Overadvertised and underfunded

I am sick.

It started as a slight tickle in my throat. I started gargling salt water.

Then it got a bit worse. I bought a bottle of Source Naturals Wellness Formula capsules. I've used them before, they actually work for me.

Then I was running a fever, aching and shivering.

Fuck.

I had plans for the upcoming long weekend. They included interior painting, which is not my first choice for fun times, but it needs to be done. Now I'm probably not going to be able to do that.

I now have big ol' lined journals (360+ pages, hardcover) for the next 30 years. And there are three varieties with large amounts of each, for my matchy-matchy twitchy-brain. And because I was happy to drive around to different stores, I paid $15 per journal instead of $25 or $41. (The journals are discontinued, and available to purchase at certain stores; but some enterprising folks also were selling them on Bezos' List for a bit of a markup.)

I've begun the pare-down process, donating lots of clothing, shoes, and bedding. I'm now reducing my absurdly huge nail polish collection. With a neighborhood full of teenagers, I'm hoping that I'll be able to find most of these good homes. I've only started culling my nail polish collection, though. I've got over a thousand bottles, so it's not going to be a snappy process.

I have to get actual walk-through / in-person quotes from the international shipping companies, make my choice, and schedule pickup-day. I've got two quotes so far, and they're about 10K apart, so one of them is giving me a pretty obvious teaser-rate. I don't want to end up with my stuff "held hostage" for however much they underbid on the job, so I might get quotes from additional companies and filter out Lowball Inc.

Home-polishing tasks are underway! Some more interior painting, a spot of floor refinishing, one window pane replaced, et voila! It'll be all ready to put on the market. According to my realtor the maintenance I've done is going to make my home look very attractive, so hopefully I'll be able to find a buyer who won't have problems renting back to me until I'm ready to drive away in late autumn.

And, of course, none of this even begins to touch on finding my first home in Mexico, and then finding an architect so that I can build the place that will be my forever home.

Winter will be officially here next weekend, with the season's first snow. We're currently forecasted to get about 3 inches, which isn't as bad as other parts of the US are being hit with...but I'm still planning to go shopping, stock up, and minimize my driving after that point. People get crazy-stupid when the first snow hits, just like people in CA get crazy-stupid when the first serious rainfall hits and the roads change. It's not a free-for-all, it just slows driving a lot. I'd rather not deal with that.

I've started spring cleaning - not just cleaning the house, but downsizing. I have clothing that no longer fits, I have some books that I read once or twice and just didn't care for, I have boxes of old papers that I brought with me from my former house (eight years ago!!) and haven't looked at since, I have some old end tables (one of which isn't actually being used for anything). I need to get all of this stuff out. I'm planning on working on a room - each week. That'll keep things manageable, and I'll actually see progress.

Behold: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics.

...that's all for now...

Me refreshing USPS tracking, seeing today's date as the delivery date and the last status update, dated this morning, just says "Moving through network": -=sigh=- Not today. Not today.

...wait, WHAT?!??

I took a taxi to the Mexican consulate to apply for my temporary resident visa. I masked up before I got into the taxi. The cab driver was an anti-masker, he said "You don't have to wear a mask in here, the pandemic's over" and all I could think was...my d00d. You're older than I am. You're flat-out elderly. If you get Covid, you could die. You work with the public every day. And you're this cavalier about it?

No. No, no, no, no, no.

I no longer mask up at the height of summer when I go to the grocery store, or the post office. But as soon as it's September, I mask up. That's when kids return to school, that's when disease transmission spikes, that's when more people start getting sick. I liked not having seasonal colds and flu for three years! I have one now (probably also brought on by stress + travel weakening my immune system) and I'm hating it. I have been masking steadily, and I hope I haven't given it to anyone else in the infrequent trips I've taken outside my home. I took a Covid test as soon as I started feeling ill, and it came back negative, so that was a relief. (I'd been vaccinated almost a month before I took my trip.) Even if Covid becomes Not A Thing, I will continue to mask up every year, from late summer to late spring. I'm getting older, and getting ill every year sucks. And if it's preventable...you bet I'm going to take steps to prevent it.

Besides which, my mask hides my mouthing invectives about Stupid People.

No, recruiters.

I do not want to be part of a "challenging" team.

I'm in my mid-50s. I want to be part of a "mature" team, a "powerful" team with a large and well-managed "throughput", a "structured" team that knows how to use processes to quickly and accurately handle the Same Stuff Happens Every Week so that when someone else comes screaming in with their ass on fire babbling about something someone else broke and We Need To Document This Thing NOW NOW NOW, one or two of us can calmly turn from our current tasks, neatly and quickly handle La Emergencia, and calm the panicked person's heartrate without raising our own.

I'm old. Fuck "ambition". I just want a good paycheck and no dumbass "this REALLY could have been avoided" hasslepanic.

(originally posted July 3 2023, over on my fediverse account)

Friday the 4th, my power went out. Same for most of the county, in fact. My power was out for four days and change, and only returned just as we were having our first hard frost of the year. (I could see my breath while inside my house. It was not a thing I expected to be able to do, and not really something I'm eager to repeat.)

So now my shopping list includes:

* a pleated blind for that huge-ass window above the foyer. Fucking thing just lets all the heat go bye-bye right through the dual-paned glass, which is better than single-paned, but DAYUM. I'll have to get help measuring and installing it, because it's too high for me to safely reach unless I build scaffolding.
* a generator. Not sure if I'm going to get a large portable one, or a whole-home generator hooked into the gas line. I'll still have no internet or phone reception when the power goes down, but I won't freeze and won't lose everything in the refrigerator. I'll also have light! (This is another reason to own your media instead of buying digital copies stored on other peoples' computers/in the cloud. Even if your power is out, if you have a flashlight and/or some battery life on your device, you can read/watch your books/music/movies.)

I did decamp to a hotel about 20 miles away for one night, and spent a few more days in the business center when my home internet didn't come on with the power. I put on more layers, bundled up like a babushka, and welcomed the cats when I went to sleep. They were probably as happy to have me there as I was to have them there. The thought bubbles all read: "Ooooo, a friendly heat source!!"

I am planning to move out of the metro area, buy acreage, build a net-zero house, and grow several types of vegetables. I want to do this for several reasons:

• I prefer to interact with my neighbors as infrequently as possible, but I still want to be able to enjoy the outdoor spaces of my home.
• I enjoy nurturing plants...to an extent. If I can't eat it, I don't want to put the work into it.
• I like being able to try different spices, and think it would be very cool to be able to share the "excess" spices with others.
• I know that I do not have the stamina to care for farm animals, even animals as seemingly low-maintenance as ducks/chickens/pigeons.
• Caring for animals is EXPENSIVE. I have five delightsome cats, and their food and medical bills are not cheap. And I do not want to become the kind of microfarmer who has ducks or chickens that don't lay enough eggs to be profitable, or have health issues and so aren't both consistent and safe egg-providers.
• I want a house that will be liveable as I get older and become less mobile. That means a one-story house...and since more people now want single-floor homes, they cost more than multistory homes, even multistory homes with more square footage. An "age-in-place" home can also include power outlets higher up the walls, wider doors and hallways (to more easily accomodate walkers and wheelchairs), toilets with grab-bars, and showers with grab-bars and a bench. Yes, it's possible to retrofit an existing house to have the shower-with-bench and the grab-bars without breaking the bank. It costs a lot more money, though, to rebuild an entire house with wider doorways and hallways.
• I want a house that recycles my grey water (flushing the toilets and/or watering the plants) and gets most of its energy from solar (particularly a battery or two that can run the essentials during a 15-24 hour outage), but is also hooked to the electrical grid so that I can have enough power even in the winter. It is possible to add solar panels to the roof of an existing house...but if the roof doesn't face the right direction or is partially shaded, the output isn't as much as it could be.
• I also need to have high-speed internet. That means broadband. I don't want to use DSL (that's so 1990s) or be stuck relying on satellite internet (because fuck Elon.) I can take care of this by doing my research before I even go to walk a property.

I can buy land and build custom, or I can hunt around for a rambler with just the right orientation that's available, buy it ($500K and upward), and then spend another $100K+ retrofitting it. I'd rather just go with Option A.

Ideally, I'd get 15-20 acres and have several tiny homes for friends and friends-of-friends to live in for 5-10 years and contribute toward annual property taxes while they save up money for a downpayment on a house of their own - or land of their own, whichever. (Saving a downpayment is difficult even on a tech-industry salary, and saving a downpayment while also paying other bills is nigh-on impossible.) I know I'd have to do a lot of research on that first, though: what legal restrictions are in place for such a thing? What kind of contracts would I need people to sign (because while I would not be charging monthly rent, this would be a tenant-landlord situation. I need to be able to hold tenants to a maximum term, and if someone's a disruptive asshole I have to have remedies to evict them. They also need to know that I'm not going to suddenly evict them on a whim, or suddenly start charging them a whole lot more rent than they initially agreed to pay. And other bits.)

(I don't want to be a vacation-home hostess. Too much work, too much bother, too many strangers traipsing about my property.)

I don't know how long this will take, but if there's a big ol' housing crash in the next year my dreams may go up in smoke - or may be delayed until the economy recovers, which might take 5-10 years. My home has appreciated an insane amount since I bought it, and selling it at its current estimated value would give me enough money to buy at least 5 acres of land, build a custom net-zero home, and have a very small mortgage - even with the recent rate hikes. But that's not a step that I can take without more research and planning...like, how to find architects who are familiar with building net-zero homes that still comply with local permitting regulations. It isn't impossible. It's just...a lot.

This is going to be the ultimate project manager job.

Too bad I don't like being a project manager, because this would be a HELL of a resume-item.