Be Excellent To Each Other

Couple of nested Yays for me.

After nearly 9 years, we've finally managed to sell our "spare" house and make a modest profit. Yay!
This means we can invest some of that money in our current house. New kitchen and bathroom AT LEAST. Yay!
After crunching a load of numbers and checking a lot of regulations and reliefs, our profit comes in below the threshold for Capital Gains Tax, so Mr HMRC doesn't take a big wet bite of our shiny equity. Yay!
As a knock on, I don't have to do anymore bloody self assessment tax returns. YAY!

So... it's been a satisfying couple of days.

That Is a lot of yay’s.

Good work Davpaz!

Have just been approved for a mortgage. Passed all the checks and everything.

I feel all grown up and very scared.

Not your first mortgage, surely?

But also, YAY!

Yes. First on my own.

Mortgage broker has found a new Mortgage deal £90 a month cheaper than the Banks offer. Application submitted.

Eyy that's great man!

And today’s bit of good news from the same group.

That's brilliant!

Yep, I can’t imagine how much of a difference that will make to them.

I got a 25% pay rise!

This is great because I love the company and the people I work with and it'd been a few years since I joined and I'd had nothing change at all, not that I'm overly bothered about the remuneration I receive, but it's good that I actually feel appreciated

Congrats!

Woohoo!

Yoink! Fantastic!

That is awesome

A bird poo'd on me today.

Did you forget to put the glass back into your coffee table?

POTW

I was going to say, "Photo, or it didn't happen," but there's probably a video as well and I'm pretty sure I don't want to see it, although I may inadvertantly see it anyway, during my peregrinations of the web.

Just out of curiosity, you understand, was it expensive to arrange?

Won the tickets tickets in the Commonwealth Games ballot for the table tennis and the rhythmic gymnastics!

Just done my car/emissions tax for a year. Sheer luck that I noticed - I got far too worried about where to put the eurolites headlamp stickers to prevent me blinding people in Europe, and tried various sites at random to tell me about my car, one of which pointed out I only had it taxed till the end of the month. Luck! And I had read that I should have my V5C with me, and could use that for the tax. Simple, but I could so easily have missed it totally.

I'd been driving round with no MOT for a fortnight without realising. It was only when I wanted to buy some headlight bulbs and the Halfords website would only let me check stock after I put my number plate in and then it helpfully told me the MOT was expired. Then I went to get an MOT and the garage told me that it's a class 7 and the council place will have to do it, which they did do but told me that actually the garage could have done it anyway because it's obviously not a commercial vehicle. But anyway sorted now so yay.

Also managed yesterday to swap the absolutely woeful standard headlights for some much better ones off a scrapper:

This looks a solid weekend away for Team MaliCool

https://twitter.com/TruckFestival/statu ... 9017512963

⚡️ LIKE AND RETWEET FOR THE CHANCE TO WIN 6 x ZODIAC WEEKEND TICKETS AND £200 BAR TAB ⚡️⁣

We are thrilled to announce Sam Fender, Kasabian, Bombay Bicycle club, The Kooks, Blossoms and so much more for Truck Festival 2022!

FINAL tickets are now on sale! https://t.co/tfGmTWXrLQ pic.twitter.com/i8MM210hrH

— Truck Festival (@TruckFestival) November 29, 2021

All the best people are going.

And Kasabian!

I've heard of most of the headliners and the last two but you aren't telling me that all the ones in between are not just some random made up names.

I don't see Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs

If you hop to BBC sounds app, find today's Skentelbery show, then flick forward to two hours in, you can hear me winning a competition.

After waiting since April for a build date for my lease car, the leasing company called me on Wednesday, but I couldn’t pick up as I was doing some last minute shopping using my daughter’s car. They left a message, but only to say “there’s news about your car.” I decided to wait until I got home before calling them, but on the drive home, they called again and I still couldn’t answer. I was expecting them to say they had a build date some time in the new year.

When I got home I saw they’d also mailed me to say another customer had ordered the same make, model and spec as the one I’d ordered, but they’d cancelled their order so the dealership was holding it for me until 4.45, but if they hadn’t heard from me by then they’d try the next customer in the queue. They also said that if I wanted it, they could deliver on 29 December. I got back to them with about 20 minutes to spare, so I should have it by next Wednesday.

I’m just hoping I have a while to enjoy it before I go in hospital for my bypass surgery, when I won’t be able to drive again for about a month.

That is fab news.

The last I heard, mine was in the port in Germany.

Christ, eight months build time? What is it?

Part of the bargain with the fleet purchasers I imagine, less profit so lower priority, wait until batches of similar spec are going through to minimise exceptional expenditure.

I was even lucky to get my factory-order Superb in only however-many months (5?), though that was partly down to a global Alcantara shortage which didn't get the same press as the chip shortage that still isn't resolved.

I am at 6 months for mine. Still not here.

Fucking amazing that they sneak the ordered car in just before year end AND do the customer a huge favour at the same time...

I had to know, so went hunting - only 3 almost to the day from ordering to posting a photograph of it in the drive.

Briskoda forum had stories before and during my interminable wait of people waiting much longer for more mundane specs though. I guess mine had a lot of additional profit in it.

Skoda Kamiq 1.0 TSI 95 SE, and according to them it's someone else's order. I have no idea whether this is true, or if it is, how long they'd been waiting. As with many things in the motor trade, this may be complete bullshit, but there's not a lot I can do about it.

The GOOD thing is that I'm getting it at the price quoted in April. I looked at their current offer for the same model and spec today and it's £60 per month more than I'll be paying.

I've been told to order my car now to get in July, but that may be car dealer bullshit.

Merry Christmas everyone!

A hella flush Nissan Cube.

It is right. It is taking a huge time to get built.

Mine was ordered in July.

From what I understand there’s all sorts of supply chain issues with car manufacturers at the moment which means they cannot make the cars fast enough.

I know that BMW are also struggling thanks to the chip shortage that’s caused by the cryptoknobs, loads of people I know have had to accept their car without some of the features they ordered (particularly touch screens) - for a refund on those bits, of course.

Yes. My car was built to a point that did not need the chips.

Is it because of the crypto? It is effecting everything.

I mean, I'm sure there's other factors other than the cryptominers, but my prejudice tells me that they're all responsible for everything, probably including COVID.

Supply chain issues are obviously all because of Brexit having a domino effect across the globe, so the whole thing is Boris' fault. QED.

Didn't a chip factory burn down?

Every office on the face of the planet had to triple their VPN infrastructure, laptop estate, and various other things basically overnight. At the same time everyone stopped buying cars because nobody could go anywhere so there was a massive gap in production

Risk-aversity means most cars depend on chip technology a decade and more old. When the car makers suddenly weren't selling cars they cancelled all the orders and companies like intel said "cool, all those old factories are idle, let's modernise them!"

When the car companies came back asking for obsolete tech the capacity wasn't there anymore, and they can't even switch to newer-but-still obsolete chip processes, never mind current stuff, because of that risk-aversity. The chip companies could turn it around easily because it's trivially understood it's so old but there are years of verification and surrounding changes before it can be used in a car.

I am feeling really proud of myself. I get crippling anxiety speaking on the phone to anyone but my Ma, but on Friday I had a lovely conversation with forum alumni Ange, for over two hours. Then today, perhaps spurred on by that, I agreed to talk to a journalist from the Sunday Telegraph about setting up our vegetable garden during the pandemic and how and why we chose to do that, and it didn’t feel weird or strained at all.

I’d had an awful, unexpected NHS phone call on Thursday which made me clam right up and really shook me up, so to do this *completely normal for most people thing* feels huge to me today.