Cheery's country living adventure

Baileys_Babe

Are you able to you gym on pay as you go basis? Can you try and beat that figure in you per session cost?

Cheery_Daff

Ooh, interesting question! 

Swimming is £3.75, and classes are £5.40.

So either 10 swimming sessions, or 7 classes over the month. 

Will keep track...

Cheery_Daff

Well already my gym commitment is looking ropey 🙄 I've cancelled tomorrow's boxercise class as I'm just so achey today (possibly from swimming although I only did 300m - more likely from all the gardening over the weekend 😂).

Also realised my friend is coming camping on Wednesday morning and I still need to finish strimming the camping spot - we had other friends round for tea tonight so couldn't so it then so tomorrow night is the only time I have. 

In other news - we won another £75 on the premium bonds 😮😁😂😂 We've won every month since March (the first month we had them). £375 in that time towards the kitchen fund.

Definitely starting to see it as a regular income - I'll be SO cross if we have a month without winning 😂

greenbee

Following your example I've finally got round to investing in premium bonds - primarily because I know this year's tax code is wrong and I'm being paid too much, so want to keep the money separate from savings that may be used for the house/car etc. Any prize money will be used for mortgage OPs, so your numbers are encouraging!

I hope you can get back to the gym sometime this week. I'm about to sign up for some online pilates classes (£12.99 a month) as I slowly try to get back to it... 

hb2

You do seem to get a lot of visitors Cheery! shows what a sociable person you are

The people who would be welcome to visit us mostly live by the sea themselves, so are not in a rush to come and spend the summer here (although I am really hoping that a certain Yummy will visit again at some stage).

Cheery_Daff

We get quite a few in the summer, hardly any in the winter 😂 And to be honest, I put in a LOT of effort to encourage people. There are maybe 4 sets of friends who we'll meet up with pretty regularly either here or at theirs, but on the other hand there are a few we used to see pretty regularly who've never been out here at all.

I do make a real effort to keep up relatively regular contact with lots of people, send them pictures, invite them for specific things (not just 'come out when you like' but suggesting dates/events). Of course there's been a small backlog of family visitors this year, but we've also had a couple of sets of people who've not been out before, and one set who've been out 4 times recently helping us build the chicken run. 

We do love having visitors. It helps that there's plenty of space to camp (quite a few did that last year, although tomorrow's are the first this year). 

But I don't think we'd get half as many of I didn't put in the amount of effort encouraging and cajoling 🙄😂 Makes it sound like I'm begging people to visit - generally I'm not, honest! Mr Cheery had grand visions of this being a kind of party house but in reality that's just not going to happen, which makes him a bit sad, but I do try to keep up a steady flow of visitors.

Hoping we might be able to encourage a few more over winter this year too with a new kitchen, a big kitchen table, and a spare bedroom 😁

I should point out that we do our fair share of gadding about to visit other people too! 

Anyway, after a completely unproductive work day, I did have a productive evening. Mr Cheery was out, so I scythed and strimmed and raked to prepare the camping spot for visitors, and then started painting the chicken run extension until it almost went dark, then washed up and cleaned the kitchen and hoovered.

Apparently our visitors are going to be self sufficient on the catering front, so I have taken them at their word and prepared literally nothing 😮 Only had 48 hours notice, with another set of visitors and 2 days of work in that, and friend is gluten and dairy free and did say not to get anything... so I haven't... Hope she did actually mean that (I'm sure she did - I used to live with her and she's pretty organised)

Anyway, must go to sleep!

themadvix

Thanks for that description of how much effort is required to get people to visit Cheery, I’ll remember that when no one comes to visit us! (We’ll be about two hours away from most people but will have several spare en-suite bedrooms and camping space.) Quite happy to travel to see others but with that much space (if it all goes ahead), I’d like my excessive and very un-MSE council tax to have some benefit!

 Hope you have a nice time with your visitors arriving today.

Cheery_Daff

Ooh,that sounds SO exciting vix!! 😁😁😁

We're only an hour away from most people, but folk are busy - I think sometimes we get mentally placed between 'not far enough for a weekend away' but 'too far for a day out'.  

Depends on your expectations though as well I think. Mr Cheery always wants things to be more sociable than they are so I sometimes think he'll never be satisfied even if we have visitors every weekend, whereas I'm at work all week and very much like lazy weekend! 

(We do have plenty of weekends without visitors, we're just having a summer holiday flurry at the minute...)

Feels like I only went to sleep 5 minutes ago 🙄 Maybe if I stopped messing about on the phone?! 🙄

themadvix

At least I won’t have that problem with Mr TMV - he’s most anti-social! I think we would probably be in the weekend away category, so hopefully that will help. 

I don’t know what happened to last night - thought I’d slept well but feel exhausted - maybe it was only five minutes long! 😂

greenbee

I know how you feel Cheery! I like the idea of lots of visitors, but after a full-on work week the prospect can feel exhausting - particularly when there is laundry, housework, gardening etc to catch up on.

Your self-sufficient visitors sound ideal! Maybe it’ll be a bit easier once you have the building work done and a proper kitchen and spare room? (Having said that, my spare room seems to keep filling up with junk!).