Monday, March 21
Mar. 22nd, 2022 01:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gottawonderToday I am grateful for:
Lovely weather today.
Getting to town for pottery. It was a lot of fun today. The lady who I always end up working with after most others have left is named Diane, and she and another woman were making truly wondrous fairy houses; the kind you would put in your garden. I made her a little mouse to put beside her fairy house.
A funny moment, where we were truly belly laughing. I haven't laughed that hard in ages.
I got some glazing done, and some decorative under glazing.
Mostly, this was just a wonderful social time. I almost felt light-headed again after talking with people face to face for so long. Moments like this make me recognize how very little time I spend with other people, and how little of that time is truly just for fun.
I got a text back from the guy who might at least give us a quote for doing the stairs to the basement.
Frustration: My husband wants me to get at least one other trades person to quote the stairs. I feel like he is just doing this to punish me for wanting to get someone else to do the work; it's not enough that I found someone, I have to find two people, and have them both come out and look at the job and give us a quote.
I did talk about the house project at pottery, and I tried not to sound like I was ungrateful for our home. This is the feeling I always have: I am very tired of not being finished; of having a crappy hole for a porch, not being able to use over half of the space in the house, and so on. I am still very grateful for our home, and for living on a nice acreage with animals.
At the same time, I feel so frustrated at how the house has dominated my thoughts and my life, yet I can do so very little to make it move forward. It is a formula that creates obsessive thoughts, like having a terrible itch and not being able to reach it.
I picked up dog food in town, and I got groceries on the way out after pottery. I am REALLY noticing big increases in the prices of everything. Just about everything was a dollar more if the item cost more than five dollars . Bread was higher, eggs, cheese has been higher for a while because of trade changes with the U.K. and NAFTA, and we are supposed be seeing some more increases because apparently Covid means everything is going to cost more. My over all cost was probably 5% higher than just a few weeks ago. It seems like every time I turn around, there is another reason why gas prices are higher, and the cost of food goes up, but it never seems to come back down if gas prices go down.
Once upon a time, $100 was a big trip for groceries, now it's rare for me to spend less than that. The prices go up for everything at a rate far exceeding any increase in earnings, yet the market seems to think that they need to keep asking for more money for things because of inflation.
I shudder for anyone who is already at the edge of what they can afford.
I am grateful to be able to get groceries.
Today I learned a bit about the island "Sark". It is in the British Channel Isles, has a population of around 500 people, and is about 2.10 square miles. It was the first area to be designated as a Dark Skies Community in 2011, and is one of the few such designated places to have any people there (most are uninhabited places). The people living there made changes in their lighting to be able to get the designation. There are no cars allowed on Sark, only tractors, bikes, and horses. It is not clear to me what is considered a "tractor", since the Wikipedia article shows an emergency vehicle and called it a "tractor-drawn ambulance". A truck? No idea.
It's primary industry is tourism, and apparently "financial services". From what I gathered under the heading of taxation, there look to be some ways for wealthy folk to hide money there and not pay taxes on it, so kind of a Swiss Bank sort of tax haven. Interesting.
It is an odd place, still considered to belong to the Crown, run by an antiquated system where a Seigneur holds it as a fiefdom, and the individual land owners are still sort of considered to be living on lands granted in lieu of service or something. It is a remnant of a Duchy, and is still kind of politically isolated from the rest of the U.K., and can set its own taxes and has a separate legislative assembly, etc. though it is closely tied to whatever happens on the island of Guernsey.
It is apparently trying to attract new permanent residents, as some of the homes are now empty and no one is moving into them.
A real relic!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sark
Lovely weather today.
Getting to town for pottery. It was a lot of fun today. The lady who I always end up working with after most others have left is named Diane, and she and another woman were making truly wondrous fairy houses; the kind you would put in your garden. I made her a little mouse to put beside her fairy house.
A funny moment, where we were truly belly laughing. I haven't laughed that hard in ages.
I got some glazing done, and some decorative under glazing.
Mostly, this was just a wonderful social time. I almost felt light-headed again after talking with people face to face for so long. Moments like this make me recognize how very little time I spend with other people, and how little of that time is truly just for fun.
I got a text back from the guy who might at least give us a quote for doing the stairs to the basement.
Frustration: My husband wants me to get at least one other trades person to quote the stairs. I feel like he is just doing this to punish me for wanting to get someone else to do the work; it's not enough that I found someone, I have to find two people, and have them both come out and look at the job and give us a quote.
I did talk about the house project at pottery, and I tried not to sound like I was ungrateful for our home. This is the feeling I always have: I am very tired of not being finished; of having a crappy hole for a porch, not being able to use over half of the space in the house, and so on. I am still very grateful for our home, and for living on a nice acreage with animals.
At the same time, I feel so frustrated at how the house has dominated my thoughts and my life, yet I can do so very little to make it move forward. It is a formula that creates obsessive thoughts, like having a terrible itch and not being able to reach it.
I picked up dog food in town, and I got groceries on the way out after pottery. I am REALLY noticing big increases in the prices of everything. Just about everything was a dollar more if the item cost more than five dollars . Bread was higher, eggs, cheese has been higher for a while because of trade changes with the U.K. and NAFTA, and we are supposed be seeing some more increases because apparently Covid means everything is going to cost more. My over all cost was probably 5% higher than just a few weeks ago. It seems like every time I turn around, there is another reason why gas prices are higher, and the cost of food goes up, but it never seems to come back down if gas prices go down.
Once upon a time, $100 was a big trip for groceries, now it's rare for me to spend less than that. The prices go up for everything at a rate far exceeding any increase in earnings, yet the market seems to think that they need to keep asking for more money for things because of inflation.
I shudder for anyone who is already at the edge of what they can afford.
I am grateful to be able to get groceries.
Today I learned a bit about the island "Sark". It is in the British Channel Isles, has a population of around 500 people, and is about 2.10 square miles. It was the first area to be designated as a Dark Skies Community in 2011, and is one of the few such designated places to have any people there (most are uninhabited places). The people living there made changes in their lighting to be able to get the designation. There are no cars allowed on Sark, only tractors, bikes, and horses. It is not clear to me what is considered a "tractor", since the Wikipedia article shows an emergency vehicle and called it a "tractor-drawn ambulance". A truck? No idea.
It's primary industry is tourism, and apparently "financial services". From what I gathered under the heading of taxation, there look to be some ways for wealthy folk to hide money there and not pay taxes on it, so kind of a Swiss Bank sort of tax haven. Interesting.
It is an odd place, still considered to belong to the Crown, run by an antiquated system where a Seigneur holds it as a fiefdom, and the individual land owners are still sort of considered to be living on lands granted in lieu of service or something. It is a remnant of a Duchy, and is still kind of politically isolated from the rest of the U.K., and can set its own taxes and has a separate legislative assembly, etc. though it is closely tied to whatever happens on the island of Guernsey.
It is apparently trying to attract new permanent residents, as some of the homes are now empty and no one is moving into them.
A real relic!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sark
no subject
Date: 2022-03-22 07:44 am (UTC)It's not terrible to make hometime a long-term project, but if it drags on for a couple of years, the danger of years becoming decades begins to loom ominously.
Sometimes more than one quote can help to choose the right person for the job (like roofing) but for handyman work, I don't know what the point would be other than the notion of quasi-control. I hope you get the job done sooner rather than later and can enjoy a nice set of stairs in time for the good weather.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-22 10:53 am (UTC)I really don't have much for friends these days. I mean real friends that would come over to your house for no other reason than to visit, who might go for a walk with you.
I try hard to keep in touch with my family, and there is some contact, but not often in person.
I KNOW how valuable social contact is, and I make a lot of conscious effort to have some in my life.
Covid make things pretty bad for me for a while.
As to the quote, I know. Having two prices etc. is sometimes useful, but I am with you on this. It's my husband's way of being a dick about this. My personal feeling is that if this one guy was recommended by our friend, he's probably a decent person. The determining factor would just be how much he would charge for the work and if we thought it was reasonable.
My husband just really needs to look at how little is truly getting done, and how long it is going to take if we only do a few hours of work every two weeks when he is home. He's only human, and he can't do everything.
When we talked about the order things need to be done in, my Sweetie made it sound like what holds us back from finishing the floor in the mudroom is having the stairs done (the stairway goes down to the basement from the mudroom), and we can't install the sink and so on in the mudroom until the floor is done, so to me the stairs need to happen.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-22 08:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-22 08:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-23 06:49 am (UTC)