Personal targets – July

Posted on July 2, 2018 by Jo

My lovely PT has headed off for a month long break in Mexico (a week in Cancun and then 3 weeks of  a Sivananda yoga course) and I’m trying not to be jealous! In his absence I have promised to do things (and rest) so for the sake of accountability here are the targets for July.

Fitness

  • 13,500 steps per day or 94,500  per week (since I’m trotting up and back from the allotment and lugging watering cans around this should be do-able)
  • 3 x 30 min cardio sessions in the gym every week
  • start (and complete) the Daily Om 21 days of yoga course
  • daily stretching and foam rolling

Health

  • drink all the water or c. 2 litres a day (in this heat I need it)
  • daily vitamins
  • food log and meal planning
  • 6 a day fruit/veg minimum but preferably 10 a day!
  • aim for a min of 6 hours sleep
  • play with cat and kittens (good for the soul)!

Home

  • I desperately need to do an Unfuck your habitat or Kondo around the flat
  • Tidy up tiny front garden
  • Tidy up small back garden
  • Repot and sort all houseplants

Finance

  • No spend days are the aim for July (my budget has taken a hammering with a broken boiler in February, cat diagnosed with terminal illness in Feb/March and 3.5 months of high vets bills and the washing machine has just packed up)!
  • Challenge BT about overcharging me on two accounts
  • Dig out all the paperwork relating to old mortgages, loans and credit/store cards and get my PPI claims in
  • Seriously sort out old electrical stuff, DVDs and books and sell off via CEX, Ziffit, Zapper, we Buy Books, Momox and Music Magpie (earn money and create space).

There’s a separate list of allotment tasks for the two plots but that’s enough planning ahead for now!

 

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Allotment targets – June

Posted on June 1, 2018 by Jo

In the hopes that writing things down may mean they get done here is the list of tasks for the allotment(s)!

Farm plot

  • Shed
    • Clean last bit of last year’s paint off the windows
    • Fix tool hooks and hang up tools
    • Fix brackets for shelves and make shelves
    • Finally cut plywood for last bit of floor strengthening and paint
    • Tidy up
    • Set up refreshment station with camping stove, tea etc!
    • Connect water butt to guttering
    • Level spot for water butt
  • Finish making the last bit of the fence
  • Paint pegs for the fruit bed borders
  • Fix wooden planks to pegs and make/install fruit bed borders
  • Weed Apple Avenue
  • Plant lavender in Currant Crescent and mulch
  • Weed and mulch (and plant last raspberries) in Raspberry Road
  • Bonfire for all the old pallet wood
  • Sort out and neatly stack the wood pile (for making borders for beds)
  • Plant honeysuckle
  • Get black plastic on the back half of the plot
  • Clear all rubbish
  • Measure up again and check against draft plan
  • FINALISE plan
  • Mark up and start digging beds
  • Clear weedy half of the stony bed by fence at bottom of plot and decide whether to plant to herbs or make a wild food hedge for wildlife (source and cost up plants)

Rose Avenue plot

  • Strim paths
  • Strim front third of plot so I can see the ground!
  • Weed the poor overgrown herb bed
  • Weed and mulch under the currants
  • Pull up all thistles on bit of plot which has been prepped
  • Plant stuff (strawberries and beans) in ground which is ready
  • Cut back giant self seeded comfrey and make comfrey tea
  • Decide where to move comfrey next year!
  • Weed and mulch around rhubarb plant
  • Collect seeds from opium/Himalayan poppies and offer to share with other plotholders
  • Start digging over front third of plot and finally try and get rid of brambles and bindweed.  If necessary get as much bare earth as possible then put cardboard and black plastic down until next year.
  • Decide what to do with small square bed at back of plot – maybe ideal spot for comfrey?
  • Dig over front of pot next to tarmac path (be careful of bulbs!) and decide what flowers to put in there next year (emphasis of wild and good for wildlife)
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People throwing money away

Posted on March 14, 2018 by Jo
money
Phillip Hammond has announced a consultation on “Cash and digital payments in the new economy.”  The call for evidence (linked above) is quite short but this bit (bottom of page 10 and top of page 11) left me more than a little shocked.

“In the normal course of the cash cycle, many denominations fall out of circulation, for example, by being placed into savings jars. Surveys suggest that six in ten 1p and 2p coins are used in a transaction once before they leave the cash cycle. They are either saved, or in 8% of cases are thrown away. To meet demand created by such losses from circulation, in previous years the government and the Royal Mint have needed to produce and issue over 500 million 1p and 2p coins each year to replace those falling out of circulation.”

People are literally throwing away money. I was more than a little skeptical until the question was posed on another forum where I hang out and more than a few people said that they wouldn’t stop to pick up small change they dropped and several others testified that their kids, foster kids, young people they know will regularly chuck copper coins on the floor after buying their lunch or snacks.

I’m more than a little boggled by this. I mean I’m one of those people who doesn;t carry much cash these days and prefers to do everything by card because it’s so much easier to download and track my spending that having to try and remember ho I spent my cash. But I do still have the occasional cash in my wallet and I dump out loose coins on a weekly basis into a couple of piggy banks which every quarter get transfered into my saving account – and there’s generally around £50 of 1 & 2ps, 5, 10 and 20p coins when I tot them all up.

I just can’t wrap my head around literally chucking away a couple of hundred quid a year!

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Allotment – prep! And Casa Chaotica

Posted on January 26, 2018 by Jo

Today’s the day – a friend is coming over for 11:30am and then we’re off to pick up a van and buy lots of lovely timber so I can finally start making the raised beds for the large allotment.

I’m hoping there may be some clearer weather over the weekend (and Monday as I have a day off) to get started on this but the forecast looks a little grim.

The upside is if rain stops play on the allotment I’ll have 3 days to sort out the spiraling chaos in my flat. I’d had just under 3 weeks off at Christmas when all the flat clearing, tidying and some moderate decorating were due to happen – alas I caught the dreadful seasonal lurgy and achieved precisely nothing!  So I started the new year in a state of chaos and I’ve not quite managed to catch up since.

But there are four empty days ahead and I have PLANS so I’m optimistic at the moment that it might be a productive long weekend!

 

 

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Statistics Sunday

Posted on January 7, 2018 by Jo

Like many others I’m kicking off my Year of Growth (known as YOG) with a refreshed focus on health and fitness. I’ve had the fitness/exercise part of the equation more or less nailed down since November 2014 which is when I limped into my local gym and threw myself at the mercy of my lovely PT and asked for help.  2014 saw me being both too sedentary during the week and trying to garden like a woman possessed at the weekends on the allotment and I ended up with major back and knee issues.

The PT fixed me in short order and got me a lot fitter – but there’ve been some injuries this year which have hampered my cardio training and the portion control has slipped a bit. So the plan with the PT this year is to get me back to having a regular Friday boxing session ASAP and work on getting back to being fit to run.  It’s good to have goals (even if working around plantar fasciitis in the left foot and a weird thing with my right hand at the moment which makes one of my fingers feel like it’s locking/dislocating.  For once google has been my friend in diagnosing what’s happened here)!

In the interests of accountability I’ve been weighing and logging food all week, watching my portions and making sure I hit those 13,500 steps per day. So this is what my stats look like.

Top graph (calories consumed – blue) vs calories available (yellow) and bottom graph calories earned through exercise (bue) compared to minutes spent exercising (red).

2018-01-Wk 1 stats

Most of the exercise has been gentle walking – the spike on Saturday was due to a boxing session in the morning. If I can keep this up for the rest of the month I’ll be off to a good start. On the plus side these stats are pretty good:

  • Steps walked: 96,000
  • Miles walked: just over 44
  • Calories burned: 21,713

I’ve not been quite as successful in improving my sleep patterns. Though I’ve averaged 6 hours and 22 minutes this week it’s only because I slept a ridiculous 10 hours Thursday night/Friday morning.  Still haven’t quite cracked the winding down and getting to bed before midnight element of good sleep patterns!

 

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