Week commencing 11th May (blogged three times)

Incoming: £500 in Premium Bonds

I had expected last week’s bonds to be wiped out when my landlord cashed my rent cheque.  Only thing is he hasn’t cashed it yet.  He did however come and do a day late “house inspection” (although he didn’t actually look in any of the rooms).

His reason for being late was that when he was in Crimea his helicopter got shot down and he bashed his head.  Since then he randomly falls over with no warning and had to get a doctor to jab him up with something.  Best excuse ever, am tempted to start using it myself.

One good thing that did come from his visit though was the reminder that I will be getting my deposit back.  To be accurate the lead tenant (Gingell, who else?) will be getting all the deposits back and it is then her responsibility to distribute them.  So looking forward to what is going to feel like free money hitting my PayPal account in a couple of months time.

I thought it’d be amusing to create a PayPal donation button for this site but apparently they can’t decrypt their own encryption, amateurs.  I guess I could use an unencrypted button but then you’d see my email address (no offence, I’m sure you’re all lovely people, but I’d rather keep the rape and Bible spam on my WordPress dashboard rather than in my inbox).  If you really want to send me sweet nothings you can head on over to my contact page.

Outgoing:

• £28 food
• £15 drink
• £20 loan over calculation repayment
• £50 Vodafone (I had to buy a new phone because the speaker packed up on my Samsung SGH-U600.  People could hear me but I couldn’t hear them, this made conversation difficult).

Let’s pause here to review my new Samsung J700i (my fourth ever mobile), a phone that was described to me (apart from the camera) as an upgrade.

Pros

• I can hear my callers.
• No slide buttons.  Be a button or be a touchscreen, don’t try and be both.  I’m sorry I’m just prejudiced that way.
• The menu icons are prettier; their shapes and colours suggest the kind of marzipan covered cakes that would be served if you were ever invited for high tea with Mr Kipling.
• Menus are more intuitive in places.
• Standard issue backgrounds are marginally more inspirational.
• The phone has more of a physical presence to it, seems sturdier and makes a more satisfying sound when you close it.

Cons

• Camera seems to have lost 1.9 megapixels somewhere.
• On my old phone I could fit half of Outkast’s Stankonia, on my new phone I can only fit two songs from Wild Young Hearts by Noisettes (album is a lot more chilled than the single would have you believe, has something of a Fiona Bevan vibe to it).
• Vodafone won’t let you change what has to be the ugliest homepage I have ever seen.  Browser feels even more broken than the last one, although that’s a gut feeling rather than anything scientific.
• Menus are great until you want to send a text, then it messes you about by asking if you want to send the text to additional people and it doesn’t save your sent messages automatically you have to prompt it everytime (maybe this option is buried deep in the menus somewhere, in which case another menu fail).

Back to the numbers.

• £15 insurance monthly direct debit
• £15 toaster (don’t really have a category for this, sorry)
• £16 rounding error

• Total: £159

End of Week Total: -£2,820