EH - Essex > Hebrides...the next step of the adventure?

Lemon_Tree

If I do say so myself it's inspired, the chocolates will be the children's gift as they've helped (aka eaten the excess chocolate). We have 15 bags to do so that potentially could have been 15 bars of chocolate which wouldn't have looked that nice. This way I only need 5 or 6 bars of chocolate, a couple of quid for the mould and bags and a bit of time. Very mse! I suspect it may end up being a long standing tradition.

EssexHebridean

That really is inspired! I'd certainly consider doing something like that as presents at some stage - I saw a lovely recipe for chocolate pretzel bark the other day which would look amazing bagged up nicely in pieces too! lovely family tradition to form as well - the sort of thing that your two will maybe do with their own children in the future!

Remembered this morning I needed to book the hire car excess insurance so that is now done. Went through TCB, paid £14 and the 10% cashback has already tracked - not much but it all helps as we know! MrEH will call at lunchtime to get the details from the hire company of what car it is and where both it and its key can be found, then that's all in hand.

Packing got mostly done last night until we reached the point where we realised that our second rucksack has a rather threatening "start of a split" in some of its stitching - and as such we decided that it was not suitable to be trusted to the Glasgow Airport baggage handlers (they have form!) so a trip to Go Outdoors is called for this evening to get a replacement. That does at least mean that we'll be able to get a rather bigger bag than the one we are replacing, which should make the remaining packing a little simpler!

I still have MrEH's last few presents to wrap - his rugby training on Tuesday got cancelled so I couldn't do it then, but will do that as soon as I get home this evening. Also need to fuel up my car this evening but will likely do that on the way to or from Go Outdoors I think, for ease. I do like a spot of journey-combining. Turns out that MrEH's car may yet see him through to past the CC cut off date before it needs more diesel too which will be handy. This top up of mine, plus the further fuel which will be needed for the return trip, will be covered from the christmas trip budget in any case.

Pleased to report that I also managed to tick off my 500km run in a year challenge last night which I was VERY pleased about, considering that back in october I realistically thought I had no chance of getting there. Over 250km run in under three months which is - for me - fairly extraordinary. I won't submit the evidence for the challenge medal until next week I don't think as I'd like to get at least one Hebrides run in the tally as well. I'm not planning on doing a massive amount up there though - to be fair I think my legs could do with a wee bit of a break! :rotfl:

£25 spend the other day on signing up for 2 challenges for next year too - I've re-committed to the 500km one again, and have also signed up to an RAF Benevolent Fund Centenary challenge for January for which I'm going to aim for 100km running. That at least should start the year off on a roll! :T

WannabeFree

I hope you have a lovely Xmas EH x

Lemon_Tree

Well done on achieving your running target, enjoy your trip to go outdoors, I discovered this year just how easy it is to spend in there now we've taken up camping. Have a fabulous time away.

HairyHandofDartmoor

Just popping in to say Happy Christmas :xmastree: :xmassign: :santa2:.

DebtFreeDuo

Just stopping by to say I hope you have had a wonderful Christmas x

HairyHandofDartmoor

Happy new year EH _party_

EssexHebridean

Aww bless you thank you all - I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and New year too!

Our Hebrides trip was fabulous - we even had wonderful weather and - astonishingly - almost NO wind for the first few days too, extremely unusual for this time of year so we made the most of that. LOTS of lovely walks, and I managed to fit in a couple of runs as well, on the beach, as if you CAN run on a beach, why would you not?! The flight across (and landing on a beach, too!) was excellent as ever, and we even got lucky and got a lift for the walk round from the airport to the ferry terminal on arrival too which saved us a couple of miles with heavy rucksacks, so all good there. on the return trip we discovered that we were briefly going to be in the same place at the same time as the lovely Pippi (Mrs Stripes herself) & TRG so worked in a brief catch up with them too, which rounded a lovely week off wonderfully!

Since then it's been back to work, back to running in rather less pretty places than lovely long beaches, and I now have a trip planned this week to Scampton to catch up with friends and do some photographing of those Little red Jets, which should be fun. Other stuff coming up include our first beer festival planning meeting of the year, and a trip to Manchester (lots more catching up with pals there) for a few days too.

Financially, there has been plotting and planning to do as our final Nationwide Regular Saver account ends in a few days time - so we have been busy working out what we plan to do for our savings going forwards in order to maximise the interest we can earn - currently the Coventry Reg Saver accounts are what we're going for so those need to get opened in the next few days, and the first payment will then be made using some of the money from the maturing one. We've also planned out what we are going to do with the balance of the money from that one - with a lump going to the 0% card to get some more of that cleared, and another lump going to bolster our Emergency Fund savings. The balance - which won't be much - will head off to the long term savings.

Aside from that my 2020 pledge to start me off on a good footing is to "Use what I have" rather than buying new, or additional items, and also to remember that while I can't control the way others act and speak, I can control my own reaction to that. I also have a couple of running challenges - I've signed up for 500km in the year again, and am also aiming for 100km this month. There is another - but less challenging - RAF Museum one I will be doing later in the year too - I need to think about what I can add to that one I think, as it stands "80km in 80 days" is not going to stretch me that much.

EssexHebridean

So in the spirit of the "use it up" challenge I pre-prepped the rather wonderful Tom Kerridge Minced Beef Biryani recipe from the BBC Food site last night ready for tonight's dinner, so that will be sitting ready to just reheat this evening. It used mince from the freezer, and the other half of assorted veggies that were bought for last night's stir fry (which in itself used up a sachet of stir fry sauce that had been lurking in the larder) as well as basmati rice and spices which I already had. In true "EH's Kitchen" style it also didn't *precisely* adhere to the recipe... :rotfl: it also should - I believe - make an additional portion which may well do a meal for one of us at some stage.

Tomorrow's dinner is on the meal plan as a pasta bake, but I'm leaning more towards it ending up as Sardine & Butterbean pasta - again a bit of a storecupboard classic. On Thursday MrEH will be using the remaining eggs as I will be out. :cool:

I need to get to the cashpoint at some stage - or raid my savings tin at home and then transfer the money across to the savings account, which might make more sense. Thursday night's meal with friends will almost certainly go on a card as it's easier that way, but I do need to have a bit of money with me for oddments for the next few days, and as I've not been to the cashpoint since before Christmas, I'm feeling quite pleased with myself on that front.

The CC bill is now in so I will be able to get the money-shuffle done on that in the early part of next week. In fact I've already transferred over the money from our spending at Christmas. And we need to get on with opening the new Coventry Building Society Regular saver accounts ready to get the transfer for those up and running for 1st February or thereabouts.

EssexHebridean

Good stuff:
CC money shuffle now done, and actually a respectable surplus left in the joint account this month which is nice.
Coventry regular savers both applied for and paperwork in the post.
Old Nationwide regular saver has now matured and had its interest paid.

Less good stuff:
Broadband at home stopped working at the start of last week - MrEH called them and they've sent a new router as they said that was the issue, but we've now got that, got it all connected up last night and we STILL have no broadband. not impressed.
My ClubCard app has randomly started showing a totally different number for a clubcard which apparently doesn't even exist - not earth shattering this one as i can use the plastic card and mostly pay using PayPlus anyway, but more than anything else quite entertaining as the customer service team at ThaT supermarkeT are utterly bewildered by the whole thing!

Very not good stuff:
Nationwide are currently firmly in my bad books. When I tried to transfer the agreed lump across to the EF account (which is an ISA) from the matured regular saver, I got a message saying that I'd made no payments in to the account for the past 12 months and so needed to renew the ISA as a result. All well and good except I have been paying in regularly - to the tune of over £3000 since last April. I suspect it's going to come down to it being a flexible ISA so the payments in offset again money removed without showing as relevant to the ISA entitlement, but Nationwide aren't saying that, just that their records show no payments being made to the account. Both my online banking AND my app clearly show the transactions - so I am now escalating a formal complaint which is initially to find out what the actual situation is, but I suspect will shortly be changing to be against the appallingly bad wording - and no form of proper explanation - I have had in messages from them. I'm financially savvy enough to be able to unpick the situation - there are one hell of a lot of folk out there who wouldn't be, and who would be in an utter panic by now.

Our gut feeling currently is that this is going to lead to us leaving Nationwide - a pretty big step for me in particular as I've been with them for over 30 years and have always - until now - been a very happy customer indeed. It's disappointing, but I have been hearing more and more reports from others of poor customer service from them of late - and the message I received saying that they would deal with my complaint "in the next few days" really didn't help things much. :mad:

A third of the matured regular saver money has been transferred across to the 0% card and is now showing as having come off the balance - a quick calculation suggests that there will be around £600 still to clear on that when the 0% ends so I'll have to make sure that's available at the time. Some of that may well be able to come from surplus in the car account though, with luck.

Finally (for now!) using things up is going fairly well - this week will see a tub of beef stew and some pork steaks coming out of the freezer, as well as various bready-products which got used at the weekend.