Morning!
Easter weekend seems like it was aaaages ago already, but it was only last week. Thankfully we have another long weekend coming up already. April and May really spoil us for Bank Holidays, not that it means much if you’re self employed, other than no payments will go into your bank account and you won’t get any mail.
Any way, enough of that. It’s a beautiful sunny day and I feel the urge to get out into it (and probably immediately realise how cold it is).
Honestly, this week has been mostly tiring and a bit frustrating. I almost didn’t even want to write todays diary post as something I thought would be a super fun thing to write about has turned into a bit of a source of irritation that’s actually kept me awake composing frustrated emails, but hey, maybe I’ll just leave that bit out and tell you about all the other AMAZING things I did this week. Because if you read these regularly you’ll know the excitement that’s about to come.
So, this week I…..
Did some digging
Don’t say I didn’t warn you about the excitement that was to come. I started this week with a spot of digging. We have an allotment. I say we. Mr Chick has an allotment, gardening isn’t really my thing, I much prefer eating the results.
While Mr Chick was working there I popped round with an ice-cold cider, seeing as the sun was shining (actually it wasn’t ice-cold, it was luke-warm as it came from the corner shop fridge, but never mind). Then I got roped into some digging. It was kind of fun as it happens, but not for long.
And I got mud in my shoes.
Started watching season 7 of the Walking Dead
We don’t have Sky, so we always wait till the seasons finish and then immediately binge watch them all on Amazon. Bank Holiday Monday was the day we chose to start this one.
Have you seen it? I recommend having a counsellor on speed dial before you watch episode 1. That shit is seriously harrowing. I am permanently mentally scarred.
I do love a good Zombie movie/story, but the fact is The Walking Dead isn’t really about Zombies any more. They’re just a side threat to the real problems, which seem to mostly be that people are dicks.
We’re about half way through now and every time we watch an episode in which there isn’t any truly gut wrenching, mentally scarring horror it makes me even more nervous for the next one because I KNOW it’s coming.
Anyway, all that said, it is a great series, you should totally watch it.
Got some new shoes
In less harrowing news, I finally bought something from ASOS with my Christmas voucher that I like enough to keep.
I returned the silver glittery shoes with the 4″ heels that didn’t fit me very well, and bought a more practical pair of gold shoes with sensible 2″ block heels which were half price in the sale.
I am aware that calling any pair of gold shoes “practical” might put me in the crazy lady category, but I really wanted a pair of shoes to wear out in the evening on nights where I don’t need to look fancy enough to take spare shoes with me, but I want to look fancier than ballet flats.
These are all nice and padded on the inside, so pretty comfortable with their sensible sturdy heels. The only thing I have found is that the elasticated straps don’t hold my foot as securely as you’d think, so occasionally my heel slips out of them. If it starts irritating me I’ll try some heel grips, but it’s not a big deal.
Got free biscuits
Sadly this may literally have been one of the most exciting things that happened this week.
Like I mentioned in this post about saving money we now get our weekly food shop delivered. This means I can plan ahead, change the order throughout the week and stick to a budget.
We normally get it delivered on Thursday night, while I’m at Roller Derby practice. On Wednesday night, just before the cut off time for changes, we got sent an email voucher from Sainsburys for a free box of TTD cookies. Honestly, I’m not sure when I’ve been so excited. I was probably as excited about cookies as I was about that trip to Basel in March.
On Thursday night I talked about biscuits quite a lot at practice. I was very excited about having dark chocolate and ginger cookies and a glass of milk when I got home. I was seriously concerned that they might be out of stock and not arrive. I wasn’t sure my little heart could deal with the disappointment of there being no dark chocolate and ginger cookies.
Well, as the picture probably gave away, I got my cookies and milk. Very tasty they were too. Even tastier for being free cookies, I’m sure.
Bought a new server
I probably should have left the week on the high that was free cookies, but I felt like I should at least mention 1 of the things that has caused this week to be tiring and frustrating.
I host quite a few websites, and to cut a very long and dull story into a slightly shorter dull story, earlier this month the place I use to host them suddenly put my price up by £25 a month, meaning that it would now cost me almost £100 a month. I did some research and discovered I was basically over paying by a lot because I hadn’t investigated the improvements in server capacity that were available in the 5 or 6 years since I set mine up.
So I bought a new one, and commenced the long and frustrating job of moving my website. I needed to move it before today, which was when my previous server wanted paying for. So I bought the server on Tuesday, thinking that would be loads of time, but it actually took them till Friday to get it set up in a condition where I could actually use it.
If you noticed and blips in service on this site on Friday it was because I was at my desk till gone 8pm trying to move it. Which involved teaching myself to do things like transfer my ridiculously large SQL database using SSH access to my server. I say teach myself, I mean “Google and copy the exact stuff I found”.
Still, it is done and I have saved myself approximately £40 a month as well as getting a more powerful server.
Next week I just have 10 more sites to transfer. Wish me luck.
Srsly, I should totally have finished with the biscuit story shouldn’t I?
How was your week?
