What this means is I can now afford to buy the lumber and insulation I need to build the shell of the tiny house. Yeah! And being unemployed gives me the opportunity to actually build it. This is progress.
I just paid for 2 years car registration today. The fun thing is that the ohio BMV is shut down for the pandemic, so all I have is a reciept for the tags I saved on my phone. I was a stroke victim when the tags came due in Sep, so they got forgotten about at the time. And who knew that I would lose the company car because I lost my job because Trump didn't close the borders and put anyone coming into the us into quarantine for 2 weeks.
Now, if I just knew what I needed. I can't decide if I want to thicken a 2x4 out to 9 inches, or just use a 2x10 every 2 feet to hold up the roof. The 2x4 with studs and 1x2s attached would be a lot more work. The 2x10 would be easier and faster, but would not be as good a thermal break. Maybe have 4 2x10s on the ends and 2x4s built out in the middle.
A friend dug a ditch for me along the top of the property to help dry things up. I need more ditch dug along the top and the side of the property. And a bigger culvert for the start of my driveway, because the 6 inch one we put in back filled itself.
What I really need is a load of gravel brought in to make a driveway for me. Tired of having to slog through 100 yards of swamp. So will have to budget for that out of this last paycheck.
I also have to pay for my phone on the 10th of each month. I may have to go for the cheapest possible plan they have, or to transfer my phone over to trak fone.
The phone is really my only expense though. I paid my rent through August already.
So my plan is to save back enough for car insurance, gravel, and 2 months of phone.
Now, I promised I would talk about why I am not working with computers... Evidently I got too old. I can see the look of disappointment when I show up for the job interviews. After applying for thousands of positions and being interviewed dozens of times, I got the hint. There is age discrimination in the computer field and you won't get a job in computers past 40.
Fuck you all, you mother fuckers. Yeah, I said it.
You know the sad part, I am worth 10 normal programmers. I find algorithms and write solutions in hours that would take a team of people weeks to find. If they even could. I am that good.
Just for fun I wrote a real time scheduler for Arduino boards that does power saving when nothing is running. How many people in the world could even do that? Just for fun I wrote a data driven website where the pages live as data inside a nosql database. Day 2 of writing javascritpt I created a closure to step any property between two values and call back when it was done. Just for fun another guy and I created a website that replicates the entire rule book for a popular role playing game. It even lets you download your character as a pdf. How many people could do that?
But I am just too old to work as a programmer.
Good times!
I planted 80 different kinds of seeds in seed incubators inside the greenhouse I built. It took over 5 hours to do that. A lot harder work than I realized. A lot of the seeds were so small I had to use tape to transfer them into the right place in the planters. I carefully recorded what I planted in each space, so if I don't see starts in a spot I can try again.
I even got fancy and planted a couple of flower pots and scattered flower seed around the edges of my lawn.
I noticed that I only have beefstake tomatoes, need to get at least cherry tomatoes too, if not a few more varieties.
I am also thinking about planting more fruit and nut trees here. I ate some of the walnuts I harvested last year and they were good.
I made a seed vault from an ammo can and a couple of bags of desicant. Once these starts are in the garden in a month I will replant the incubators with a second set of plants so I can have a second harvest. Might need the extra food to give to neighbors if we fall into a great depression.
I am also trying some micro greens. They are supposed to be harvest ready in a couple of weeks. And you can harvest them two or three times. If I get a few plots of these going it could give me greens for every meal, all summer long. By Fall the big southern facing window should be done. Might make a great place to grow plants year around.
I started building a solar heater to transfer heat into the house on a cold but sunny day. Basically cutting the ends off of aluminum cans and taping them together. Then just need to spray paint the cans black and put them inside a wooden frame with a plexiglass front.
I am also going to build a rocket mass stove along the bottom of one wall of the new tiny house, basically put concrete tiles around a stove pipe and pack all loose space between the tile and pipe with clay. Of which there is a multiple foot thick layer everywhere on the property.
So, I have a lot of time to get things done.
Oh, and a couple things went right for me the last couple of days. I walked across the yard from my car during a lightning storm and the rain didn't start until a minute after I got inside. The second thing is that I slipped and fell hard and basically landed in a way to minimize any possible damage. Just a little stoved up like I was rear ended in a car. I didn't land on a jagged chunk of metal! Yeah me!
Of course Providence, if you are listening, it would be better not to let me fall down, so work on that, will ya? I have noticed that since the stroke I have fallen more often.
Tomorrow I plan on buying some more supplies. Some plastic storage boxes from the dollar store. Some nut mixes from the dollar store. Some shorter screws from the hardware store. Toilet paper. Fingers crossed!
Next time I will talk about why tiny houses are so important. And why people that horde stuff are idiots.
No comments:
Post a Comment