Returning to MFW, my elusive unicorn!

coldcazzie

Today is not a NSD either beginning of the CC month is not the time to be declaring NSDs I think!

@shangaijimmy and @Grogged were talking about trampolines and it reminded me that ours needs a new bounce mat (in fairness, the current mat is almost 20 years old, I think? My parents bought it a bit after moving up here which was 2000). So I've been down the garden, measured and bought a new one. It was only £50 which is more reasonable than I anticipated. The money will come out of our gift pot - my uncle actually gave us some money a while ago to fix it and I never got around to it (she says guiltily ).

Now seems like a good time to fix it. If we end up going into lockdown in the next couple of months then this will be vital - Medium Small is a very active child and does multiple physical activities a week. He will really struggle if he has no physical outlet due to all our groups stopping. On the other hand, if we don't end up in lockdown, well it's still fixed and I've been meaning to do it for ages. It's a win either way!

regularsaver

Hello!

What a great diary, I have now bookmarked it so I can follow! I thought it about time I should come and post here as you have posted multiple times on mine

I also note you have great taste, in terms of  watching NCIS and being a fan of Gibbs rules

coldcazzie

regularsaver said:

Hello!

What a great diary, I have now bookmarked it so I can follow! I thought it about time I should come and post here as you have posted multiple times on mine

I also note you have great taste, in terms of  watching NCIS and being a fan of Gibbs rules

Welcome @regularsaver pull up a pew! We watch lots of sci-fi and crime dramas. Currently binge watching DS9 on Netflix and Elementary on Prime with the kids (seen both before, but we love them).

Medium Small and Small Small are both very excited for the trampoline to be fixed  

coldcazzie

Relaxing weekend. Busy day today.

Today was my first day shopping at Ald1, and then plugging the gaps at M0rris0ns (because it's round the corner):

Ald1: £48.66
M0rris0ns: £29
Total: £77.66 which is a fair bit cheaper than if it was all at Morribobs, I reckon.

Didn't get everything I wanted as there was no orange juice at all, and I couldn't find any wild rice, but that was a bit of a stretch anyway (I usually buy it from Tesc0). I am going to do this for a month - shop firstly at Ald1 and then plug the gaps at A$da/Tesc0/Morribobs, and see what effect it has, both on our spending level and on the quality/our tastes. We already have several things we have to go to specific SMs for anyway - none of us like Tesc0 quiche, for example, and Medium Small says A$da's custard creams have a weird aftertaste.

I posted off that Lego set, which wrapped up at £66 + p&p. After fees and shipping (which ended up being more expensive by Collect+ not RM because I foolishly didn't weight it beforehand and assumed it would be under the 2kg limit) I have put £54.47 into the OP account. Our large duplo collection has also been listed and has a bid on it, and I am collecting together all the pieces for another lego train set so I can list that too, although that particular set is Medium Small's, so any funds raised will go into his bank account not the OP pot.

I collected a prescription for a new inhaler, and the money for that will come out of the health account. It irks me that in England asthma isn't considered a serious enough chronic health condition to warrant free prescriptions, but it is in Scotland, Wales and NI  

Finally, yesterday we opened up 6 new joint savings accounts to add to the 8 we already have not sure how many Tilly ended up with by the end but 14 savings accounts is apparently a lot...

FD rep: So my colleague said you wanted to open up two more savings accounts.
Me: Two? No, we want to open six.
FD rep: ..... six?
Me: Yes. We already have eight and we'd like to open six more.
FD rep: ...... uhm. Okay then.



Previous accounts:
Clothing/shoes/accessories 
Gifts/cards
Car (did not include petrol or parking)
Health
House
Home
Pets
Entertainment (inc bday parties)

New accounts:
Food/booze
Toiletries
Cleaning
Sundries
Stationary
Holiday

Not putting anything in that last one yet but I'm setting my intentions by having it exist. More on holidaying later as I need to check some things with my mum.

The car pot is being adjusted to allow for petrol/parking to come out of there too. Pets will include their insurance premiums. We're still debating where eating out and takeaways will come from and are basically choosing not to do either until we've decided. Not that we do that often anyway; I think we probably get a takeaway about once every 3 months, and eat out maybe twice a year (when the kids perform their dance shows they do 2 shows on a Saturday and we go out for tea in between).

Feels like it's getting there!

Sausage casserole in the slow cooker for tea this evening. Sausages from the freezer, and I found and used a sad looking pepper in the back of the fridge lol. Will probably serve with pasta. Chicken tikka tomorrow, which always goes down well

Happy week everyone!

South_coast

I think I'm up to 11 accounts now. I'm with Santander and you can open a new one online in seconds and re-name and re-order them whenever you like 😍

P.S. I feel you on the inhaler charges - I feel like stamping my foot when they ask me to pay and wailing "But I need it to breeeaaathe!"

coldcazzie

Yep.

Insulin, you say? Yes, you're right, if you don't have that your body will rot itself from the inside out and you'll die slowly and painfully over the course of several weeks. Have some free prescriptions. Salbutamol? Helps your airways not close up so that you can continue breathing? I mean, I know it'll kill you within a few minutes but it's not really that serious, is it? Pay up!

coldcazzie

South_coast said:

I think I'm up to 11 accounts now. I'm with Santander and you can open a new one online in seconds and re-name and re-order them whenever you like 😍

Yes, I love that I can rename my Santander accounts. And my NW ones too. Last couple of years FD have been bigging up their new and improved online banking experience. Honestly, I think it's a bit pap. AND you still can't nickname the accounts! Why did they even bother?!  

shangaijimmy

Count me in with the inhaler annoyance! Grrrr

coldcazzie

I've done a few more surveys on Prolific. Probably not as many as I could have because I have to share my laptop with Small Small and she often has to use it to access her online learning resources. I have noticed that they rarely email me, and when they do, by the time I've hopped on the computer whatever they've emailed me about has vanished. I've taken to having the tab open on my phone and glancing at it as often as I remember, and then booting her off if I find summat I wanna do, but it's definitely not ideal! I've reached about £3 in earnings though, so not all bad.

Small Small is, I think, preparing for a growth spurt. She is eating through the day, and then coming downstairs in the middle of the night to eat, and then having to get up super early to eat too. She's getting quite frustrated with it, and is noticeably more tired from having to get up twice in the night to eat. Poor love.

As part of my financial shuffling, I decided to use our NW jt acc for home ed stuff, and have nicknamed the acc accordingly. I find it quite hard to keep track of what we spend each month because some of the groups are paid in cash on arrival, some are paid by card on arrival, some are paid in advance via pp, some are annual subs which obviously need money putting aside through the year. I hate cash. I'd pay for everything electronically if I could. I've appropriated an old coin purse that used to belong to a child into our EHE* purse, so I can at least keep the EHE cash separate. Our CC month has just finished on the 13th, and the first payment will be going into the EHE acc on the 23rd, and I'd decided in the interim to just pay anything that needed paying out of our FD jt acc. Big Small watches a weekly KS3/KS4 zoology webinar, and I paid for today's session at the weekend, making sure I selected our bank acc as the funding source on PP. So imagine my joy when I discovered the fee on the CC statement yesterday. Y'know when something makes you doubt yourself, even though it shouldn't? I KNOW I selected our bank acc, so WHY has it taken the payment from elsewhere? And WHY am I asking myself, "but did I select the bank account tho..."? I KNOW I did, and yet I'm doubting myself. It's not a big problem, except... what if it decides that it's gonna take it from the CC next time too, instead of the debit card for the EHE acc that I've just added to my acc? It's only £3, but what's the point of my separating stuff out if PP/Zoom decides to stick its oar in and mess it up? Le sigh.

The new trampoline mat is arriving between 11 and 12 today, according to the DPD email I got this am. The kids are brimming with excitement I am not looking forward to the mud. Our garden is long, probably about 100ft, with the half near the house more or less level and the other half sloping down away from the house and to the right to a sycamore tree in the bottom right corner. The trampoline is almost at the bottom, on the left, which means there's an awful lot of garden for them to run down to get there. There use to be several more trees than just the sycamore - both in next door's garden and on the boundary between them and us, but next door had them all cut down over the course of about 3 years. Now they complain about the fact that the garden is really wet and boggy and I have to literally bite my tongue to stop myself from saying "you brought that on yourselves, you plonkers". Really though, 5 huge trees drink a lot of water, so if you cut them down, you got a hell of a lot more ground water to contend with. Is that not obvious? Perhaps not, given how many places have to deal with flooding due to deforestation. So the garden is horribly muddy, and the slope means that there's sections of it that end up a bit mud-slick ish, and the kids occasionally come inside with mud all up themselves having slid down it by accident. Suppose I should be glad they don't do it on purpose we have a rule that they can't go down there in anything other than wellies. Eventually we intend to put a path and steps in - settle large stone bricks, edge and then line with weed fabric and cover with slate probably - but that seems unlikely this year as it really requires the chicken run to be in place first... ugh. I'm not getting started on the rest of my garden woes!

On to other things. I rang my Mum last night to talk with her about holidays. The last time we holidayed we stayed on their narrowboat (they have a time share). I checked; that was October 2016 the kids have all expressed that they would like to go back there, and there is something to be said for forcing yourself into a situation where you are not constantly plugged in. I said I wasn't sure if it would be possible this year but I would like to set my intentions and possibly look to go next year, if we could have a spare week? She said they have October half term booked this year, and that we might be able to have that week if we wanted it, and they would go elsewhere, which was not how I expected the conversation to go. She's going to speak with Dad and we are going to look at the canal options, and see where we might like to go. As far as I know, the boat is moving to a new mooring next year so this year will be the last opportunity to travel round the area it's currently moored in.

My pilates class has been cancelled. I absolutely need to make sure I can carve out time at least once a week to keep up with it. I don't do it for weight loss, but for core strength/flexibility/fitness which helps me not to have as much backache and will hopefully help my hip (although it hasn't yet - 2 years and counting). I actually couldn't care less what I weigh (and I'm sure my BMI is higher than it "should" be - inverted commas very much in place because I think BMI is a bunch of b0ll0cks! - for my height), but I do care about not being incapacitated with a pulled back! Interestingly, I'm more healthy now than I ever was when I was skinny. I eat better quality food because we have more money, I no longer drink or smoke, I get plenty of sleep, I exercise because I enjoy it although I am much less active overall (anything over about 6000 steps and my hip is in agony for days). When I was skinny, eating crap because that was all we could afford, smoking and drinking on the regular, and lacking sleep because babies/young children/studying, people would kinda tilt their heads at me and be like, "are you okay, you look like you've been ill?" and I'd be like, "no, I'm fine, that's just my face, thanks..." and, weirdly, I don't miss that! I wasn't convinced I'd like pilates at first but I absolutely love it. If I could afford it and there were enough convenient classes I'd probably go about 3 times a week. Annoyingly, I find it very hard to do at home, but perhaps 3 months of no classes will cure me of that.

Finally, after our CC ticked over I bought a cork bath mat. I have such fond memories of my parents' one from when I was a child - lovely and warm on my feet. But the bathroom has carpet in it and the idea of the cork mat on carpet makes me itchy. Not sure why, although it may be simply because carpet in a bathroom makes me itchy. We (as a couple) have yet to move into a house that didn't have carpet in the bathroom. WHYYYY do people put carpet in bathrooms?! I have been begrudgingly putting up with it since we moved in, but I think the time has come for it to change, because the new bathmat arrived this morning. I have some hardboard in a cupboard, plus plenty of pins. I think I will be visiting our local carpet place today and seeing if they've got an offcut of lino I can yoink for not too much money. Should be a fairly risk free visit as they are rarely busy, and small businesses can definitely use the support right now.

I'm done rambling now. Merry Tuesday everyone. Chin up in these anxious times  

*EHE = elective home education, which is the legal name for those who educate their children themselves.

coldcazzie

I had many things on my To Do List for today. I didn't do any of them lol, but I did rip the horrible carpet out and start laying hardboard in the bathroom it's almost all done; will finish the last bits tomorrow and then lay the offcut of lino. Only £50, plus £4 for spray adhesive and it's nice thick stuff too.

The Manwife™ and the kids, meanwhile, put the new trampoline mat on, and Medium Small has spend about 2 hours on there since 2pm, leaping about and doing various flips, tumbles and jumps he's learned at gymnastics good call, I reckon.

Chicken tikka in the slow cooker for tonight. Smells delish