The Wonderings of Wibble

Sunday, 13 January 2013

Christmas

Today is not Christmas it's my birthday 'HOORAY!' 'WOOPEE!' 'CONGRATULATIONS!'

Thanks- but I can't tell you anything about it now because I have to write in chronological order, and before my birthday came Christmas, New Year, and our Berlin Trip.

The Great thing about Christmas, now that I'm married is double presents. If you are unmarried and yet to be conceived here is a list how to maximize you present gaining potential. But before you read them I'd just like to say I don't do all of these things, and I do actually like buying people gifts, and Christmas is all about Jesus. I'm just saying if your sole aim in life is to receive more than you give you should do these things:

1) Be the oldest sibling in your family
2) Have many younger siblings
3) Marry someone who has many younger siblings.
4) Prevent your sibling from gaining partners or children by giving them gifts that make them look ugly.
5) Be the first of your family to marry.
6) Have many children.
7) Write thank you letters to all the relatives for which a thank you letter is a deciding factor.
8) Try and encourage you parents to divorce.
9) Make sure your God parents aren't also other relatives who would get you a present anyway.

most of these work around the fact that when you get married you can just buy the same kind of things you always buy for your relatives and sign them 'from the Joneses' but they often feel obliged to get you two separate presents. I didn't make that rule by the way I'm just stating what society has deemed to be the rules.

So we spent Christmas time in Southport, Coventry and London, and my funnest moment was when an american man who is so distantly related to me that I can't remember the link, was talking about the Isle of Mann and he said 'Can you get a ferry there' but because of his accent it came into my ears as 'Can you get a fairy there.'

That's not especially funny unless you can imagine a middle aged american man ridding a little fairy. Which I could so I laughed and my sister laughed because she knew why I was laughing, but we never really explained why we were laughing to the man.

Wow I think I've pretty much offended my entire family with this post, sorry about that. Love you guys. I really do.

Merry Christmas xx

Thursday, 20 December 2012

Smiley Badgers and 2013

I've been blogging a bit more frequently recently that is because I don't have a lot else to do at the moment, but let me share with you some of the things I did when I had things to do. My proudest achievement was facilitating the creation of this:

a badger with a side smile cheers everyone up right?

What's even funnier than that is Dan's impression of the side smiling badger.

Last time I wrote a blog I never got round to saying what I set out to say, and again I have been distracted. Damm those smiley badgers and their powers of distraction!

So 2013 that's what I was going to chat about. 2013 is going to be the best year ever because I declare it! and because I have been super stingy my whole life but 2013 is the year we have chosen to convert money and to super fun adventure times.

Here are some of my top most stingy things I've done.

saved 50p a day out of my lunch money all through secondary school by not drinking.
for 2 months I lived on a budget of £5 a week for food.
I didn't go to see Atomic Kitten when they came to my school because it cost £1
I virtually never buy cards, I always make them - it's not because I'm thoughtful it's because I'm tight.
When my old work told me I needed smart office trousers, I found some age 10 school uniform trousers for £2.
I use free wallpaper samples for wrapping paper
this year I've made my own Christmas crackers from toilet rolls
I've had my current phone for about 3 years- it was free with a £10 top up.
in my whole life I've had a desktop computer and 2 laptops, the combined cost of all of these is £20

I've done generous and extravagant things too but I won't list them.

But the point is I've been very careful with money my whole life, and since we've been married Dan has been working very hard commuting to a job he doesn't like in southport (by bike and train because it's the cheapist way) BUT 2013 is going to be the year of adventure and fun where we take 2 months out from working to travel by folding bikes, interail, planes, and a sailing boat through 14 different countries to Kuwait.

It's going to be massively epic!

Thursday, 13 December 2012

55 Years Left

In December I always feel a bit of nostalgia looking back on the year and thinking how grown up I am now. When I first stared this blog I thought it was absolutely unnecessary to clean your bathroom every week and now I feel a little bit guilty when it's not done once a week, that just shows how I have matured since 2009.

According to Wikipedia if I am the average woman in the uk I will live 82.1 years and therefore at 26 years and 11 months I have only 55 years left. Me and Dan would like to live in another country though, one of the countries we are considering is Lebonon but if we live there then I will only have 43 years left.

Anyway I'm not going to get sad about it, I had a midlife crisis when I was 14 and rebelled by still continuing to wear big baggy orange t-shirts and no make-up when everyone else had suddenly got "grown up." It was great to get the midlife crisis over with early though. Last year I set myself a list of things to do before I'm 30 You can see that here:
http://thewonderingsofwibble.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/10-things-to-do-before-im-30.html

and I pleased to say I did manage to do some stand up comedy

(Here is my latest: http://youtu.be/3zip2VBhL9k)

and I tried putting cheese in a glue gun. which you can view here: http://youtu.be/r9NMIJFOVDo

So all I've got left to do in the next 3 years is:

make a mosaic in the garden,
go on an amazing adventure to kuwait (which is happening in August and Sept)
learn to cook a proper roast,
Try laminating some ham (for no reason other than to see what happens.)
and have a baby. Easy peasy lemon squeezie.

I've also achieved my list of things not to do before I'm 27

I have not started listening to radio 4 (although someone from radio 4 was once interviewed on radio 2 and this was a bit of a moral dilema for me)
And I have not started saving for a pension. - that was a pretty easy goal to achieve.

I've just got to focus on not buying a bread maker and not becoming a national trust member now. You may think that having goals of things you your not going to do is stupid, but you need to set yourself boundaries or you might accidently end up being someone who paints water colour dogs for a hobby. I've not even got onto what I intended to write about today I'm like a old person nattering away to nobody. Oh well I will save the rest for another day. x

Tuesday, 11 December 2012

Vintage of the Future

My rock and roll husband is a a gig right now (10.30 on a Tuesday night) but I have stayed in done the washing up, had a bath a made this on MS paint. In case you can't tell it's a cake stand made from a ipad a ipad mini a iphone and a ipod nano (which is by the way too small to put a cake on and therefore useless.)

You may laugh now but I'm telling you this will be all the range in 2042.

Sunday, 25 November 2012

Friday, 16 November 2012

Kuwait trip!!

Here are my grandparents Elspeth and Peter in 1953

This is them setting off for a very long drive to England from their home in kuwait. This is the route they took:
Kuwait- Iraq- Syria - Turkey - Greece - Macedonia -Kosovo - Montenegro - Croatia -Italy- Austria- Switzerland- France - England.

For absolutely ever (and by this I mean approximately since 2008) Me and Dan have been talking about doing a similar trip also in a moris minor but in the other direction from England to Kuwait. One day a few years ago we got their travel diary and mapped it all out. The diary was written in quite a boring style with not much personality, but here are 2 interesting bits I remember:
1) they only spent £40 on fuel for the whole trip!
2) My granny got touched up by a Turk.

We set a provisional date for our trip as Sept to Nov 2013 a while ago and then started looking into all the boring things you have to do before having fun these days. (I bet my grandparents didn't have to do any of this) Things like can you ship a car from Kuwait to England? Can you sell give away or dump a car in Kuwait? what visas do you need? How can you get around Syria/ Iraq? what insurance covers you everwhere in a 60 year old car? bla bla bla snore.

I found some answers to these questions but not really enough to make me feel confident about the trip. Much as I believe that as risk increases fun increases, I do also know that there is a point on the risk-fun graph where fun dramatically decreases and that is at the injury/death/ being totally stranded with no money point. If you look carefully at a map there really is no way to get to Kuwait from Europe without going through dangerous bits. Which is totally not fair because we thought of this idea before Syria had issues! Anyways to overcome a lot of the car related problems we have come up with this super duper new plan:

FOLDING BIKES
LYCRA
INTERAIL
HITCH HIKING
COUCH SURFING
CHEAP HOSTELS
MY DAD'S SAILING BOAT
SOME SHORT DISTANCE FLIGHTS THAT AVOID SYRIA

BOOM!

Sorry I got board with sentences there but you get the gist. Dan want's us to be able to comfortably cycle 60 miles a day, I'm not really motivated to exercise generally but if there's one thing I love it's bargainous transport (I have even been described as a 'bargain Nazi'.) So that and sense of adventure is enough motivation for me to get into shape. I'm going to have to only take 3 or 4 outfits though and I can't even just think about which are my 3 or 4 top outfits, I'll have to think about practicalities : ( Boring! AND Dan says I'll have to wear padded crotch cycling shorts.

This is the route we will take: England- hopefully a sail boat to France- interail and bike all through europe to Turkey we haven't decided exact route yet- fly turkey to Lebanon (this is an unnecessary part of the trip but we both really want to go)- fly to Jordan (annoying that we have to fly but we can't go through Israel with an Lebanese stamp in out passports and we can't go through Syria)- go through a deserted areas of northern Saudi to reach our destination KUWAIT! and our new dates are 1st Aug - 30th Sept.

It's going to be epic!

p.s if anyone wants to live in our house rent free and just pay for bills for those dates let us know.

Thursday, 1 November 2012

Dear EDF

I recently received a letter from my energy provider EDF this is a bit of what they had to say....

"Raising prices is one of the hardest decisions we have to make; especially when the economic conditions are difficult. since cutting our prices in February we have seen a significant increase to many of the costs we incur to buy and supply energy. We have absorbed many of these for some time but an increase to residential electricity and gas prices has now become unavoidable."

Awww bless them...don't you just feel so sorry for them?! You can just imagine the CEO tossing and turning in his sleep as he thinks about all his poor but loyal customers. In case you can't tell this is sarcasm. Dan and I have a long running battle over whether sarcasm is a sin and I once tried to give up sarcasm I lasted 21 hours and many of them I was asleep or on my own. But anyway I'm not fasting sarcasm now, so I have decided to write a reply. which is best read in a soft voice over emotional music.

Dear EDF,
I was heart broken to read about the rise in energy prices, I know you must have been battling day and night over this decision. I had no idea you had been absorbing the costs in such a selfless way for so long. I fully comprehend why you must raise the prices- this burden is too big for you to carry alone. However this leaves me with the biggest dilemma of my life....should I stay with you my lovely provider, you've kept both my house and my heart warm since the beginning of my mortgage, or are these rises too much to bear? Can I trust that you will not do this again? If you are not my provider though, who will be? Is there any energy company that can be trusted? It's like a Shakespearean tragedy...for the modern age. Oh how I wish for the bountiful carefree years of the early 2000's, but alas...this tragedy is my destiny, and I will soldier on through the pain and turmoil to face this battle with or without you. (In short that means I'll probably go on one of the comparison website and if you're not in the top 3 I'll switch.)

Yours not that faithfully,
Hannah Jones.