Financial & Travel Musings

With Christmas just out of the way that means that 1) the sales are getting underway and 2) Valentine’s Day isn’t far off.

That combination makes for an excellent time to be shopping for your loved one right now. Shopping that little bit early also has the advantage that you’ll not find yourself madly racing around in some last minute rush to find something appropriate as most of us often do.

Lingerie generally figures quite high on the Valentine’s Day shopping list for most guys but generally lingerie of the fairly unrealistic kind. Added to that there’s the business of knowing what size to get.

Rather than hit the shops immediately what you need to do first is to check out the labels on the stuff that she’s wearing right now and note down all the sizes. Confusingly, some products require larger than normal sizes (typically anything tight fitting and made of not too stretchy materials eg leather/pvc and the like) and you’ll find that you generally need to go up a couple of sizes on things like that.

What makes should you go for? Well, the game plan is that she’ll actually wear the stuff so, for the most part, you can pretty much forget about nipping into the local sex shop and stocking up there. For one thing, it’s generally cheapo stuff of relatively poor quality material and manufacture and secondly chances are that she’ll not be too keen on wearing it anyway. It’s much better to look towards something like Shirley of Hollywood which has quite an extensive range of wearable yet sexy stuff and at pretty reasonable prices too (that little item in the photo is under $20).

So, sizes first, shopping second and do both now!

Popularity: 23% [?]

Wendy reckons that I’m turning into a perpetual student with signing up for yet another degree just after I’ve completed one.

In practice, I don’t really think of the course starting in February as the start of another degree at the moment although having said that I have gone as far as allocating it to a psychology degree. Separately from that I’ve also run up a list of all the courses from the current prospectus that I might like to do and that equates to about three degrees and something like 20 years odd of courses.

Will I do them all though? Well, I won’t be able to do all those on that list for the simple reason that they won’t stay on the prospectus for long enough for me to do them all. However, I’m sure that there’ll be equivalent courses that’ll come up and presumably there’ll also be courses that I’d like to do which aren’t in the current prospectus. Of the three-ish degrees I’m not sure about the psychology one right now but I figure that I’ll get around to the physics degree in due course as it’s been on my to-do list for getting on for 20 years now.

One thing that’s encouraging me down this route is “wee Stuart” who was well into his 80s when I was starting off on the modern languages degree and died during the second of the French courses. Despite his age his mind was far more active than the rest of us and his fluency in French was miles ahead of everyone in our study group. I don’t know if it was the French that kept his mind active but I’m sure it played a part.

Popularity: 22% [?]

We’re moving back to our UK place soon and have already started thinking about updating some aspects of it as it’s been quite a while since it last had a facelift.

One possibility that would make quite a difference to the overall look of the place is to change the doors or at least some of the door hardware ie the door handles. Although that sounds like a fairly trivial change in fact it can make quite a difference to the feel of the house eg if we chose antique handles to replace the purely ancient ones there at the moment.

I’d be quite tempted to change one or two of the doors too but that’s a slightly longer term project as we figure that a large number of small updates is going to make a more significant change to the house than a small number of more major ones. So, as well as the door handles (the work of a morning perhaps), we’ve also penciled in changes to the bathroom fittings.

Popularity: 16% [?]