It's the 7th of the month and I feel broke. There's like £50 in my current account, and I'm not due to be paid again for weeks. At least this is the shortest month and it's not a leap-year. Ok, so technically I keep very little money in my current account anyway, transferring it all to my savings account to maximise interest, but that's not the point. I'm shelling out money left right and centre and that's got to hurt. I know I've got the money sitting in an account for this exact purpose, but that's not the point. Though there's plenty of money at the moment, there's also plenty of work to do. As a result I've written some budgets which pretty much convince me that I'll either have just enough, not quite enough, or plenty less. They're not very accurate budgets.
On the money front, there's news that pay conditions at work are changing so that we're not getting bonuses anymore. Instead, we're getting what we might have gotten as a bonus added to our salary. So it will seem like there's a rise in my pay in the next pay check or so - some of this may even be backdated (perhaps enough to pay for my new computer and TV). You'd think I'd be happy, but I guess I'm aware that, had things been different, I would have worked for and earned exactly the same bonus. So, I would probably have exactly the same amount of wealth by this point. The only advantage of it happening like this is to avoid the "bonus effect" that a friend of mine talks about - where a bonus is spent several times over because you imagine you have more money than you do. In this case, the bonus happens to pay for things I bought because I suddenly found myself having to buy them. Maybe the net result is the same, but with different expectations. Maybe I'm actually doing the bonus effect with the X-amount of money, presently sitting in my savings account, which is allocated for developing the house. I keep imagining that it will cover ALL the jobs that need doing, when it wouldn't take too many of them to go wrong before I'm in trouble.
Pay rises will happen at some point. It's possible that mine will happen in 2008. As a result, I may feel like I'm not getting any more money, especially coupled with the rise in my living costs, as a result of living alone in a house that I'm progressively destroying and making less tenantable.
It's not really money that bothers me. Being able to do something is far more important. Actually doing things is even more important. If I fail to get the house sorted in time, then it will cost me even more than planned/reasonable. It has to succeed. I'm basically putting two hours in per night. It's hard to find the energy to do too much labouring, and not all jobs can be completed in one sitting.
I'm having a bad day. Things don't seem so rosy today.
Last night I did some plaster patching. The stuff I used may or may not be good enough for the job. It went on ok, but will need sanding to flat. All surfaces will be wallpapered over, so flatness is all I need - it doesn't need to hide cracks especially well, or be perfectly smooth. Last night I also did some wrecking in the bathroom. I'm still wary of rupturing my cistern. So, I was careful. It was some hard tile-chipping. At one point stuff was falling off the walls and taking my collection of tools off the windowsill of the bathroom. I was worried about losing them in the rubble.
When I'd tidied up the job, I thought I'd made a reasonable fist of it. (I think that's a phrase people use.)
I'm an idiot. Did I mention that?
I discovered that something had gone awfully wrong when I flushed the toilet late in the night. I don't know exactly what is wrong, but I do know that the connection between the back of the toilet and the pipe outside is not water-tight. I know this because a quantity of water (and god knows what else) escaped into the room at quite high velocity. I managed to leap out of the way, grab a mop and deal with this water before it did too much damage. What the hell's wrong is not something I even want to know. I do know that I'm going to disconnect and remove the toilet very very soon.
I went to sleep grumpy as a result. I woke up grumpy too.
This lunchtime, I organised the builder to do the bathroom. He can worry about making the toilet not spew water everywhere when it's flushed... it will even be a different toilet. I suppose I ought to go out and buy the toilet I'm expecting him to use.
I hadn't just had a poo in it when I flushed it.
I couldn't wake up this morning. When I eventually did, I ended up in an hour of traffic to work, which got me there late. Annoying.
This lunchtime, feeling a bit moody, I decided to break my resolve to eat healthily - I found out last night that a brief spurt of weightloss has been reversed (not in the extreme, but enough to annoy me) - and went across the road to get Fish and Chips and mushy peas, with brown sauce. The bastards didn't even have any. I couldn't even eat unhealthily. I ended up with the vaguely healthy lunch I usually have from the cafe of this office building.
Buying a DVD at lunchtime didn't help alleviate my grumpiness.
On the plus side, one of my blisters is healing nicely.
Also on the plus side, though I'm grumpy and annoyed in my head, I'm not raging with pain/annoyance physically. Sometimes you can get so fussed that you feel physically buzzing with it. I'm physically quite calm - probably exhaustion.
I don't know exactly what I'm going to do tonight, but I would like to do something which feels useful. It may involve removing a faulty toilet (I have a downstairs loo too, which was pretty grim, but is now the best loo in the house).
I've dealt with worse things than today.
On the money front, there's news that pay conditions at work are changing so that we're not getting bonuses anymore. Instead, we're getting what we might have gotten as a bonus added to our salary. So it will seem like there's a rise in my pay in the next pay check or so - some of this may even be backdated (perhaps enough to pay for my new computer and TV). You'd think I'd be happy, but I guess I'm aware that, had things been different, I would have worked for and earned exactly the same bonus. So, I would probably have exactly the same amount of wealth by this point. The only advantage of it happening like this is to avoid the "bonus effect" that a friend of mine talks about - where a bonus is spent several times over because you imagine you have more money than you do. In this case, the bonus happens to pay for things I bought because I suddenly found myself having to buy them. Maybe the net result is the same, but with different expectations. Maybe I'm actually doing the bonus effect with the X-amount of money, presently sitting in my savings account, which is allocated for developing the house. I keep imagining that it will cover ALL the jobs that need doing, when it wouldn't take too many of them to go wrong before I'm in trouble.
Pay rises will happen at some point. It's possible that mine will happen in 2008. As a result, I may feel like I'm not getting any more money, especially coupled with the rise in my living costs, as a result of living alone in a house that I'm progressively destroying and making less tenantable.
It's not really money that bothers me. Being able to do something is far more important. Actually doing things is even more important. If I fail to get the house sorted in time, then it will cost me even more than planned/reasonable. It has to succeed. I'm basically putting two hours in per night. It's hard to find the energy to do too much labouring, and not all jobs can be completed in one sitting.
I'm having a bad day. Things don't seem so rosy today.
Last night I did some plaster patching. The stuff I used may or may not be good enough for the job. It went on ok, but will need sanding to flat. All surfaces will be wallpapered over, so flatness is all I need - it doesn't need to hide cracks especially well, or be perfectly smooth. Last night I also did some wrecking in the bathroom. I'm still wary of rupturing my cistern. So, I was careful. It was some hard tile-chipping. At one point stuff was falling off the walls and taking my collection of tools off the windowsill of the bathroom. I was worried about losing them in the rubble.
When I'd tidied up the job, I thought I'd made a reasonable fist of it. (I think that's a phrase people use.)
I'm an idiot. Did I mention that?
I discovered that something had gone awfully wrong when I flushed the toilet late in the night. I don't know exactly what is wrong, but I do know that the connection between the back of the toilet and the pipe outside is not water-tight. I know this because a quantity of water (and god knows what else) escaped into the room at quite high velocity. I managed to leap out of the way, grab a mop and deal with this water before it did too much damage. What the hell's wrong is not something I even want to know. I do know that I'm going to disconnect and remove the toilet very very soon.
I went to sleep grumpy as a result. I woke up grumpy too.
This lunchtime, I organised the builder to do the bathroom. He can worry about making the toilet not spew water everywhere when it's flushed... it will even be a different toilet. I suppose I ought to go out and buy the toilet I'm expecting him to use.
I hadn't just had a poo in it when I flushed it.
I couldn't wake up this morning. When I eventually did, I ended up in an hour of traffic to work, which got me there late. Annoying.
This lunchtime, feeling a bit moody, I decided to break my resolve to eat healthily - I found out last night that a brief spurt of weightloss has been reversed (not in the extreme, but enough to annoy me) - and went across the road to get Fish and Chips and mushy peas, with brown sauce. The bastards didn't even have any. I couldn't even eat unhealthily. I ended up with the vaguely healthy lunch I usually have from the cafe of this office building.
Buying a DVD at lunchtime didn't help alleviate my grumpiness.
On the plus side, one of my blisters is healing nicely.
Also on the plus side, though I'm grumpy and annoyed in my head, I'm not raging with pain/annoyance physically. Sometimes you can get so fussed that you feel physically buzzing with it. I'm physically quite calm - probably exhaustion.
I don't know exactly what I'm going to do tonight, but I would like to do something which feels useful. It may involve removing a faulty toilet (I have a downstairs loo too, which was pretty grim, but is now the best loo in the house).
I've dealt with worse things than today.
1 Comments:
Probably not much help now... but anyway... I had to dismantle a toilet the other year to replace the flush (the membrane had torn). Having put everything back together it all worked, but water seeped out of just about every joint.
I called a mate who happens to do stuff like this for a living and asked him what to do. He said, and I quote, "we just use fuck loads of sealant mate".
Seems the trick to doing a professional job is learning to smooth putty neatly!
Post a Comment
<< Home