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July 2017 Allotment Update
It’s been a while is becoming my catch-phrase this past couple of weeks. I sat down at my desk on Monday and started to go through all my recipes on the blog. There are now over 550 published articles on the blog. It’s taking me some time to go through them all, dust them off, and start sharing them again. I hadn’t done that in months. Since the middle of May in fact when life (and death) got in the way of having time to do anything other than blog and work. The longer I continued to focus on work and family, the more difficult it became to sit at…
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Tuesday 19th July, 2011 – Tracker Mortgage Update
I’m crying. Big fat dirty tears of despair are running down my face. It’s the kind of ugly cry that I never want to be seen in public, yet here I am. Standing in the Community Welfare Office with my husband, trying to figure out how we will manage while he’s temporarily laid off over the Summer months. The Welfare Officer shifts in her seat, embarrassed. I turn and push the buggy away from the window that separates (protects) the staff from the public. Eyes sympathetically follow me as I wrestle a tissue out of my pocket, push the buggy with our 2 year old with one hand and blow.…
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What Happens From Here?
I’m starting 2017 in a state of flux because so much is up in the air. What happens from here? How will we manage our mortgage/bills and what are my plans for the future? It’s a question I’ve been asked quite a bit over the past few weeks or so, since we finally got our letter and confirmation from Ulster Bank that we were indeed on the wrong interest rate for about the last 6+ years. We have been wrongly charged, we know that we ended up in arrears, needlessly for a substantial part of them.
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The Solstice Brought Hope
Wednesday morning, long, LONG, before the dawn, I tweeted a message about the days getting longer and that the Solstice brought hope. I’ve not been sleeping very well, the stress of everything has been taking its toll. Later on that day as I waited for the letterbox to click, just as I have done everyday since the CEO of Ulster Bank made that promise at the Oireachtas Finance Committee, I felt that hope wane. The letterbox didn’t click at the usual time and the day got longer. Still no sign of the postman. I sent out a message to the neighbours asking had the postman been yet. Yes, he had,…
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Banking On Christmas Stress
It’s not the lack of money for groceries that gets me in the end because I don’t notice the difference. It’s the stress; the feeling of tightness in my chest when I think about the bills, the weird anxiety when I consider getting the car past the NCT, and the massive gulp when we pay the mortgage every month. Then absolute screaming frustration when another niggly thing crops up that we have to pay for, that I have to fit into the budget. Somedays I feel like I’m wandering around in an empty house, in an empty town, in an empty country, with nobody to talk to about how it…
