Plodding determinedly up a 300k mountain!

Karmacat

I love those unproductive days - my first few days catsitting were like that, it was such a relief!

michelle09

Thanks greent! It's so nice to grow it all yourself, well not all, this is a London garden. I've started looking into this site on urban beekeeping so we might try that next year.

Unproductive days are wonderful KC. And if you have a cat as well, it's a bonus.

Not a bad week, just done a double workout because we're off to a charity afternoon tea after lunch. Donating £10 each to charity to eat vast amounts of sandwiches and cake. MSE, money for a good cause and having fun. What's not to love?

If anyone is on O2, you can get a free hot drink at Caffe Nero every Tuesday or Wednesday. I'm green enough to refuse to use the disposable cups so I bought a bamboo cup for £8. If you order a drink with a reusable cup then you get an extra loyalty stamp on their card. I've built up two free extra drinks and am keeping the cards in my wallet for a day when I need a pick me up.

Not particularly MSE, but now we have a little bit of cash saved up (and because the government is pulling FIT payments) we have someone coming round next week to give us a quote for a solar system. We have a small roof but the first guy thinks we should be able to cover our usage, although not much extra.

Karmacat

I definitely think a solar system is MSE - it's mainly green, of course, and for the two to go together is a huge plus to me



I'm very interested to hear about any fonts of knowledge you find about beekeeping

michelle09

Wow, it's been a while.

I stopped posting because the job I picked up in 2018 turned out to be a nightmare. My line manager took against me (clearly I need to work on my sparkling personality!) and it disintegrated to the point that I had a breakdown. And now I am a virologist in a respiratory pandemic so it has been a very long year of being on the frontline of COVID-19.

BUT. There have been good points. During the job from hell I met one of the most inspiring women I've ever met and she managed to create a job for me. And because she utterly fails at negotiation - she offered me a rise of £10k, to supervise my PhD and flexible working hours if I left and joined her. It's been 18 months and most of it has been us pandemic-fighting but I am involved in some amazing research and so much happier than I was. I've also discovered that I can charge private schools for the talks that I do at state schools for free. So that, plus OH continuing to plod happily along (one workaholic in a marriage is enough) and get standard rises means we are financially WAY more stable than we were when we first moved in here.

And despite being emergency service workers, we both have the opportunity to work from home a little and have decided that our current home isn't really suited to our needs anymore. So we are moving!

As people are moving out of London / we bought right at the top of the market / the local area has degraded somewhat we haven't really added value to the house. In the end we only accepted £5k more than we paid for it. But the crazy overpaying and increased borrowing means we can afford a bigger house with a massive garden (60 metres long! ) in a village in Hertfordshire.

Unfortunately, that comes with a higher mortgage. So our £300k mountain is going to be closer to £500k. And while my partner is really happy to support the idea of overpaying, routinely hearing about it is less appealing. So I am going to try and check in here a lot more to rub keyboards with like minded folk.

I will update my figures after we've moved in 2 weeks.