julicorn's journey 3 - The House on the Hill

julicorn

South_coast said:

I'm just enjoying the positive thinking that the £30k's will come round so soon that you'll still be able to taste the last one 😀😀😀

What can I say, I'm an optimist at heart (and clearly an extremely infrequent champagne consumer )

Our current total stands at a fun £203,203, I find joy in little things like that. 

We had our work Christmas do yesterday and I'm not feeling too fragile even though I'd been feeling a bit under the weather and started drinking wine at 1pm yesterday. Luckily could tell when to call it a day. 

The storm is keeping us inside tonight even though it's not looking too bad around here. Mr julicorn's parents got woken up by an emergency alert to their phones at 3.04am last night, not the most helpful I'd say! Maybe they need to rethink that system a little, given that they'd already gotten one during the day yesterday and the situation hadn't exactly changed. It's also messing up my matched betting today, lots of sports nonsense understandably cancelled. 

I'm really enjoying our advent calendars, especially the heritage seed one I treated myself to. Yesterday it had Japanese carrot seeds in it, apparently the carrots can grow to 1.5m! If they get to 5cm in our soil, I'll be happy  

I hope you all have a good weekend everyone, and stay safe!

julicorn

I completely forgot to mention this mornings' money-saving success - Our broadband bill is coming to an end, and I saw that I could get a better deal with Virgin. So I messaged Vodafone on their live chat to asked if they could match the Virgin new customer offer, and they didn't just match it, they even beat it! So we're getting an £11 discount for the next couple of years, £21/month for 500mbps. I'm happy with that, and it saved me the hassle of switching  

trix-a-belle

That's great news, makes a change for a company to value existing customers even if it took a bit of a nudge to get the deal, so often they will only match it if they do anything.

julicorn

trix-a-belle said:

That's great news, makes a change for a company to value existing customers even if it took a bit of a nudge to get the deal, so often they will only match it if they do anything.

Yes, I was surprised to be honest! I would have even been willing to take a slightly less good deal, slower speed or something like that, but the guy I was talking to rounded down the Virgin price and gave me twice the speed they offered. 

LadyWithAPlan

Oh well done on the deal ! 

It reminds me my 2 yr Vodafone deal runs out end Jan but not sure if I’d want to renew as definitely planning to move next year 

julicorn

LadyWithAPlan said:

Oh well done on the deal ! 

It reminds me my 2 yr Vodafone deal runs out end Jan but not sure if I’d want to renew as definitely planning to move next year 

Maybe see what you can get. I've moved house with an existing contract a few times and don't remember ever getting charged extra for it. I remember one time it actually resulted in the supplier cancelling the contract for free because they couldn't supply to the new address. But things might have changed, it's been a little while! I think if I'd done nothing now, it would have gone up to £37 or so for 80mb/s, pretty poor. 

julicorn

We braved the storm, ventured into town, and got almost all of our Christmas shopping done! I love YNAB for that, we have categories for everyone set up and it makes it so easy to decide whether or not a present is in budget, and how to priorities.
Just waiting for some gyros wraps to be delivered now because we have some more money in the takeout category too, what a day!  

julicorn

Also - I know this probably isn't a thing for most of you, but I won't just let go of random German Christmas traditions, and because of that I'll go ahead and wish you all a happy 2nd advent 🕯🕯🎄

julicorn

I had a Christmas parcel to send to my cousin, and rather than let Mr julicorn send it from work this time (which seems to inevitably get hit with customs charges, even when he's declared everything properly as a gift! Oh Brexit and German customs...), I decided to send it with Royal Mail. 

Pleased to see that I could book a collection for no extra charge. Even more pleased to see the postman actually turn up at the arranged time! Well, turns out he didn't actually have the label for the parcel. Whoops. He knew he was meant to have it, kept rummaging through his labels, but no dice. 
After 30 minutes on hold / on the phone with Royal Mail, I decided to take it to a parcel shop after work. It was only raining a little bit, and the steps would do me good I guess? The nearest one is 15 minutes away, down a steep hill through a bit of forest. I got there, only slightly wet, and not having fallen over on my way there - and the QR code wouldn't scan. The guy didn't try and enter any of my 5 different reference numbers either, just told me to go to the other post office, 10 minutes walk up a different hill. Aaaargh. So I did that. And succeeded. They could scan the darn code and I finally got rid of that parcel. 

I took the opportunity to walk that extra 20 minutes from there to our local Hobbycraft to buy some more wool for the Moomin socks I'm knitting for Mr julicorn (just ran out of the white colour last night), and then treated myself to a bus up the hill. They're currently only £1 for short journeys, I think that's quite a nice initiative. Glad to have made it home before the rain started properly. Oh, I also may have eaten too many jam filled gingerbread hearts, but that's a story for another day. 

julicorn

I got to be on a panel at a conference today, that was actually quite fun! Would do it again. Just trying to kill some time on the train ride home, I swear Thameslink trains are a weird time machine that make every journey feel at least twice as long.

Octopus savings session tonight, so although we're not gonna make much out of it, Mr julicorn and I are going to light some candles and just have a chat and some gingerbread I think. Should be nice!

Got another choir Christmas do tomorrow night, looking forward to that too. We're taking part in a show at the Brighton Dome on Monday, I'll have to practice a bit for that after work tomorrow. Good thing the neighbours can't hear me sing! Our clearly very festive set list features Common People and a rather eclectic take on Björk's it's oh so quiet, with the lyrics changed to be mainly about eating cheese, and a little bit about rampant Christmas consumerism. Let's see how that turns out!