A Simple Life of Luxury

Clearly I’m no large scale investor… I simply don’t have the money to do so, but I do have a cash ISA for my pension and several years ago I set up a Stocks & Shares ISA as that always seemed to be the best way to invest money. Obviously there is always a risk with such investments, but over long periods (5 years or more) index tracking funds are supposed to provide the best returns.

Now, although people call me ‘lucky Al’ it doesn’t always ring true. I started investing in Stocks and Shares in Feb 2001, I didn’t know it was going to happen at the time, but Share prices then generally fell for the next year or two, so by March 2003 I had made a loss of about 20%… Not a great start.

I held my ground though and things did gradually pick and at the moment they are performing OK. Of course I don’t check them that often, afterall they are meant to be long term savings so knowing what they are doing on a day to day basis isn’t important. Typically though I did check them today and also checked to see what the index was up to… What a day to check them, apparently the FTSE100 index has dropped today by the largest amount in 6 months. Never mind, hopefully hey will recover just as quickly tomorrow!

It was Morgan’s 2nd birthday today and he is just about old enough now to understand that it was his special day. He didn’t have a proper party today as he is having that next weekend when more people can make it, but Josh came around for tea and to play with his new toys.

As you can see from the photos below he had a new trike which can convert into a ‘chopper’…. Cool.

It is still just a bit too big for him but he can get around on it and seems to like it which is the amin thing.

I shouldn’t complain (and I’m not), as it is good as a freelancer to have lots of work on, but it does get in the way of life a bit!!… Busy, busy busy, no time to play!

No, this isn’t an “I’m feeling smug because I use a Mac” post. I do use a Mac and I do like it, but I’m feeling smug today because I’m all backed up. Actually I am good at backing things up on a regular basis. I use a program called SuperDuper! which allows me to run daily incremental back-ups in the background to an external Hard Drive. This means that the entire contents of my Hard Drive is backed up daily to another Hard Drive and as it does it automatically, as long as my computer is switched on (which it usually is) the back-ups just happen. The best thing about the back-up made by Super-Duper is that it is a bootable copy of my Hard Drive, so should my internal Drive fail I should be able to simply start up from the external drive and carry on with my work as if nothing had happened. The perfect solution for me.

I also do occasional back-ups to a third hard drive just in case. BUT, and it is quite a big but, I don’t very often actually check these backups… Well, today I have and they worked so I’m feeling smug.

So, you’ve read this far, you must have a little bit of time on your hands or else you wouldn’t be reading this…. Why not be productive and make a Back-Up of your data now… You may end up thanking me.

I’m quite busy work-wise at the moment and for some reason couldn’t sleep last night so I got up and started work at 3am. I stopped at 7am and then worked again from 8am until midday, which by my reckoning makes a full 8 hour day… I therefore decided to treat myself to an afternoon geocaching in the Welsh Hills.

First stop was Dinas Mawddwy and a strenuous walk stright up the side of the hill past lots of interesting quarry and mine workings. The cache itself was located right at the top of the hill but was easy to find. there was a bit of drizzle, but that kept me cool for the climb. This is just the sort of cache a like, a fairly hard walk to get to it, lots of spectacular scenery, peaceful surroundings and a decent hiding spot.

After finding the cache I headed back down the hill got in the car and headed off along the scenic road towards Cross Foxes. All was going well until going up the hill the engine management light came on again… I thought this was sorted as it hasn’t come on for a few weeks, but it appears to still be a problem… Back to the garage again. I’m still having problems with the tracking o the car as well as it pulls quite badly to the passenger side so I’m having to steer towards the right all the time…. Grrrrrrr….. Cars!!… Why are they so expensive and why do they always go wrong when I buy them!?

I stopped at the top of the Tal-y-Llyn pass to look for another geocache. It was pouring with rain here and I got drenched in no time at all and to make matters worse I didn’t find the cache either. At least switching the engine off for a couple of minutes meant the warning light had gone out and the car was back up to full power.

next stop was Aberlefenni and a pleasant walk alongside another quarry to a nice easy cache. Again the landscape was pretty stunning, not exactly untouched by humans, but impressive all the same. I love the noise of walking over slate tips too.

A nice day out in Wales, a little damp at times, my car is annoying me again now and no one had done my work for me when I got home, but it is good to have some fresh air now and then and I’m sure I’ll sleep better because of it tonight.

We’ve had a ‘big boys bed’ for Morgan for a while now but he has always wanted to sleep in his cot.  It’s not been a problem and he’s been sleeping well in his cot and at least he’s contained when he wakes up.  Well, he was contained until a few days ago when he figured out how to climb out!  And he was sleeping well until about a week ago when he started waking up several times a night. 

We thought there was little point having him in the cot and nearly killing himself to climb out when he wakes up so we convinced him to try sleeping in his bed last night.  He wasn’t very happy about it as he really likes his cot but the promise of a ’special present’ if he slept in his bed all night soon did the trick and once he was asleep we didn’t here a peep from him until 7am this morning.

We’ll try again tonight but hopefully we can get rid of the cot now and we’ll have a bit more space.

Sleep well Morgan xxx

I wasn’t really ‘THAT’ into collecting geocoins, although some of them really are little works of art. If I found one in a geocache I did take it and move it on and log it on the geocaching website, and I do like having the little icons I get for my troubles. Some people take this to a different level though and have huge collections of them that they carry around with them for other people to ‘discover’. The Dancing Samurai’s and Red kite who we met yesterday had quite a few coins with them so we took a look through them and I have now logged them on my geocaching profile..

All of a sudden I have 36 trackable items listed… A mere drop in the ocean!

Some of them are nice though, I think my favourites so far have to be the Dressel Dragons geocoin that I released recently and the Compass Rose geocoins that I discovered yesterday. The one shown above is a ‘Dreamcatcher Geocoin’.

We had the first outing of aber-cachers yesterday. Me Anna and Morgan (forcesofnature) and Dave and Sarah (IdleRocks) headed off from Ynyslas, filled up with diesel in Aberystwyth then headed south to Aberaeron where we met up with Tinkerbell, Lesley (Red Kite) and Dan and Vanya (The Dancing Samurai’s).

The first cache of the day was a new one hidden by aber-cacher member Jennie.m. It involved a nice walk along a flat track next to the River Aeron. A really nice, family friendly cache with lots to see.. A nice river, plenty of birdlife and some spring flowers just beginning to bloom. Morgan set the pace but the cache was found easily.

next up we intended to do a cache called ‘Of Gorse you can see the sea’, but a couple of the crew were a little hesistant about part of the path so we knocked that one on the head (Well, Dan did quite literally!) and headed off instead to a cache called Craig Ddu on the coast path aboce Cei Bach. Morgan fell asleep as we arrived at the car park for this one, so Anna stayed in the car with him and the rest of us headed up the muddy path to the cache which provided some lovely views of Cardigan Bay and the beach below.

After finding the cache we headed back down, found Anna and Morgan and then had a little play on the beach. A good day out and good to finally put some faces to the names of the aber-cachers.

I found Red Kite’s mad dash to get First to Find (FTF) on a new geocache in Aberystwyth quite amusing last night. Aber-cachers was quite busy which is good and there were a few people online posting in the forums, when we discovered that a brand new cache called ‘Off Yer Trolley’ hidden by The Dancing Samurai’s had just been published.

As soon as we saw this, I noticed that Red Kite had gone offline and guessed she must have grabbed her GPSr and rushed out the door to find the new cache. Not long after that she was back, pleased with her little expedition and did indeed get the FTF.. Not surprising really as it was virtually on her doorstep. Quite funny though to imagine her rummaging around in the dark looking for a new geocache.

It wasn’t the only new geocache published in this area last night either. There’s a new cache at Dinas Mawddwy that looks really good. It certainly looks as though Gwyddno put lots of effort into hiding this one. and I can’t wait to get out there and find it.

Geocaching seems to be growing in popularity in the area which is great news.

Regular readers of this blog will know that one of the key factors that allow me to live a ‘Simple Life of Luxury‘ is the fact that I chose to turn my back on my geology training and become a freelance website designer. I guess there was never a conscious decision to become a website designer, that side of things just happened, but there was a conscious effort NOT to get a ‘normal’ 9-5 job. Being self-employed seemed to offer numerous advantages along the lines of more flexibility with my time and the ability to work when I want to work.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple and I do still generally have to work fairly normal hours most days in order to fit things in around family life. Morgan needs collecting from nursery each day, I need to spend time with Anna in the evenings and I need to sleep too. However, I can if I wish take time off during the week to go windsurfing or geocaching, I quite often do and my ‘Simple Life of Luxury’ is better because of it.

Self-employment does of course have its downsides, I do often work in the evenings just to keep on top of things, there is of course always the worry of where the next client of next project will come from and whether or not I’ll have enough work on to pay the bills next month, or this time next year. Working from home means I get work related phone calls at all hours and can’t ‘go home’ from work. But overall the benefits do outweigh these

I’m pretty busy at the moment so seem to be spending quite a bit of time in my office, hence the photo of my ‘workspace’. At the moment my main tasks are:

• As always I’m working on Fairies World.
• Keeping Forces-of-Nature, my personal site ticking along.
• Building a website for the South African and Rhodesian Engineer Corps.
• Building an Amazon affiliate store for an electrical gods shop.
• Working on various scripts and things for HeadCandi, a headphone and speaker shop.
• I’ve just set up a new site for Geocachers in Wales.
• Working on a website for a running shop in the Forest of Dean

And of course as a freelancer I’m spending plenty of time keeping on top of the books, answering the phone and generally running my business.

I did try to go windsurfing just now, but the wind dropped off, so I’m back in my office writing this… Annoyingly this is actually the 2nd time I’ve written it as a power cut meant the last one disappeared before my very eyes!

Of course, now that I’ve finished this, the wind has picked up again!