Blog
Just some ramblings about things and stuff, very much not tech related. More techy variant of this website is over on Armadillo Sandwich.
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Time for a reboot
06 November 2024After a long run of particularly awful circumstances and some rather low points I’d rather not go into here, I’ve made the decision to quit my day job and spend a few months rebooting my life by doing my own thing for a while, working on my own projects and learning some new skills and brushing up on some old ones.
I’m having a workshop built that I intend to use as a studio space, and that’ll free up the little self contained building on my property as a room to let, which will keep the wolf from the door during this time.
It’s nice feeling better again and having some motivation again. My job over the last few years has kept me near a computer in case anyone has questions or little tasks they need doing, without the job I can drift away from the computer and do messy outdoor things that are completely incompatible with computer use. Or just properly focus on build projects without interruptions.
So we’ll see how this goes. This is a huge turning point and took quite a bit of deliberation to get here, and hopefully it’s all positive.
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Where did the time go?
05 February 2024Where has the time gone? The last few years have been hell, and I’ve had to put almost all my plans on hold. Not being able to do occasional bursts of contract work or full time work resulted in me selling almost all my assets far sooner than I wanted to.
I got the country house pretty well fixed up, but with a lot of government interference in my life, being rural became completely impractical and I moved again, to a small town that has services. The upside to this is in the few years I didn’t post, real estate prices went through the roof and I’ve come out the other side not only debt free but with a healthy bank balance, which does at least tick one of the boxes for goals I had a few years ago. This proves that money doesn’t buy happiness.
Things still aren’t looking up despite so many years passing. I don’t know what to do about it. There doesn’t seem to be any easy way out.
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Backyard Birds
24 February 2019Here’s some of the birds I’ve identified that I see in my backyard. Click through if you’re interested in learning a little more about them. I’ll add more to this post as I figure out what they are.
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Finally moved to the country
11 February 2019I did eventually get around to moving to the country. I bought the house in 2017 for $30,000 and have easily spent as much again fixing it up. It’s turning into quite a nice house now, but still needs a lot of work. It used to be a bakery back in 1900 or so and was empty for somewhere between 10-15 years before I bought it, the timeline is a bit hard to figure out. I’m currently trying to buy the vacant land next door so I have lots of room for chickens and fruit trees.
The second half of last year was quite a bad time in my life and I ended up with some very physical effects from all the stress that are dissolving as I am out here in the country, spending time pottering in the garden and painting the walls. The kids have settled down a lot and their behaviour has improved dramatically.
After 4 weeks I caved and adopted a cat from a local rescue, which puts me firmly on the path to becoming an eccentric cat lady in the bush. I have decided I have a $80 a week budget for plants from the internet and boy am I going to make sure I spend it every week. The garden looks much nicer now I’m actually here to look after it.
But the biggest change is I now have a big white 4WD, which fits in perfectly on my street.
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Cunning plans
07 September 2018So about a year ago I was going to actually blog about these plans I have to disappear to the country and go live under a rock. The plans are taking longer than I was thinking, but aren’t really rocket science.
They go something like this:
- Live like a pauper
- Buy shitty real estate with a high yeild x a few
- Accidentally buy shitty real estate in an area experiencing very high growth
- Wait for growthy property to growth some
- Sell growthy property and pay off other properties
Clearly this is an oversimplification, and I’m still on step 4 and am going to encourage this growth by getting the land surveyed and an architect designed dwelling approved, as it’s a shitty block of land and nobody has any imagination these days for what you do on shitty land. I may actually build and sell the completed non-shitty dwelling as it is in a good location, but that’s far too far ahead to really think about.While I’m waiting on step 4 I should probably buy some index funds, but am distracted by trying to secure a completely paid off house to live in while doing so, and I’m not quite sure what’s happening with my current job. I also need mundane things like a chook yard, shade house, fruit trees and indoor plumbing. Baby steps.
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Welcome
05 August 2017Yeah I’m going to write something here but got distracted by css and stuff, nothing to see here, moving right along
