julicorn's journey

julicorn

Just a little and slightly random update on the side gig topic:

I signed up to Appen months ago, and have pretty much ignored it ever since because almost all projects seem to require you to be a native English speaker.
Well, I just got an email yesterday saying I got accepted for one of the projects I had applied for back then! It involves rating Instagram ads for an hour a day, at least 5 days a week, for around a year (if they don't kick me out earlier), and I should get around £300 a month for it. Success! Seeing as I can easily do this on the bus ride to and from work (which I tend to spend - wait for it - staring at Instagram anyway), this should be quite an easy one to incorporate into my day. One of my colleagues called it 'getting a bus job', which I quite enjoyed, while another pointed out that I need to be careful not to spend all the extra money on stuff I see advertised as part of this project :rotfl:

beanielou

That sounds good

bigbeff

You are inspiring me! I'd love to be paying that extra off my mortgage - I think my overpayment was about £3000 last year and I was proud of that!

What do you sell in your etsy shop? Ohhh and did you get new freezer containers? I need to do that too!

julicorn

Thank you both!

bigbeff, I sell instant download cross stitch patterns. So no real work for me when someone buys them because they are able to download them straight away, and each pattern can theoretically be bought an infinite number of times. I test out each pattern before I sell them though to have an example picture (and see if there are mistakes in the pattern), so that's a fair bit of work of course.

Karmacat

Both your sidegigs, old and new, sound really good - lucrative too well done you.

julicorn

Thank you Karmacat! Also, I don't know if it was intentional, but your reply sounded a little like a poem :rotfl: I love it!

"Both your sidegigs,
old and new,
sound really good
- lucrative too!
Well done you."

South_coast

Oh no, she's found another side gig now, re-purposing people's posts into poetry. She's unstoppable!

These creative types....:rotfl:

julicorn

South_coast wrote: »

Oh no, she's found another side gig now, re-purposing people's posts into poetry. She's unstoppable!

These creative types....:rotfl:

Making money through pure plagiarism :rotfl:

Karmacat

It wasn't intentional, so I'm extra honoured :j


:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

julicorn

Thought I should share a little update now that we are already 2 thirds of the way through January! :eek:

Meal planning has been partially successful. I cooked a silly amount of chilly, an even sillier amount of lasagna, and tonight I'm cooking a lovely red lentil, carrot, ginger and orange soup - yum! It's helped us waste less food for sure, and rely a little less on spontaneous 'let's just get X from the shop' dinners, but there's still room for improvement I would say. The glass containers are lovely too!
A few new refill stores have opened around here which is just fantastic. Will probably increase our grocery spend a little, but we're happy to do that if it helps us avoid buying so much plastic all the time.

Had I mentioned holidays yet? We've got a fair few coming up this year! In February, we're going on another surprise holiday for Mr Julicorn's birthday which we are both very excited about. In March, we're off to Vienna for a long weekend because it's my dad's birthday and we're celebrating there, and then we're also meeting my parents in Liverpool and the Lake District in May. And last but not least, we're going to California in September! Just booked the flights on the weekend. We are staying with a friend in LA for a week, and then also heading to San Francisco for a few days. All sounds a bit extravagant if I list it all out here, but all budgeted and planned for, so no guilt felt here!

WRT the flat, one recent curveball is that our freeholder is looking to sell the freehold in the near-ish future, and he would need to offer it to us leaseholders first. I don't fully know what to think of the whole thing. He is a good freeholder, didn't charge us much at all, and we'd need to see what the other leaseholders want to do and what kind of arrangements we can come up with I suppose. Buying the freehold should be cheap enough, we've got 150-odd years left on our lease and the ground rent is virtually non-existent, but yeah, it's all a bit of a weird situation.

Either way, I'm off to cook that soup now! I hope you are all well and have lovely evenings :heart2: