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

milann

The bike ride and walk sounded lovely- it wasn’t fit for either here over the weekend- rain hail and wind with a glint of sunshine in between to kid you, then it started all over 😳
I love it when I can use vouchers for my shopping. I paid for virtually all my Christmas shop with nectar Points - smiled all the way home

lucielle

Weather was awful here as well, so we didn’t do the planned walk. Did a lot of decluttering instead. 

L

EssexHebridean

Hello Milann & L- yes, I get a feeling we were lucky on the weekend weather - it tipped it down and blew a hoolie all day on Friday with us, and it was still pretty blustery both weekend days, but dry and bright. 

Just done a little bit of credit card tidying up - added up the joint spending from the trip to Edinburgh and I've paid my share plus the joint contribution across - MrEH will forward his share on for me to pay later. I was going to add up the food spend for the month too but I've realised this week's veg box is yet to land there (should be today) and will probably fall on the current side of the cut-off so I'll leave that for a couple of days until I see. 

In "sort of money saving news" I've just booked tickets for three of IWM Duxford's "Flying Days" for this season - they are free to members so I guess this confirms I'll be renewing my membership when it expires in April - in fairness I was pretty much set on doing so anyway, it's a good cause and with the flying days, plus a member discount on the full airshow days I attend too, and also being able to visit the museum whenever I like (it's only 30 miles up the road so nice and easy!) I do pretty reasonably out of it. the cost of the renewal will come from my Airshow Savings account which unsurprisingly after the past few years is looking moderately healthy! 

Still not wildly impressed with Ipsos I'm afraid - I seem to spend a lot of time answering questions only to be told after ten minutes that I "wasn't a good fit for that survey" - being awarded a tiny handful of points in exchange for a lot of - frequently personal - information and then when I click back to the main page all the other great list of surveys it claimed to have for me have disappeared. I'll get it to cash-out value then ditch it. It was worth a try - I know others seem to do really well on it so I guess I'm just not their required demographic! (And having said that, I just broke off from typing here to try another of their surveys and got given a decent payment AND a product trial! Although annoyingly it's not actually credited me the points it said it was going to - pah!) 
OnePoll is at 462 points
Prolific at £1.82 paid/£0.10 pending

Sunshine_girl2

EH I have been doing Opinium , cash out at £25 , I have had 2 £25 payouts in recent months , nearly up to half way for a third. Don't get thrown out very often but it tells me fairly quickly if I am not successful. 

EssexHebridean

I'll add that one to the list to looks at as well SG2 - thank you! I confess I never foresaw a situation where OnePoll actually became one of the better payers for me, but it's happened! 

Last night ended up as a right rush - whizzed back to the car on the bike (managed to get out 15 minutes early with agreement of Mr Boss), drove back and straight to the gym, then drove from there to the rugby club to drop the car off as MrEH was training and was going to go and put diesel in it when he'd finished, walked home, grabbed (mercifully quick to prepare) dinner, and managed to be sitting in front of the laptop for another beer festival related online meeting by 8pm. Fingers crossed our new plan (we're on about plan E now I think) solves the issues - if not there needs to be further discussion. 

MrEH has (hopefully) managed to extract the money from the C0ventry - it should land at some stage today and I can then transfer the various amounts to where they need to be. He'll still need to change the nominated account details on there - we've chanced that it will bounce on to the new account OK for now - it *should* do - and worst case is that N@tionw1de will tell C0ventry that there's no account associated with those details and will send it back. we hope...eeek! The council tax/Water rates money has landed in the PB's account - as and when I dump some from any surplus in the joint account across there we should go through the next thousand barrier which will be ace! 

Hoping for a slightly less full-on day today. I managed to get an extra mile of cycling in this morning, and have plans to do extra on the way back to the car tonight as well but it must be said my legs are starting to feel a bit tired - probably not surprising allowing that I've not really given them a day off for over a week - hmmm! I'll play the weekend by ear - I'm going to go to the gym one day or another, I want to get to Duxford for the Spitfire exhibition probably on Friday afternoon, but if I end the regular week over last week's 20 mile total cycling I may not throw in a longer bike ride as well. 

Food all on plan still - tonight is a mish-mash of black pudding slices, mash (or jackets, possibly), eggs and some veg - but that might be a tin of baked beans - honestly, we know how to live! Tomorrow will be baked gnocchi with veg - which will include some veg removed from the freezer hopefully - I need to have a look and remind myself what we have in there that will work. Definitely a tub of roasted tomatoes, though. Under control, anyway. Might persuade MrEH he fancies fish & chips for Friday night...  

milann

Chippy Friday - go for it 🍻
Your certainly clocking the cycling miles up - well done.

savingholmes

Sounds like you are whizzing around here there and everywhere and staying MSE along the way. 

Cheery_Daff

Mummy, chips 😁 my meal planning has gone out the window (only lasted about a week) - Mr Cheery has been making all my food this week, bless him, but it's not really been stuff we can put leftovers in the freezer, so I need to have a bit of a batch cooking session at some point I think. 

About time I gave the pizza stone another outing I think! Not that that counts as batch cooking 😂 but it might be a tasty treat for the weekend!

EssexHebridean

I've definitely got pizza stone envy Cheery - they sound fab! Milann, SH, I'm really enjoying the cycling having got past the stage of it all feeling like hard work again after the three week (near enough) gap over Christmas/new year. Still not covering vast distances but certainly enjoying the extra miles here and there before/after work. Hopefully I might get my hands on the "new to me" hybrid bike over the weekend to see how I get on with that - if OK I'll sort a charity donation as our friend won't take any money for it - he's adamant about that already! That should be a bit easier/more comfortable to ride hopefully so I might start getting a few longer rides in at weekends.

Still undecided about tea tomorrow night - watch this space! I've got the last of the previously roasted beetroot out of the freezer for tonight, along with a tub of roasted tomatoes and some lamb and rosemary sausages. I'll chop up the remainder of the punnet of mushrooms and the last leek and chuck the lot in the oven as a traybake along with some gnocchi - quite intrigued to find out how that works baked as it sounds lovely! 

The money duly arrived from the C0ventry yesterday and has now been distributed between the new N@ti0nwide easy access account which will be a "feeder" for the regular savers over there, and the M@rcus account. Hoping that we hear something from M@rcus fairly soon now with a rate increase. 

Just paid a pal some money this morning for an airshow ticket for an event in May - we've managed to get together enough people for a group booking which will represent a pretty good saving on the usual price so that's handy. I need to start thinking about getting some other stuff booked too - and also to start noting down everything I think I want to do this season especially allowing I've already booked tickets for those three "free with membership" events at Duxford too. It'll be nice to get back to a degree of normality again - fingers crossed! As luck would have it I've already got one date clash I know about - typical, hopefully there won't be too many more.

Still planning/hoping to get to Duxford tomorrow -  and ideally the gym in the morning too I think. Looks like MrEH's rugby team are planning to return to a second day of training per week so he'll be back to being out on Thursday evenings as well - they're trialing it this week to see how many they get I think. If that picks up as a regular thing I'll probably use that opportunity to get in an extra gym session - albeit I'll most likely make it a shorter cardio session rather than more strength stuff I think. For tonight I just plan to make the most of a nice evening to myself with the TV remote for company!

Prolific still where it was
Ipsos 503 points - annoyingly the iTunes option seems to have disappeared now though!
OnePoll 527 points

lucielle

New bike sounds good. Keep toying with the idea of an e bike. 

L