Financial & Travel Musings

Not sleeping well over the summer is something that many people expect because of the longer days and warmer weather. We’re conditioned to sleep when it’s dark and, of course, it’s light for a lot more hours over the summer months. Add to that the warmer weather and it makes for a difficult time to get a good sleep.

However, another problem is often caused by your mattress which is one of the pieces of furniture that most people tend to completely neglect until they’re in a pretty bad state. That’s understandable in many ways as you get used to the shape of an old mattress underneath you but even aside from the problems of worn out springs there’s the not so small issue of dust mites which build up over the years.

So if you’re still not sleeping too well as we edge into winter, think about the mattress underneath you.

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If you’ve had a reasonable summer season chances are that it’s time to get the pre-winter maintenance tasks done before putting all the equipment away ’til the next season.

The physical things are easy enough to identify and though they’re a bit of a pain to do they need doing before everything is put away or you’ll just have a whole heap of trouble next time you try to use the stuff. Where it’s less obvious is for the intangible things like motorhome insurance which is something that’s very easily forgotten about but, if anything, even more important than getting the lawnmower cleaned.

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For the first time in a long time I find that I’m finishing off a number of courses at pretty much the same time.

First to go was Human Biology (SK277) which I really miss doing as it was a really, really interesting course. It was far from being an easy course for me as it was my first ever biology course but the fascination more than made up for that and I ended up getting through the course books much faster than expected.

This week I posted off the final assignment for the Investigative Biology (SXR270) summer school. They’re an odd breed of course as they basically only take up a couple of weeks of your life but have such an intensity that it can take a month or two to wind down from them.

Coming soon is the final assignment for the Astronomy (S282) course which seems to be taking forever to do. I’m really dreading the exam for that but then so are a lot of people so perhaps it’ll work out fine in the end.

Alongside that I’m well into the assignment for the Planets course (S196) which I should get away sometime in the next week or two.

By the time I’ve that lot done “all” I’ll be doing is the revision for the astronomy exam which is in mid-October so, all being well, I’ll understand it much better than I do now. And the Molecules, Medicines and Drugs course (SK185) which is just as fascinating as the human biology one was so chances are that I’ll finish it well before the end January deadline.

As this should leave me with a bit of a lull in activity I’m toying with fitting in another course, probably the one on fossils which is in its last run this year and sounds both easy and interesting.

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