Someone did mention to me about taking out British Gas homecare, even though we're with Scottish Power. Will possibly look into that too. I'll see after Monday.


Today was slightly expensive as I had an impromptu meal at Jamie Oliver's. There was lots of cheap street food about, but we were trying to avoid unhealthy, and I think were feeling a bit overwhelmed by the food quarter in Brum. Everything is shiny, and futuristic and has adverts playing on it - it's like flipping Bladerunner!


It was a market research trip (nice cheap tickets, with a bit of Quidco and Nectar), and we can probably expense all this from a future tax bill as it's related to OH's future career. Extremely useful day. Lots of information, great insight from people already in the business, and clearer ideas about the requirements and risks of moving forward.


And we popped to the Art Gallery to go and see the Staffordshire Hoard. It's an absolutely amazing exhibition. How the Anglo-Saxons managed to do cloisonn! and filigree so finely, and to work with alloys that can only be worked in a very narrow range... it's astonishing! Rumours have it that the Angles may not have made these at all, and everything came from Germany. Nonetheless it's all pretty awesome.