Financial & Travel Musings

It’s been a while since I really reviewed the insurance that I was paying out and so the rise in the price from last time is quite shocking.

Funnily enough, although I generally keep a close eye on the car insurance premiums, they’ve experienced the largest rise by far: almost doubling in a single year and for no reason that seems in any way obvious. In fact the rise is so great in this case that the insurance on the cheapo small car is now greater than that on the large car which we do most of the driving in!

So I’m off tracking down insurance quotes once more. A depressing task as always but at least the Internet lets me avoid the pushy insurance guys and, usually, gets me a better price than I’d get by just walking into an insurance place.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Funnily enough, although I’m actually losing weight at the moment, I don’t know the answer to that question as I’m doing a lot of other things at the same time.

That’s the problem in selecting the best diet pills for you, of course. The really successful dieters do a number of things at once and therefore lose weight relatively quickly. Thus, for me it’s a change to a low salt, low sugar, low fat diet (which remains enjoyable to eat in spite of what you might think) combined with more exercise (so far, just long walks) and thrown into that mix is Bladderwrack.

Why Bladderwrack? Well, that’s because it was the cheapest diet pill on the shelf in the supermarket. Whilst I have actually done some research on the diet pills available in practice I just went for that one on price on the assumption that they all work to some extent and therefore it makes more sense to try the cheapest generic brand first before splashing out on the more expensive options available. Having said that, it does target what I think may be one of my weight problems in that it speeds up the metabolism and, for example, a fat absorber isn’t going to do much for me when I’m on a low fat diet.

However, despite my caveat that I’m doing more than one thing to lose weight, by chance I missed out the pills on a couple of days and the weight seemed to go up a pound or two. Taking the full complement per day does appear to make a noticeable difference.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Between one thing and another we ended up being quite busy over Easter, mostly with “holiday mode” activities as the kids have been off the last two weeks.

The list of places has been long and mostly outside to let us take advantage of the relatively good weather. Thus we’ve been off to Carnfunnock Country Park which we’d only ever been at the entrance of before and were surprised to find that it’s got loads of attractions for children so we’ll be off to that again in the future. Silent Valley is somewhere that I used to go to when I was a child so it’s interesting to see how much it has changed when I took my own children there. No longer can you drive right up to the dam so it was quite a long walk as the shuttle doesn’t start operating until next month. For the kids there’s quite a large open area before the first of the dams and a rather cute little coffee shop.

Most of that was in the first week of Easter as we were all felled by a throat infection for most of the second week which knocked out several planned trips which we’ll be spreading over the weekends in the next couple of months.

Popularity: 8% [?]