The good morning, good night thread

[elay2433]

Sounds like a blast, Geoff. Have fun.

-elay

[Ed]

A seventy mile bike ride without the assistance of an engine or a dupe on the forward portion of a tandem sounds like my idea of hell, but I hope you enjoy it, Geoff. I think I'd like the writing part of it - sounds good

[Ed]

Well, it looks like the recession is starting to bite. My brother-in-law lost his job yesterday, and I've heard of several companies reducing the rates they pay to their workforces - the choice is 'take a cut or fuck off', literally.

AFAIK I'm stacked out until the end of February, but I'm not sure what's out there after that. I'm lucky to be able to see that far ahead, though.

[elay2433]

I work in small shop. Just two full time employees. My boss just laid one of us off. Now my work load is beefed up a bit, but still it's nothing substantial. We're looking at it almost day to day now. Hopefully things turn around sooner rather than later, but it looks like things are just getting worse. How do you suppose all this affects publishers? Probably going to make it even harder to sell a piece as more and more small press markets drop off.

[Ed]

I don't know, but historically it seems that people are prepared to spend a bit of money on entertainment to cheer themselves up during recessionary times, so you might find book and magazine sales actually do as well, if not better than normal.

It's difficult to believe that we find ourselves in such a bad way, financially, on a global scale, again, and it's not really that long since the last recession. Has this kind of crap happened right the way back through history? I can't believe that it has. I hope your job remains safe, Elay. Just the threat of impending doom is enough to make life feel quite depressing, though, whether or not your job is technically safe. It's the uncertainty that hurts.

[Caz]

  I went down to the local DVD store today, when I came out and tried to unlock my bike from the railings I found that the lock was jammed. After about ten minutes of cursing and turning the key back and forth, I went in search of a shop selling WD40. I had no luck there but did manage to buy a small can of oil from a guy in a pound shop. He told me he had a pair of bolt cutters I could use if need be, so after finding out that the oil was of no help I took him up on his offer.
 
  It took a while to cut through the metal, those D-locks are tough sob's, but I eventually got the bike free. As I was walking back to the shop I spied a police car waiting at the traffic lights, the thought crossed my mind that I might look a tad suspicious with a pair of bolt cutters in one hand and a broken lock in the other. I was right. Just as I was handing the cutters back two coppers descended on me. I explained to them what had happened and that I was the owner of the bike, after producing the offending lock key they seemed satisfied.
 
  I just hope that's the end of my bad luck for a while, in the last two weeks a drive belt snapped on my car and the windscreen cracked.
 
  On the plus side I've recently found a job after being out of work for five weeks and the guy in the pound shop was selling poppies, which was good as I'd been looking to buy one all morning.     

[Ed]

I thought you were going to say it was then you realised it wasn't your bike - just one that looked remarkably similar, and you had in fact driven your car into town that day That's the sort of thing I would do.

Can't seem to get anything right myself, lately. I spent a good few hours messing around on my roof, off a ladder, taking down my chimney pots and feeding a twin wall stainless steel flue liner down the flue to my woodburner. After struggling at every turn, I finally got the liner down there, attached a few vitreous bends, shoved the flue liner up out of view, and sited the wood burner. Job done, I lit the fire and it worked like a charm. At that point I wandered into the kitchen to make myself a mug of tea. That's when I saw the offcut I'd cut from the bottom of the liner and realised I'd installed the liner upside down Dipshit.

So I know what I'm doing today, now.

[Caz]

I hate it when things like that happen. I've made similar cock-up's more times than I care to remember. The latest involved a shredded drive belt, I really should've made sure it was properly seated in the alternator pulley before starting the engine. Doe!! 

[Ed]

Done it now, and it didn't go too badly, though I did get a good drenching into the bargain.

I cooked a pork belly for dinner tonight. Basted it with a marinade of soy sauce, port wine, brown sugar, honey, butter and black pepper over a bed of carrots, onion, celery and garlic. I roasted some potatoes in olive oil, thyme, sage and more garlic. Boiled some runner beans and swede to have with it. Made a sauce from the stock and roasted vegetables, put it through a sieve, reduced and then thickened it with cornflour. Absolutely lovely meal. Even the kids raved about it.

Must admit I enjoyed the minute steaks I cooked for dinner last night more, though - they were really tasty seared in a hot skillet and served with mashed spuds, fried onion and field mushrooms. Everything about it was delicious. I really enjoyed it. The kids were begging for more, so my wife promised to buy them one each next time she goes to the butcher, instead of them splitting one between them.

[evildeadgirl]

Hi all--Big howdy Ed-- just popping by. Ruff week ending with me having to teach a  martial arts class to 25 --- 11&12 year old girls----talk about horror--- well I am back to my house work.

dl

[Ed]

Hi

Sounds like a complete nightmare. Anything involving 25 eleven to twelve year-old girls sounds pretty awful to me

[delboy]

Seems to have been a quiet month here - no doubt folks reading and voting on the competition entries and then following the voting thread. But for me, the ever increasing pressures at work are taking their toll. I'm still trying to write every day - and I have four or five projects on the go, a couple at various stages of rewrite, one awaiting a final reread, one in the early stages of creation and another at over 30k of words - but the aforementioned pressures are seeing me sleep poorly, wake-up tired, and by the evening just wanting to crash out. It's a real battle to get some words on paper so I'm quite pleased that I'm still doing this (it's actually one of the few things keeping me sane at the moment); but it's left little time for the Cafe.

I suspect that throughout the ages it's always been thus, it just feels particularly bad at the moment - I also suspect it's because of the financial down-turn, the housing market situation, increasing unemployment, which together create a virtual narrowing of options, meaning that instead of saying 'stuff this for a game of soldiers, I'm off to build Cotswold stone walls' one has to (realistically) ride it out in a sensible manner. Sigh.

All that aside, I shall look on the positive side of things, take things one day at a time, and rejoice in the good things I do have. As Ghandi once said, "I thought I was poor because i had no shoes, until I met a man with no feet."

Del

[Ed]

Yep - it has been a quiet month here. Usually the site's a hive of activity when the competition is on, but not this year.

I've been having much the same experience as you, Del. Funny how bosses treat everybody with more contempt than they'd usually dare when times are hard. I had one company I do work for try to drop my rate today. They don't give me much work at the moment anyway, and they're a pain to work for, so I told them to get somebody else - somebody not as good - somebody cheaper than me. But they turned around and said they wanted me to do it, just for less money. I said no, and repeated what I'd said, and they eventually backed down, offering to pay me my current rate. Others haven't been in the position to call their bluff and have had their rates drastically cut as a result. It's unfair, too, because the bosses can afford to keep paying the same rates - all they're doing is taking advantage of the situation.

What's most annoying to me is this recession - hell - the whole economy is just bullshit and fakery. The last major recession was only twenty years ago, and I'm seeing the same things happen this time as last, like a big game is being played by more powerful players than ourselves. Has this happened every twenty years for the whole of human history? Not a chance. All the boom and bust cycles began with the advent of the rise of the stock market about a hundred years ago.

[canadian]

I think I'll just hide under a rock until everything stabilizes again.

The charity I work for is in trouble. As soon as the word 'recession' hit the newspapers, all of our corporate sponsors sucked in their guts and eliminated the words 'corporate giving' from their vocabularies. We'll know in about a month whether we continue our work ... or not. Meanwhile, I'm applying elsewhere. Fingers crossed.

What gets me is that all the wealthy people are still wealthy. They're just less wealthy on paper. Those at the top won't lose their jobs or need to cut back on their grocery store spending. They'll still be going south for the winter, buying posh gifts for Christmas and living it up (perhaps with a less expensive wine) in local restaurants. The rest of us will be the ones paying the piper, won't we?

[Geoff_N]

I agree, Donna.
This is what happens when the economy is based on rumour, speculation, greed and chance. No one wants to be regulated and controlled but more is needed if we're to avoid this situation in the future.

Geoff