Just remembered, while next week's pay is going to be back to normal again, 100% instead of furlough, there will be a deduction. I've not paid for this laptop yet, I think it will come out of this month's pay. There's always a chance they'll take it out of the following month's pay, which would be handy and less noticeable.
I realise I didn't report on all of the weekend, so just for the record here it is. I helped with Jim's garden on Sunday. Planned to get round there at midday and blitz it, but by that time Dean had already cut everything down. So only all the picking up, bagging, and sweeping up to do. I might do the same with my garden, though it's less easy for me to get rid of the debris. At his we filled his brown bin, and then filled another dozen sacks too. Hmm maybe it's time for me to get a brown bin1, it's less espensive than I thought, that's only two pounds per collection. Pay day if I've not been charged for the laptop I'll definitely do it.
After the gardening I went to the Inn Doors for one, was quite quiet. After we got the boys' tea and went to the Clarendon to sit outside in the remaining sun and play top trumps again.
Yesterday I managed to pass on an offer of freelance work to an ex-workmate which was nice. A busy day apart from that, making dinner, doing housework, going for a run. Lots of washing and bed and towl changing and uniform ironing. Annoyingly putting a white wash on hot awoke some dirty part of the machine and I had to put it all through again.
Pubs closing at 10pm from now on and we're being encouraged to work from home more. This might work out nicely for me if say I were to get a new job, as I have found it will cost £734 per month2 to get into London. If I get just the train ticket without the tube (£664), and pay only for only a single journey from St Pancras, that's hardly cheaper. If I worked in London twelve times in the month then it's £742. If I had to be in London three times a week that could be thirteen trips in a month, so the travelcard is the best option. It saves more money to go for an annual ticket but that's just too much outlay to think about. Of course I am factoring these costs into any new salary, so the new earnings would more than compensate, but when it comes to it I still want to find ways to save money. Can I travel on the outside of the train maybe, like they do in India?
It might be time to stop saving so much on my mobile bill. I'm out of data, my £6.60 contract does not give me enough. I am paying £10 for thing one's phone too, he has TEN TIMES the data I have, and he's still going over that, so I might go up to £15 for him this month.
So, building up quite a little shopping for when I do land a new role:
Clare is also talking about us having a cleaner, but not sure she's going to have as much extra money as she first thought.
I started looking at TV's and cars yesterday. You can soon upsell yourself can't you? I was thinking of £700 or so then upsold myself to this one for about a grand11. I only really need some more HDMI ports to plug the games console in and a DVD in, but thought I might as well get a much bigger screen as we go. Ro tells me no, don't get LED, get OLED instead, which means paying quite a lot more for less screen size. He's probably right, so probably I won't rush and get the TV out of the redundancy money.
Cars were even more trouble. When you start making a list of what you'd like (basically new, hybrid for me the eco-worrier, high driving position and parking assist for Clare it starts getting expensive12. We'd be paying £400 a month, with a hefty deposit, and STILL have £17k to pay if we wanted to keep it after three years! If you can put it out of your mind and just thing "what am I getting for £200 a month and can I afford that?" then it's OK, but I'm just too frugal to be relaxed about it.
| Country | cases | deaths |
|---|---|---|
| USA | 6971424 | 203824 |
| Brazil | 4528347 | 136565 |
| India | 5398230 | 86774 |
| Mexico | 688954 | 72803 |
| UK | 390358 | 41759 |
| Italy | 296569 | 35692 |
| Peru | 762865 | 31369 |
| France | 442194 | 31274 |
| Spain | 659334 | 30495 |
| Iran | 419043 | 24118 |
Coronavirus weekly death graph for USA + Brazil + India + Mexico + UK + Italy
Paul Clarke's blog - I live in Hythe near Folkestone. Wed to Clare + dad to two, I am a full-stack web engineer, + I do js / Node, some ruby, python, php ect ect. I like pubbing, parkrun, eating, home automation + other diy jiggery-pokery, history, tree stuff, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, + TIME TRAVEL.