And now we go again...

beanielou

Get it cracked 😹😹

Blackcats

I'm very late but congrats on version 1 of mortgage neutral.  Your attention to detail with your spending and saving is phenomenal .

EssexHebridean

The odd amount on the mortgage is still there at the moment! :LOL:

SA I'm RAGING about them removing that free bread! I fully plan to rebel against the change by simply reverting back to what I always used to do, and simply shopping around a bit more. Serves 'em right! 

It's a proper mixed old day here today. We've had grey, drizzly and gloomy. We've had monsoon style torrential downpours. We are now in the midst of bright blue skies and sunshine...I plan to head out to move the car closer to the office at lunchtime so I think we can all guess which of the three options it will revert back to by the time I want to go out, yes?  On the plus side it was warm enough overnight that the heating didn't come on first thing - which threw me a bit when I got out of the shower expecting a warm towel. 

MSE stuff:
- Well, obviously the heating not kicking in - always a win!
- I have another £50 coming from the Octopods as a pal I saw at the weekend mentioned that they were thinking about a switch - so I pounced (as one does!) 
- Meal planning still being on track - and the freezer serving us well to provide previously batch coked and so quick to serve up meal options
- Dug more of our HG tatties at the weekend - those will get transferred over to a brown paper bag for storage in the shed and will get brought in a few at a time.
- Banks checked, all good and ticking along as they should for this stage in the month.
- somewhere along the line I have managed to transfer CC spending over twice, so that is currently sitting in a small amount of credit. All good though, I can balance it off easily enough.
- Took the opportunity of using the Big River Pr1m3 day thing to check on any special offers for my deodorant - found a cracker of an offer for a case plus 5 refills for £24 which breaks down to a price only fractionally more than the cheapest the refills ever really get to - and I get a nice pretty purple case free. Win - will be being delivered on Friday.
- Spending at the airshow on saturday was limited to just my lunch, as planned. 
- Remembered to order my repeat prescriptions yesterday so will be making good use of this time's pre-paid certificate. (already had 4 scrips off it, and that is another 3 to follow!) 

I have made a solid decision to start using cloud storage for photo backups, rather than spending on more external harddrives. I'm paying for Fl1ckr Pr0 which gives me storage, and we also have Pr1m3 of course, which also lets me store unlimited photos. I have also just changed my Fl1kr subscription to a 2 year plan which will reduce the annual cost a bit, although the fee coming out in November will be a bit chunky! So one of my winter tasks needs to be to begin migrating existing stuff from hard drives to those two external sources - I've already made a start by setting my phone to back up to Am@z0n photos this morning. (Which is going to take a l-o-n-g time!)

I need to sit down in the next few days and plan what the weekend's batch cook is going to be - or indeed if I can get away without doing one this week. I am really appreciating the freezer providing quick meal solutions for weeknights at the moment - so I'm keen to maintain the flow on that, as well as ensuring that we keep on eating through the freezer contents as well. 

Plans for the rest of the month are limited, but do include a trip to Devon for the food festival at MrEH's hometown which should be fun. 

EssexHebridean

Evening all - hope everyone has had a cracking Saturday?! 

Our main MSE news today is that we took the decision to switch to Octopus Agile for our electricity earlier. We’d been musing on it for a while, but I found an app which allowed us to look at our actual use over the past year and compare and that suggested that as I suspected, we could save a decent wedge of cash even without any load-shifting…. It’s turned into a bit of a standing joke in this house that over the time we have been here we have really struggled with remembering that we don’t need to use as much electric overnight as possible, so frankly we don’t see load shifting as any sort of issue! Anyway my app tells me that we will be getting  very cheap or free electricity tonight, right now we are watching TV at under 5p/kWh which can’t be bad! The bedding is in the WM ready to wash and dry tonight and the DW will be going onto take advantage of being basically paid to run it. Air fryer bowl and basket, and water filter jug going in to fill up the space. 

Other than that, fairly routine bits 
- meal plan completed for this week and most of next
- shopping - with a list - done at Al’s yesterday meaning no need to take my car anywhere
- 2 loads of washing through and dried for free in the sunshine yesterday
- quotes for for the replacement door for the garden office - we’ll be getting that dealt with in the next few weeks I think. Not cheap, but does need doing. 
- MrEH’s car filled up today at Sainsbugs, using a voucher for additional N3ctar points. Immediately got given another voucher so we’ll use that next time! 

- fire has been it for the first time this autumn and I’m pleased to report that MrEH’s carefully crafted compressed paper logs are burning brilliantly!

MrEH’s planned rugby match was called off today so we decided to make good use of our unexpected free time together and hoped on the bus to the bigger town a bit north of us for beers. Started out in an excellent Good Beer Guide pub (CAMRA Discount AND a loyalty card PiP!), popped into another froma well known cutlery related chain but were unimpressed as the offerings so left again, then podded up the hill to one of our local breweries and had an excellent few hours in their taproom enjoying their beers and playing Jenga! 

Oh - and nearly forgot - that aurora the other night! Having entirely missed it last time it was clearly visible this far south, I was entirely delighted to see it this time round. 

Cheery_Daff

Ooh, lovely pictures! I confess I saw the alert and didn't go outside, what an idiot!! I did see an epic show last time though (not that that's an excuse) 😂

jwil

Lovely pictures!  I keep missing them.

lucielle

I’m rubbish at looking for them. Great photos. 

L

Willowtree222

I'm another that has never seen them and missed them again this time. I am travelling to Iceland next week so hoping that I do get to see them. 

Debsnewbudget

I keep toying with the idea of that tariff, so would be interested to know the app you used to help with calculating it. 

greenbee

I’m using the Octopus Compare app. I want to run it for a bit longer, but it’s suggesting savings of £1/week compared to Flux. Given I have electric towel rails in the bathrooms and delayed start/finish options in the DW/TD/WM/instant pot, and various smart plugs it might be worth trying. As long as I can stick with my current export tariff!