how much? blimey.

Bit of an odd weekend.

It was my intention to do a whole bunch of stuff and, to be fair, I did do a whole bunch of stuff. The oddness was that some of the things I did took absolutely ages, which meant that there just wasn't the time to do everything I planned.

I think part of the problem was that I remembered that this weekend I've got a four day weekend. So, rather than cut my loses on the things that took a long time, I went ahead with them anyway, thinking that I could play catch-up next weekend.

The big problem with this is that I then end up with far too much to do at the weekend, especially when my primary aim is likely to be to relax.

One of the things I really do have to do but didn't get the time to is move some credit card debt around. I've not really been paying proper attention to them and one of them hit a (low) limit and I don't want to incur any over-the-limit charges. I could increase the limit, I guess, but that would be a little counter-productive.

A thing I did do - and one of the ones that took a lot more time than anticipated - was sort out my e-bay auctions. I've ranted before about the utterly retarded thing e-bay has done with postage costs.

I have a work around using the "courier" option, but the problem with it is that it means it's a lot more effort, because I have to actively ask people what postage they want (generally I offer 1st class recorded and regular second class). This generally adds a whole bunch of steps into the process that mean it takes longer.

But anyway, the thing I wanted to mention is that the e-baying went surprisingly well. I mean, there was the usual thing of stuff selling for meagre amounts, like 5p or £1 when they cost me twenty time that, but a couple of things actual sold for half-decent prices. So yeah, it's not all bad news.

I've been trying to work out ways I can slice out extra spending. One of them was to kill off my AOL subscription. This was originally for dial-up modem that I kept in case my broadband went totally tits up.

However, in all the years I've had broadband it's only gone tits up to that degree twice, and even then the time it took to fix wasn't enough for me to break out the dial-up. Plus we have broadband at work (admittedly it's just about the world's slowest broadband, but it's quicker than dial-up).

Also, there were two other factors. Firstly, I'd heard it was a nightmare to get them to cancel and secondly they were planning switching it to "broadband" and charging more than double.

Obviously, the second one didn't make sense - my broadband wasn't with them, so I dunno how they figured it was broadband, but the more intriguing one was that cancelling my subscription was actually incredibly easy. It just took one two-minute phone call. I phoned up, asked to cancel, they did it. It was really that simple :/.

At the time I was worried they'd done something sneaky and maybe not cancelled it properly, but it seems they have ad I've not been charged since.

Another thing I'm thinking of cutting down or reducing is my phones. I have a subscription phone, but I should really switch to a pay-as-you-go service, because I just don't use it enough to justify the expense.

And also I need to investigate my BT landline - they suddenly seem to have basically doubled my bill for no apparent reason :/.