Clazz’s 2017 Challenges: April Update

Sooooooo. Erm. April has been a busy month. Where the hell did that go?!

I’ve just finished a frankly exhausting 10-day stint of work, and half way through, realised that I’ve only actually had four days off this month. Five if you include one day where I only worked for a couple of hours.

Needless to say, there are certain challenges that I’ve done very well on; others? Just don’t even bother, I know you’re gonna give me that judgy look. 😉

Really, this month has been chaotic.

On top of work, we’ve had a handful of couchsurfers to stay, I finally visited that abandoned hostel, we’ve been to a couple of local gigs, and I have some big news to share… yeah, it’s been pretty non-stop.

Anyway, let’s take a look at how last month went for my challenges…

Make £50 on side hustles

I’m still figuring out where to draw the line on this, because I barely worked at my second job at all and still earned £228! I also earned £72 on my market research job, and that’s set to quadruple this month if I can meet their shift requirements. Maybe I should up the challenge! Overall, I think I’ve earned more this month than I’ve ever earned in the UK.

I’m also testing out a few money-making apps – at the moment, I’m using SurveyCow the most. It’ll take a while to reach redemption, but generally you can answer one question at a time (some of them are reeeeeaally random) and you can reach the minimum faster if you enable lockscreen surveys. I don’t really recommend this, because every time you go to check the time or anything on your phone, you have to answer a question, which I thought would be fine, but it gets old so fast. You are also invited to longer surveys (sometimes only a few questions each), usually for 150 points. Once you reach 10,000 points, you can redeem £10 on PayPal.

I’ll keep you updated on how this goes, it’s definitely far from a fast earner, but it’s something pretty mindless. The only thing that annoys me is on the single question surveys, they show a video advert every 3 questions, which is really frustrating. I could understand maybe every 10? You get 100 beef points for joining and can get 250 extra points if you use the code FGDYLZ.

It’s been a hard slog, but I’m thinking of all the travel I’ll be able to afford at the end of it! Having goals in mind makes it so much easier.

Total: £300

Get fitter

My weight goal isn’t going anywhere, but I definitely feel better just from the walking I’ve been doing. I think this month’s goal is going to be to get my cross trainer out a bit more! (read: at all) I’m also planning to take up running (the weather has been so nice recently, which helps!), but I seriously just haven’t had the time or energy this month. When I’ve been doing a morning shift at the hostel, all I want to do at the end of it is sit down.

But at least my coastal walks are still a thing.

Write for other publications / read 50 books

Ha. Yeah. Erm…

Learn something new

Surprisingly, I’ve mostly been keeping up with my German lessons on Duolingo. I took almost a week off by mistake during my 10-day stint at work, so my fluency hasn’t gone up any more, but I feel like I’m making progress.

Also, I learned that the church in Twatt is ACTUALLY called Twatt Church! There’s even a bench! As demonstrated above. Amazing!

Other things?

So that big news of mine, huh? Guess what? guesswhatguesswhatguessWHAT.

After all my stressing over random documents that seemed so pointless…

I’VE ONLY GONE AND GOT MY CANADIAN WORKING HOLIDAY VISA!!

I don’t have any plans yet. I have until next April to enter, and I probably won’t go until fairly close to then. But I am definitely excited for what’s in store!! I’ll DEFINITELY be hitting up Vancouver for a while, and hopefully spend some time around Banff.

In other news, I finally went and checked out the abandoned hikers hostel! It is seriously cool. Here, have a bunch of pictures that show how cool it is!

That door, right?!? And that WINDOW! And the radio!! There was even a newspaper from 1978. I think that was probably planted there by someone. The stairs are dodgy as hell and the upstairs landing is literally a plank of wood across the rafters. Anyway, that was probably my favourite discovery of the month, but I have a few on the list for this month!

We hosted a few more couchsurfers this month which has been cool. Among the most interesting (and awesome!) was our first British couchsurfer, a Leeds lass who is cycling all over Scotland! She’s not even a cyclist, so that’s inspired me to do something like that. She spent a couple of nights with us and then three days cycling around Orkney, discovering things I didn’t even know about!

We’re still in the early planning stages of our Isle Of Man / Scotland trip, but it’s all starting to come together! I’m really excited that one of our good friends will be joining us, we’re gonna have so much fuuuun! The main things on my list are Glencoe, the Jacobite steam train in Fort William (aka the Harry Potter train!) and the Isle Of Skye. We’re thinking of camping most of the way, but I get staff discount for SYHA hostels, including for anyone I’m travelling with, so I think that’ll come in handy! I’m also really looking forward to the IOM as I’ve only been there once (I realise “only” might sound a bit weird to some of you, but it’s where Ash is from and we’ve been together for seven years!), and it’ll be nice to have our own transport this time. It’s definitely going to be a busy couple of weeks. I CAN’T WAIT!

I’ve also been slowly building up my Instagram. I’ve realised I’ve got a lot of great photos that I’ve never posted on there because I’ve never been particularly active on it. Here are some of my most popular from this month – the first one, as you may remember from last month’s update, got a repost on an Edinburgh page which was awesome!

I’ve kicked off May with a few Canada photos (to celebrate the fact I COULD BE LIVING THERE SOON!), so check them out on my Instagram HERE!

I think that just about covers my month. What’s yours been like? Have you made any travel plans? I wanna hear about them so I can be all jealous!