A 24-hr virus, and shot ourselves in the foot

 I had some sort of 24-hour virus thing yesterday, started feeling rough with a splitting headache, nausea and feverishness in the afternoon, by 7 pm I just had to go to bed.  I felt really feverish, one minute I was freezing cold with the quilt pulled up around my ears, within half an hour I was so hot and sweaty I had to throw the quilt off....it went on like that most of the night.  I finally fell into an exhausted sleep around 4 ish, and slept until about 08.30 am.  Fortunately, I feel much better now.

Still aching from moving furniture and dragging around a very heavy and unwieldy carpet, in fact it's worse today.  I have a rotator cuff injury to my left shoulder, it was getting a lot better but now it's got much worse again, I'm in agony and have very limited movement in my left upper arm....it'll get better again in due course, it's a case of grin and bear it.  Laying the carpet the other day highlighted not only our lack of strength and stamina, but also husband's worsening cognitive abilities.  He had difficulty working out which way the carpet should be laid - I could see fairly easily and told him, he disagreed with me (of course!) and insisted it was the other way....the easiest thing was to go along with it (he gets very cross if I disagree with him!) and turn it around, until he could then see for himself that it was the wrong way round.  When it came to cutting around the corner of the fitted wardrobe, he got into a bit of a pickle, his mind just couldn't grasp how to do it (he'd have done it easily years ago) without my help.

I've been doing a budget for this year, which is showing a big increase in lots of areas.  So far we've had notification of Betty's pet insurance, our house contents insurance, my mobile phone contract, the water rates and electricity all going up - the insurances in particular have quite significant increases.  And of course our rent and service charges will be going up in April, not yet had notification of how much.  

We did shoot ourselves in the foot by not buying another house when we sold our last one in the early Noughties.  At that time the housing market was very buoyant and quick, we sold the house literally 2 days after putting it on the market, for the full asking price, which took us by surprise.  As the market was so fast-moving, we just couldn't get another house quickly, several houses we'd made viewing arrangements for got sold to other buyers before we even got to view them.  So we had to rent privately - it was meant to be a temporary arrangement, however, we ended up staying there 10 years!  We really liked the house and area and would have been happy to buy it, the letting agent kept tempting us to stay by stating the landlord would be willing to sell up soon....but he never did.  Although we'd made a significant profit on the sale of our last house and initially put that money into savings for a deposit on our next house, we ended up using it on other things once we realised we'd be staying put.  So we became trapped in the renting cycle.  If we had bought another house, with a smaller mortgage, we'd have been mortgage-free by now.....instead of which, we are now paying rent for the rest of our lives.  And the monthly rent, plus service charge, is a large chunk out of our income and always will be.  Still, it is what it is, we're not destitute by any means but the fact is we'd be so much better off if we weren't renting.  We don't of course have all the maintenance costs of owning a house, nor the buildings insurance (only the contents), so that's something good.

Although, as I've said recently, we no longer have the costs associated with the caravan (site fees, annual boiler service and maintenance costs, insurance, fuel to get there and back), everything else is going up so much that it's taking a lot out of those monthly savings, so I'm still having to make economies where I can.