Keeping up appearances

Well, that's an interesting range of numbers.

Last year I only managed to post 10 blog posts to this here blog (and only a smattering on my other blog, too).

That's certainly a drop from the heights of 2011, when I published 169 posts. It's the smallest number of posts since, well, forever.

On the one hand, it's because I just haven't gotten my act together to write much this past year. I'm not sure why - in theory I'm not as busy as I have been previously, when I was studying two degrees simultaneously and working at the same time...

And there have also been a number of posts I started writing, but just never finished. And then I never really saw a reason to bother finishing them...

I guess my head just hasn't been in the game.

Still haven't found what I'm looking for...

So, I've been looking for a property of my very own for quite some time now, and I haven't found anything that I'm willing to pay for.

I very nearly did - I put an offer on a house and was accepted and everything - but then the building and pest inspection came back with a few problems, and I said to myself "I don't want to buy those problems", so I didn't.

I have a slight problem with this whole "buying a house" thing, in which I keep thinking meaningful thoughts about money, and it makes everything much less attractive.

My standards with this, as they are in most things in life, are too high.

I want a house that looks and feels like a nice place to live, that doesn't have any major structural damage, which would be practical for my life style and have good connections to work so that I'm not actively discouraged from riding to work occasionally.  Oh, and I'd like it in a neighbourhood that does not appear to have anyone running a chop-shop or a drug den in the street.

I'd also like it to have enough space in the yard so that I wouldn't feel like owning a pet would be cruel and unnatural punishment for the poor animal.

It all seems straight forward, until I realise that I'm going to have to compromise on something in order to fit in with my budget.  Then I spiral into a pool of self-doubt and constant questioning.

Do I want to compromise on the condition of the house and fix it up?  Do I have the money for that?  Do I want to compromise on the proximity to work?  Do I want to compromise on the size of the yard?  If I'm compromising on the size of the yard anyway, do I even want a house, or should I get a unit or townhouse where my money will give me more bang for my buck?  Do I want to spend that kind of money on a unit? In this town, where units are almost impossible to sell?

And should I be looking at something just because I can afford it, or hold out for something that feels like home?

So I find myself stuck in a loop where I question my very existence and end up asking myself "why do I even want a house/unit anyway" (I can't remember if I ever had a good answer for that), "do I want to tie myself to this town by buying it here" (sometimes yes, sometimes no), "is anything I look at worth that kind of money and being in debt for so long" (hell no)...

... and somehow that keeps dragging me down to "what do I want out of life" to which my answer is, maddeningly, "I don't know, I've never known, and whenever I ask myself that question I start feeling pointless and adrift in life, so stop asking already."

Part of me would like to just say "seeya, suckers!" take the money I've saved for a deposit and go buy a caravan to live an itinerant life.  Or a cabin in the woods - in Estonia.

Part of me is saying "but what will become of you? What will you be when you grow up?  Will you ever grow up?"

I don't know the answers to these questions.  All I know is I don't want to buy a crappy house for the sake of buying a house. And I don't want to put myself into so much debt that I have no freedom to do anything, just for the sake a buying a non-crappy house.

And yet, part of me is just longing for a place that is genuinely "mine" - somewhere that I can fix things or change things based on how I think they should be.  The way I'm feeling at the moment, though, it will be a long, long time before I get that.

Bonsai!

I drove past a bonsai club meeting on the weekend, and saw a bunch of people putting their trees back into their cars (obviously the meeting was over). I thought it must be nice to be able to take your pet tree to a play date with other trees, but wondered what the trees thought of it all. Were they happy to have the chance to hang out with other trees who had experienced similar things, or would a bonsai tree be more of a shy, retiring type who resented being forced to socialise with others? Considering bonsai trees have their growth deliberately stunted, perhaps they regard it as more of a support meeting with other "suffers". I briefly thought of taking up bonsai, once. Then I worked out it was a thing for patient people, and acknowledged that I do not belong in that category.

Why can't we buy female superhero stuff?

I'm posting this everywhere, so apologies if you're one of the few weirdos who follow me in several places.

It's stirring stuff.

"Temporary" things

Have you ever worked for one of those companies that bring in a "temporary" solution to a problem... that sticks around for the next umpteen years?

Like a "temporary" building that's still in use twenty years down the track, or a "temporary" patch that then becomes part of the code and is still being repeated in new versions of the software a decade later?

Like a "temporary" office space that has been in use for song long that people have been hired, worked for the company for several years and then left without ever knowing a different office space, these things never become permanent, but may as well be.

They behave like a permanent thing, but offer no sense of permanence.  Always and forever, they are "temporary", and because of that, they can go on for an indefinite period of time.

You see, most of the time no one would put up with them as a permanent solution.  If you pointed to the building and said "this is what you will be using for the next twenty years", everyone would say "we don't want that building - it's not what we desire or need".  If you said to the software engineer designing the patch "this will become part of the product throughout multiple iterations", that engineer would say "I'd rather not, for a better and more elegant solution could and should be found."

And the people working in that office would all - every man Jack of them - say "we don't want to work here for long".

But the knowledge that it is going to be replaced with something "better" at some point distracts you from noticing that you never solve that problem.  You never find something better.  The "temporary" solution is still working, and there are so many other, more pressing needs to worry about right now... and so it slides into permanence without us noticing.  Even though we would never choose for that to be the permanent solution.

I realised the other day that this is my life.  I've been spending about 10 years living a temporary solution that was always "going to change", but simply hasn't.  I'm not sure what I want to do about that now.

Vegan Cooking (or, Vegan Schmegan, episode 2)

If I'm being perfectly honest, one of the things I like most about vegan cooking and vegan food is the "smartarsery" of it all.

It's like being on one of those cooking shows where they give you the challenge of making something fabulous out of a supposedly limiting range of ingredients:

"You must prepare a sumptuous five course meal, and ever dish must contain radishes and raspberries!"

Of course, the average punter at home is thinking "Radishes and raspberries! That's impossible!"  But, of course, the clever contestant manages to do something creative and interesting simply by assuming the "limitation" isn't limiting them at all.

I see vegan cooking in the same light.

It's my personal opinion that cake is the highest point of human achievement.  So the idea of making a cake without any of the standard cake ingredients (milk, eggs, butter - and, because wheat and I aren't on the friendliest of terms, wheat flour) means you have to do something a bit "smartarsey", don't you?

Granted, it tastes nothing like normal cake.  Sorry, vegans, but it just doesn't.  When your palate adjusts and you get used to the new ingredients, you can comfortably say "that's not bad at all!" but until then, what you have is something that doesn't taste like normal cake.  It's still clever, though.

As I'm going to mention in a future post, my culinary background is from two very meat/cheese focused cultures, so taking the meat and dairy off the table means I have to look at vegetables in a much more useful and creative light (rather than just boiling them to death).

When you take a carrot and say to yourself: "I'm not eating carrots with my dinner - my dinner tonight is carrots", then you have to take the time to make something interesting with carrots (like this, which I haven't tried yet, but want to).

This vegan experiment* is forcing me to do something interesting with vegetables, and I'm discovering that there is no end to the interesting things you can do with them when you actually try.

Plus, it makes me feel clever.  Slightly unpopular with the members of my household who would prefer I make something interesting with chicken, rather than carrots, but you get that.

Take away the meat.  Take away the eggs and cheese.  Look at the vast array of fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, grains, herbs and spiced that you have left.  Really see them. Do something clever.


*I'm not actually vegan - yet.  The reasons for this will be elaborated on in another post. However I'm sliding in that direction, and making more vegan decisions with my life.

The great window shortage of the late C20th

I’ve been house-hunting for quite a while now.  I know I should just hurry up and buy a house already, but I’m slightly hampered by the fact that, at the moment, the longer I wait the more the house prices seem to drop, and the bigger my savings get, so it’s a weird little gamble.

Plus, I have a roof over my head, and no one is in a hurry to kick me out, so I have no pressing *need* to buy a house, I just want to spend at least part of my adult life being the person who gets to say “I think a deck would look lovely, so I’m going to go ahead and make that happen.”

Also, my mother isn’t getting any younger, her hips are getting dodgier by the day, and she lives in a house with stairs - but she’s not going to buy a low-set house any time soon.  It will be much easier to turn around in five years and say “hey, Mum, why not move in with me in my comfortable low-set house where you don’t have to climb stairs everyday?” than it will be to say “just sell your house and buy a new one, already!”  This is the way it works with my mother.  She rarely takes suggestions and almost never accepts instructions, but occasionally falls for invitations.

One of my problems with the housing market is that I want to keep things cheap (if you take out a loan, you’re basically asking a bank to buy your house for you and then sell it back to you bit-by-bit for twice the price), but the houses in my price range at the moment seem to have be built by weirdos.

I know I’m not going to get a mansion for the amount I’m willing to pay, but is it too much to ask for windows?

It seems like most of the houses I’ve seen that were built in the 1980s and 1990s around these parts were constructed during some sort of window shortage.  I’ve lost count of the number of houses I’ve walked into that only have one window in each of the bedrooms, even if the rooms have two external walls.  They’ll cut a hole to fit in an air conditioner (which is necessary, because without two windows you don’t have any cross ventilation), but they couldn’t see their way to putting in another window.  Not even a small one.

I’ve even been in houses where, of the four external walls available, only two had windows in them.  Two whole walls of a house, completely windowless!

Why?  Were windows so expensive?  Was there some sort of window tax that I’m unaware of?  Do you save money on your rates if you aren’t using up so much of the council’s precious air supply?

What really weirds me out is the location of the windowless walls.  Okay, so maybe you don’t need a window looking out the side of your house and directly at your fence.  Fair enough.  But the majority of windowless walls I’ve noticed have been the wall at the rear of the house – facing out to the garden.

If you were going to pick any wall in your house and say “nah, I don’t want to see what’s outside there” – why, for the love of all things holy, would you make it the wall that overlooks your back yard?  Why would you position the window placement so that you could see the side fence that’s three feet away, but not your garden?  That’s just weird.

Call me crazy (go on, we both know it’s true), but I don’t want to buy a house where I can’t look out over my own grounds.

I might - *might* - end up buying a house that was a victim of the great window shortage (although I’m a big fan of air, so I’d like to avoid that , if possible) but I’ll be darned if I cough up good money for a windowless box that keeps me from seeing my own lawn.