My first follower and a frugal weekend

I just thought I'd say a huge thank you to the blogger over at 'Never too old' http://nevertooldtolearnfromyourmistakes.blogspot.com/ who has become my first ever follower! I've enjoyed some Saturday morning reading over in your blogging corner and it has some great advice, particularly the mention of this forum http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=1384751 looks very interesting and I'll be investigating further.

Now this weekend will be of the frugal type, as I'm saving my pennies for the next two weekends as we are off up t'North next weekend. We're staying in a hotel in Leeds (found on a discount website of course- think it was called Late Rooms) and travel has cost us each a bargainous £7.00 each way thanks to the ever reliable MegaBus- though sometimes I wonder just how they make their money, but hey I'm not complaining! And the weekend after that is my birthday night out.

Seeing as this weekend (5th Nov) is set to be wet and rainy, my bf is at work practically for the entirety of it and the usual suspects at our local are away I think it'll be pretty easy to do.

Last night, and this may seem pretty dull to most people, me and my housemate made a regular trip to the supermarket. Over the last few years we have become fed up of battling the trolley traffic which the isles are heaving with on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Instead we can shop in tranquility on a Friday night and it keeps us out of the pub too, which is always good for money saving and what's great is that you can wake up to a fully stocked cupboard on Saturday morning and enjoy a lovely breakfast. On the menu today is scrambled egg and baked beans with seeded bagels- yum, can't wait- washed down with some coffee.

I usually pay for the food shopping with our joing account card but due to not having a bank card at the moment I've been having to use the joint card to pay for stuff, so I owed our joint account around 62.00. Last night I had £40.00 cash and it really made me prioritise my purchases as I didn't want to get to the counter and do the embarrassing thing of putting stuff back. I roughly added up the shopping as I put it on the conveyorbelt and I estimated around £41.00 and it came in around 40p over my guess! The bargains I picked up were two fajita kits which were half price at £1.50, and a huge bag of carrots for 76p which I'll make loads of carrot soup with- which will be my lunches sorted for next week.

Today, it looks pretty wet and miserable so may hit the gym as I haven't been all week followed by some batch cooking, and I really want to do some photography as I haven't done any in ages. I was thinking of experimenting with some long exposure shots of the fireworks- I'll be sure to post some of my creations on here if they work out okay. Tomorrow my mum and dad want to come over to go bike riding in Richmond park (weather permitting) and then want to go out for dinner with me and the bf for my birthday-hope that means they're paying!

How are you spending your weekend? If it's frugally I would love to hear the plans! Enjoy x

This week's freebies

Today I had the pleasure of enjoying a lovely Nando's lunch, starters and all completely free of charge. It seems that on a fairly regular basis the media companies we use thank us for our business by taking us out, or putting on some entertainment along with free food and drink. This time the people from the job site Monster.co.uk came over and about twenty TMPers descended on Nandos in Holborn.

Luckily we had been able to reserve a table for a window of 45 minutes, and when all the orders were put through the list looked just like Father Christmas's present list! Surprisingly, no -one had ordered exactly the same meal and after stuffing our faces with as much chicken as possible and daringly having a go at the chicken roulette (a plate of chicken wings of varying spicy-ness,with one killer wing lurking admist the other cooler spiced wings-which was purely for entertainment value of course). The organiser from Monster was unlucky enough to select the offending wing, and after putting it into his mouth turned a bright shade of crimson. He also had carrot coloured hair, so looked an interesting site to say the least!

On our sluggish return to the office we all felt the effects of what an only be described as a food coma, but as always free food always tastes much better than when you have to pay for it so we were all a happy bunch for the remainder of the afternoon.

Elsewhere, the Metro newspaper also had some promotions within its pages; namely a 2-4-1 voucher for Christmas coffees at Starbucks (yep, they're available already and Christmas is still more than six weeks away) and a voucher for a free bottle of vitamin water at Tesco. The paper is stored safely in my canvas bag ready for when I get a chance to tear the coupons out.

What have you found/obtained for free this week? xx