Ended up having to spend something today - $4.35 on petrol for the lawn mower (it ran out of gas half-way through mowing the lawn). Aside from that everything went according to plan - mowed lawn, cleaned gutters, shoveled four wheel barrow loads of earth from one side of the pool to the other (in preparation for putting down some gravel), and have a quick swim. DW has organised some of her digital photos taken this holiday season, so I'll burn them onto a CD tonight so she can take them to get printed tomorrow. She got a coupon for free digital photo printing from my dad (it came with the camera he bought).
It's the last day of my "at home" vacation tomorrow (back to work on Monday), so I'll have to try get the last of my stock portfolio data entered into Quicken and file away the big pile of paid bills and financial statements that's been building up for the past few months.
I'm wondering if I'll receive tax information for my US stock holdings and have to lodge a US tax return. So far I haven't sold any of my "little book" portfolio shares, but I did receive some dividends that had US foreign tax withheld. Not sure if I need to do a US tax return, or can just declare the dividends and claim the foreign tax credit on my Australian Tax return.
Thursday, 4 January 2007
Day 3 down, 362 to go
A very pleasant day out, with an evening walk around Taronga Zoo for three hours at dusk with my family and my parents. My parents have a "zoo friends" pass ($190 pa) so they are able to take DS1 to the zoo as often as he likes. Tonight (after closing) there was a special "picnic night" offer available to Zoo Friends and their guests, so DW and I got in for just $15 each (normal entry cost is $32 per adult). My parents paid for the entry and brought some sandwiches for our "picnic" dinner, so this was a "no spend" outing from my point of view.
My parents had also brought in some takeaway noodles for DW and themselves, and also brought some extra for me. Unfortunately I "fell off the wagon" and had some fried noodles and a couple of spring rolls for dinner - definitely NOT on my healthy eating plan. To make matters worse I then also ate the ham and turkey sandwiches I was supposed to have had for dinner as a late night supper ;(
Hopefully the three hours of walking around the zoo provided some extra exercise to offset some of this bout of over-eating. Although from memory a serve of fried noodles would take about 100 hours of walking to burn off the extra calories!
My only spending for the day was $18.38 worth of groceries I bought on the way home (so that I won't need to go to the shops for anything tomorrow). I'm planning to mow the lawn, clean out the gutters and do some more "earthworks" around the pool tomorrow, so it *should* be a no spend, high exercise and healthy diet day.... we'll see how it turns out.
The Australian stock market was up around 20+ points (to another "all-time high") before lunch, but then plummeted during the afternoon to end around 26 pts down for the day. This translates to a paper "loss" of around $2500 to my net worth, but as I'm a "long term" investor I try to just ignore the daily ups and downs of the market. Better to just concentrate on the things I can (and should) control - like my diet and exercise.
My parents had also brought in some takeaway noodles for DW and themselves, and also brought some extra for me. Unfortunately I "fell off the wagon" and had some fried noodles and a couple of spring rolls for dinner - definitely NOT on my healthy eating plan. To make matters worse I then also ate the ham and turkey sandwiches I was supposed to have had for dinner as a late night supper ;(
Hopefully the three hours of walking around the zoo provided some extra exercise to offset some of this bout of over-eating. Although from memory a serve of fried noodles would take about 100 hours of walking to burn off the extra calories!
My only spending for the day was $18.38 worth of groceries I bought on the way home (so that I won't need to go to the shops for anything tomorrow). I'm planning to mow the lawn, clean out the gutters and do some more "earthworks" around the pool tomorrow, so it *should* be a no spend, high exercise and healthy diet day.... we'll see how it turns out.
The Australian stock market was up around 20+ points (to another "all-time high") before lunch, but then plummeted during the afternoon to end around 26 pts down for the day. This translates to a paper "loss" of around $2500 to my net worth, but as I'm a "long term" investor I try to just ignore the daily ups and downs of the market. Better to just concentrate on the things I can (and should) control - like my diet and exercise.
Tuesday, 2 January 2007
Day 2 down, 363 to go
Another OK day - I managed to just eat mostly the "right stuff" again (hey, maybe I should write an eBook called the "The Right Stuff Diet"! - if so I'd better take the "before" shots for the cover before I get too trim, taut and terrific) and I got a bit of exercise cleaning the pool and shoveling some dirt from one side of the garden to the other. [We had bought a tonne of small river pebbles last year, and the plan is to put them between the path surrounding our pool and the back fence in place of the grass that is currently there. Hopefully the gravel will look a bit neater than the overgrown grass.] My weight is down to 98.6 kg - at the moment weight is dropping off me as if I'm on "The Biggest Loser". I know my weight won't keep dropping at this rate, but if I stick strictly to my diet plan it should average more than 1kg a week.
For the record, today was a fairly typical "diet" day, which comprised:
* 4 "weetbix" for breakfast, with 150ml skim milk and 150 lite soy milk, 4 tspn sugar and 4 tspn "aktavite" (a type of chocolate flavoured, vitamin enriched "sprinkles")
* a low-salt, lite ham and alfalfa sprout sandwich (on 2 slices of white, hyfibre bread)
* 1 navel orange
* 1 tin of chicken/veg soup and 4 slices of white, hyfibre bread (this isn't particularly healthy)
* 100g grapes
* 100g grilled, lean beef
* 50g grilled pumkin
* 100g boiled rice
* 3 "frosty fruit" ice-blocks (frozen fruit juice) (I should only have 1 of these as dessert each day, but it's still better than junk food or icecream)
Today wasn't a "no spend" day as I had to buy some groceries ($43.42) and top up the petrol ($14.97) to last until I go back to work next week. The petrol purchase wasn't too bad as the tank was still half full (not doing as much driving while on vacation at home), Tuesday is the day of the week where petrol price is cheapest around here, I had a 4c/L discount coupon from my shopping docket (which reduced the price to $1.109 per Litre), and I paid for it with the VISA "giftcard" that I'd got from my company as a "bonus".
I made some progress entering the current stock holdings for one of my margin accounts into Quicken (two more margin accounts to go), then my "Little Book" portfolio transactions for the past 7 months). That's the easy part. Going through the past 10-15 years worth of my broker and margin lender statements and my tax returns to fill in all the historical transaction data is not going to be fun. Luckily I still have an old copy of my Quicken files from '98 which had all my stock transactions up to that time entered correctly, so I'll just have to copy and enter them into the new version of Quicken, then work my way forward from '98 and check if the final stock holdings then reconcile. It's times like this that I hate DRPs, stock splits, takeover (especially cash/stock combos) etc. Another reason to only invest in 10-12 individual stocks, or, better yet, index funds).
DS1 visited my parents and they took him out to the cinema to see "Happy Feet". As Tuesday is the "half price" day at the cinemas here, the cost for two "seniors" and a child would have been reasonable. DW took DS1 and DS2 for a walk in the afternoon and collected some free wood chips for our garden beds from up the road (the local council had cut down a dead/dying tree last week and left a pile of wood chips on the side of the road. They usually come back after a week or so and clean up anything that's left).
One good thing with blogging is that I can write stuff that probably only I'm interested in ;)
For the record, today was a fairly typical "diet" day, which comprised:
* 4 "weetbix" for breakfast, with 150ml skim milk and 150 lite soy milk, 4 tspn sugar and 4 tspn "aktavite" (a type of chocolate flavoured, vitamin enriched "sprinkles")
* a low-salt, lite ham and alfalfa sprout sandwich (on 2 slices of white, hyfibre bread)
* 1 navel orange
* 1 tin of chicken/veg soup and 4 slices of white, hyfibre bread (this isn't particularly healthy)
* 100g grapes
* 100g grilled, lean beef
* 50g grilled pumkin
* 100g boiled rice
* 3 "frosty fruit" ice-blocks (frozen fruit juice) (I should only have 1 of these as dessert each day, but it's still better than junk food or icecream)
Today wasn't a "no spend" day as I had to buy some groceries ($43.42) and top up the petrol ($14.97) to last until I go back to work next week. The petrol purchase wasn't too bad as the tank was still half full (not doing as much driving while on vacation at home), Tuesday is the day of the week where petrol price is cheapest around here, I had a 4c/L discount coupon from my shopping docket (which reduced the price to $1.109 per Litre), and I paid for it with the VISA "giftcard" that I'd got from my company as a "bonus".
I made some progress entering the current stock holdings for one of my margin accounts into Quicken (two more margin accounts to go), then my "Little Book" portfolio transactions for the past 7 months). That's the easy part. Going through the past 10-15 years worth of my broker and margin lender statements and my tax returns to fill in all the historical transaction data is not going to be fun. Luckily I still have an old copy of my Quicken files from '98 which had all my stock transactions up to that time entered correctly, so I'll just have to copy and enter them into the new version of Quicken, then work my way forward from '98 and check if the final stock holdings then reconcile. It's times like this that I hate DRPs, stock splits, takeover (especially cash/stock combos) etc. Another reason to only invest in 10-12 individual stocks, or, better yet, index funds).
DS1 visited my parents and they took him out to the cinema to see "Happy Feet". As Tuesday is the "half price" day at the cinemas here, the cost for two "seniors" and a child would have been reasonable. DW took DS1 and DS2 for a walk in the afternoon and collected some free wood chips for our garden beds from up the road (the local council had cut down a dead/dying tree last week and left a pile of wood chips on the side of the road. They usually come back after a week or so and clean up anything that's left).
One good thing with blogging is that I can write stuff that probably only I'm interested in ;)
Day 1 down, 364 to go
My New Year's Resolution for healthy living has survived the first day - although I stuck to my healthy eating plan (no snacking on left-over Christmas "goodies"), my exercise for Day 1 was limited to cleaning out the swimming pool. At the moment it's cool and raining in Sydney - most unusual for Jan 1 as it's often 40 deg C and clear blue skies at this time of year. Especially unusual considering that we're been in a drought for the past two or three years and the main dam supplying Sydney's water is down to around 30%. Luckily some of the rain today fell in the dam's catchment area.
As soon as the weather fines up I'll start doing half an hour of laps in our backyard pool each day while I'm still on vacation. Until then I'm making do reading the health and fitness blog written by a fitness women which has some interesting posts. The most immediately useful one is the ten tips for starting a training program. Although some of the tips (such as "Live in an area that provides opportunities for physical activity") seem a bit extreme - I'm about to move house just to be closer to a gym!
This blog also has some useful tips on how to handle the constant challenge of eating out without ruining your diet. Although I tend to "brown bag" my lunch (a tin of no added salt baked beans (for fibre), a tin of salmon in springwater, and some "high fibre" bread) for both health and budget reasons, there is sometimes no alternative to eating out - especially if it's a business lunch with the boss.
Another interesting post was the tip to stay hydrated by drinking a couple of glasses of water after drinking a cup of coffee (as it is a diuretic). I don't drink coffee, but I drink LOTS of diet coke - I'm trying to cut back from a couple of 2L bottles a DAY, to just one 2L bottle lasting all day at work and at home with dinner. I'll make an extra effort to take a bottle of filtered water along to work, so I can alternate between the caffeinated drink and plain water throughout the day. Hopefully the reduction in caffeine plus the weight loss will get my blood pressure back down below the "borderline" readings I got last time I visited my doctor. Avoiding having to start taking blood pressure medication by losing weight and execising would also save a lot of money in the long run.
Anyhow, my weight is currently 99.1 kg (goal <78 kg) - I'll see how well I've done by the time I go back to work next Monday. I actually find it easier to stick to my diet at work, as I can eat the same things for breakfast and lunch each day - the main challenge is to resist having an afternoon "sugar fix" of junk food. Although the first week of a diet tends to be largely loss of fluids, I should be able to lose around 0.5 - 1.0 kg per week just by eating "healthy" foods without any junk or snack foods, and doing half an hour of aerobic exercise each day.
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As soon as the weather fines up I'll start doing half an hour of laps in our backyard pool each day while I'm still on vacation. Until then I'm making do reading the health and fitness blog written by a fitness women which has some interesting posts. The most immediately useful one is the ten tips for starting a training program. Although some of the tips (such as "Live in an area that provides opportunities for physical activity") seem a bit extreme - I'm about to move house just to be closer to a gym!
This blog also has some useful tips on how to handle the constant challenge of eating out without ruining your diet. Although I tend to "brown bag" my lunch (a tin of no added salt baked beans (for fibre), a tin of salmon in springwater, and some "high fibre" bread) for both health and budget reasons, there is sometimes no alternative to eating out - especially if it's a business lunch with the boss.
Another interesting post was the tip to stay hydrated by drinking a couple of glasses of water after drinking a cup of coffee (as it is a diuretic). I don't drink coffee, but I drink LOTS of diet coke - I'm trying to cut back from a couple of 2L bottles a DAY, to just one 2L bottle lasting all day at work and at home with dinner. I'll make an extra effort to take a bottle of filtered water along to work, so I can alternate between the caffeinated drink and plain water throughout the day. Hopefully the reduction in caffeine plus the weight loss will get my blood pressure back down below the "borderline" readings I got last time I visited my doctor. Avoiding having to start taking blood pressure medication by losing weight and execising would also save a lot of money in the long run.
Anyhow, my weight is currently 99.1 kg (goal <78 kg) - I'll see how well I've done by the time I go back to work next Monday. I actually find it easier to stick to my diet at work, as I can eat the same things for breakfast and lunch each day - the main challenge is to resist having an afternoon "sugar fix" of junk food. Although the first week of a diet tends to be largely loss of fluids, I should be able to lose around 0.5 - 1.0 kg per week just by eating "healthy" foods without any junk or snack foods, and doing half an hour of aerobic exercise each day.
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