I wandered about town yesterday paying bills. Thanks to property taxes, doctor bills and such, I spent in one day more than double what I spent in March’s entire Month of Frugality. But thanks to a friendly conspiracy of blog readers and mysterious others, I’m still staying ahead on everything and even gathering money for summer’s icon-painting class. During my stop at the lumberyard (where I am a seasonal regular and where one of the managers is the great grandson of the incompetent drunken bootlegger and fugitive from federal “justice” who built my house), the guys informed me that Handyman…
Category: Home improvement
I make my final report in the publicly visible thread over at the Cabal. Bottom line: Other than my microwave dying, which threw a very small monkeywrench into the works, the month was both easy and peaceful. As I say in my summation, this exercise in frugality was less about money than about attitude. And the attitude was all about peace and clarity. About creativity and focus. About sufficiency. Never for a minute did I feel I was doing without. Well, okay. For a minute. Or a few. That microwave is the center of my kitchen. I didn’t mention in…
The last few days I’ve been dealing with reality. To wit: schlepping accumulated stuff out of the bedroom-to-be and into the attic or other places where it’ll live for a while. So far I’ve gotten from this: … to this: But there’s still SO much more reality to deal with. Everything’s got to come out of the bedroom so The Wandering Monk and I (mostly the monk) can tear the floor out, then raise and repair the foundation under the back of the house. Hopefully next month. May at the latest. We’ll be working from inside because there’s almost no…
Yes, yes. We’ve all seen plenty of those tiny-house, build-it-in-a-day (as long as you don’t consider permits, site prep, plumbing, electricity and probably half the other things that go into building a house) miracle structures that are going to solve all urban woes/disaster aftermaths/third-world housing needs. But this one’s different. Aside from being roundish, it’s 3D-printed on site. Is that cool, or what? The video explains. The video also starts out obnoxiously like a corporate promo ca. 1988 (and I should know because back then I wrote a bunch of the things). But eventually it shows how the house “grows.”…
The dog is just because. —– After a scattered and exhausting weekend, I woke up today to a long email from a friend that reminded me of the connections between freedom, creativity, and spiritual strength. I breathed deeply, grateful for the message. I resolved to refocus. My resolve lasted until I went to give the critters their breakfast and discovered the microwave was dead. I ended up focusing on DIY repair sites for a while. Along the way, I ran into this snarky article, “How to Turn Your Microwave Into a Camera.” The title of the just-posted Advertising Age piece…
Thank you, Commentariat, for your kind support and wisdom yesterday. I didn’t get a chance to reply in comments because the Wandering Monk was here all day enlarging the attic hatch. After writing yesterday’s post I was on minion duty. Even when not hauling construction rubble to the backyard or perching above the hatch waiting to receive and nail down the new folding ladder I was distracted, covered with ceiling crud, grubby, and not sitting quietly at the computer. With hatch completed, I have the lovely task of schlepping stored stuff from the bedroom-to-be into the attic. Which will enable…
That’s a leap I have not yet decided to risk. —– On Thursday I learned that Amazon is decimating the Associates program and therefore decimating the monthly income of this blog. It may have been inevitable, but nobody saw it coming right now. You guys jumped in to make sure that February, the last month of the old program, went out with a bang. A thousand thank yous for that. But that still left me with decisions to make. About this blog. About earning a living. About whether to go ahead with planned projects. —– It was easy to decide…
Normally around this time of year, I’d expect the first signs — well, foreshadowings — of spring. But given the frigidity of the present winter all happy signs and portents have been delayed. Until a day or two ago I had to settle for this: A squashed frog on the road a few blocks from my house. Not this particular deceased amphibian (whose photo I found online). But one of its relatives that I’ve had to step over on my walks to town. Damn strange first sign of spring. Frogs are usually late-season arrivals and not very plentiful; what a…