The good morning, good night thread

[desertwomble]

Sorry to hear this, Geoff.

DW

[Pharosian]

My condolences, Geoff. It was good you made it into your sixties before losing him, though.

[Ed]

I spent the weekend camping with the family down near Dartmouth. It was nice to spend some time with the kids, out and about, but the food wasn't too good. I made the mistake of putting sausages and burgers on at the same time as the chicken. Course, all the fat dripped out of the burgers and sausages, which turned the barbecue into a roaring furnace, so everything ended up black and sooty, even with me taking it off and putting it back on when the flames died down. So yeah - typical barbecue chicken - black and crispy on the outside and raw in the middle

The second batch was OK, though, once I'd got the hang of it. I was glad to get home and have some decent grub last night, and sleep in a proper bed. Made some leek, bacon and potato soup and had it with thickly buttered fresh wholemeal bread and opened a bottle of wine, too. It was lovely.

[delboy]

Was a lovely weekend - ideal for camping, I'd have thought (food aside). I had a quiet weekend. Mowed the lawns, had a haircut, went for a bike ride, had a walk by the canal, saw a few relatives, watched a movie, and did a stack of (not very good) writing. The piece I'm working on is going to be won or lost on the rewrite, I think. I'm just trying to get to the end so I have some raw material with which to work.

Monday comes round relentlessly again. The sun is out, I'm working from home, yet I feel...a little down. No reason. No reason at all, except that I feel like this is it, and it isn't enough.

Derek

[evilthing69]

Friday night I went to an old friend's birthday.  22 years is a long time to know someone, it got me thinking.  That's two-thirds of my life, (I think...not much of a mathematician...still a long time).  Had a blast, though.

Saturday was a nightmare.  Home-remodelers came to fix and insulate the drop-ceiling in the bedroom and install a new faucet in the kitchen...  It got the cats, and my girl, quite upset.  I tried to tell her to relax, its no big deal, but she gets upset over little shit very easily...10 hours worth of little shit  (and 2 schizy felines) in this case.  I personally didn't really care. It needed to be done, no big deal.  Its done.

Sunday went to the flea market, grocery store.  It was a bit hot but nice.  Watched a couple of interesting Spanish horror films and went to bed.  Not bad overall.

[Ed]

I've just noticed that I can't spell 'potato', FFS That and 'persay' the other day, makes me wonder if I'm going slowly insane.

Speaking of which, I was staring (bored shitless and completely devoid of motivation) from the upstairs window of the house I was working in today, when seeing a fish in the pond made me suddenly remember a weird dream I had last night. It didn't strike me as weird when I was dreaming it, oddly enough. There was a glass tank of water in the dream, approx 36" long and 20" high, and swimming around inside it were two goldfish, and a dog. The dog, I was told, was amphibious, and as I watched, it swam up to the surface, took a breath of air and then swam back down into the depths of the tank, blowing bubbles as it went. It was the size of a King Charles Spaniel, but white from head to toe. It swam around in the tank, just like a seal. I remember saying to the owner that he needed to put a rock in the tank, so that the dog could rest itself without drowning, and I wondered just how long the dog had been swimming without respite.

I got to thinking what the dream might be about - you know how some people reckon they can tell stuff about your life by what you're dreaming of. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like the dog in the tank, you know? I'm guessing you do, Derek

[Caz]

  The weekend was good. I drank some lager, watched a DVD of Valkyrie, good film that, put in a few miles on the ten speed and sat in the garden with the cat and my new best book.
  Back to work this morning, which is also good. Apart from a few odd jobs I've not had any real work since January so it's nice to be back in the swing of things again. It'll be even nicer if I ever get paid for the work I did at the start of the year. 
   

[Ed]

Ouch - I didn't realise you'd been out of service for that long, Caz. Things generally seem to be looking up a bit now, though, don't they?

That said, I've got one builder who's looking a bit iffy at the moment, which is a bummer, because he still owes me four grand. Not sure I'm going to get it. Another I do some work for is about to start a site of sheltered housing, which will either be a godsend for me, or a complete waste of time after he's knocked my prices all to hell. I've got bits and pieces coming in from all angles at the moment, so I'm not particularly concerned. If anything I'm wishing I could have a few weeks off to do some work on my own house. Not too many weeks, though.

[delboy]

Fingers crossed that you're right, that things are on the turn. I guess it'll start with the building trade and the knock-on effects of recovery will follow the same way they did with the down-turn. But locally things still seem to be getting worse. Each week I hear of someone else I know being made redundant, the C&G has just announced the closure of all high street branches which means a fair few job cuts round these parts, and our council has just announced 300 losses, likely to rise to 500. All in all, it remains a fairly depressing outlook, so any sign of recovery will be welcome.

Derek

[Caz]

 

Things generally seem to be looking up a bit now, though, don't they?

  I'm not sure if things are on the true in my neck of the woods. There's still a lot of building workers around here who haven't got jobs. A couple of reasons for this is that a lot of the new build sites shut down months ago, I guess they paid too much for the land and can't sell at a profit now, and there's too many people chasing too few jobs. There are a lot of none English workers in the south east, I've worked with a few of them and they seem like decent people. But the fact is the government lied when it said there's a skill shortage in the construction trade. All that was achieved by opening up the labour market was to force wages down and make everyone uncertain about where their next days work was coming from. I've heard tell that there are sites in London where there are no English workers and the people there are doing skilled jobs for as little as £45 a day. That ain't right.

  I've always relied on site work and not done much of what I call private jobs. So when the shit hit the fan I found myself at something of a loss.     
   

[Ed]

Must admit I've been very lucky, because I've always done newbuild, too. I made a lot of money in the year to May 08, so I had a good nest egg when the sites suddenly shut down. Then I picked up a steady gig with a business that does refurbs and the occasional one off newbuild. That, along with doing the occasional ground source heat pumps and solar thermal installations has kept me going until now. But that company is feeling the bite now, and has just laid off six staff. They don't have anything much coming off for me for a while at least, but I'm now hearing that the newbuild is beginning to come back online. The company I used to do most of my work for is about to start a sheltered housing site and is doing the test holes for another six spec built houses. I'm getting bits and pieces coming in from all ways, all of a sudden, so I think things might be starting to come good again. Could be wrong, though.

I know Taylor Wimpey and a couple of the other big boys have managed to refinance their debts and have put out new share issues for the purpose of raising money to restart their stalled sites, so that's good news. Like you say, though, Caz - the government needs to get a grip on foreign workers and kick their asses out of the country. After all, there's no point in us having another million British workers on the dole when their jobs are being done by Russians, Czecs, Lithuanians and Poles, who send the money home. So their taxes aren't even going to support the people they've put out of work. I've seen their work, too - and it isn't good. It's cheap, but it's shoddy.

[Pharosian]

- the government needs to get a grip on foreign workers and kick their asses out of the country. After all, there's no point in us having another million British workers on the dole when their jobs are being done by Russians, Czecs, Lithuanians and Poles, who send the money home. So their taxes aren't even going to support the people they've put out of work.

Like that's going to happen! Any more than the US government is going to do anything about all the illegal immigrants from Mexico that have slithered in over the past decade or two. Not only were they not vigilant in keeping them out in the first place, I think they deliberately allowed the situation to develop, hoping nobody would notice until it was too late to do anything substantive about it. Here's why, and why the two situations are similar: the grand scheme is for the standard of living worldwide to become more uniform. In order for that to happen, our standards (US, UK, Western Europe) must decrease, and theirs (Mexico, Eastern Europe) must increase. Hence the massive outflow of money from workers in the US and UK back to their home countries. Hence the enormous pressure on West Germany to bring East Germany up to snuff after the wall fell, and for it to finance much of the eastern bloc today. Germany isn't happy about it, having been fiscally responsible compared to some of the other EU member nations... But if you look at what's going on today through the lens of redistribution of wealth, you'll see that it has nothing to do with what's good for any given sovereign nation, and all about what's good for "the global economy" -- read "The New World Order."

[Ed]

I don't know if there's actually a foreign policy behind it - I think it could be simpler than that. I think the rich are always hankering after a bargain, and if getting one means exploiting somebody somewhere, they don't seem to care. That could be because they feel as if everybody is always trying to rip them off. I know a few millionaires, and they're all the same.

The contractors have been as much to blame, though, because their prices have rocketed to the point where they aren't affordable. But that's capitalism in a nutshell, isn't it? The free market economy is dependent upon competition, and when the balance between supply and demand becomes unequal the whole thing falls apart.

[Ed]

Quiet day here, I see. No posts since Del's at about 8am this morning. Must be holiday season, or summat

[delboy]

Just plugged the laptop in to do a spot of writing. Holiday season is still a month and a half away for me. 

Del