I don’t have a particular topic tonight. I have so very, very much in my head – especially at 6am when the cats have woken me up and I can’t read in bed because my optimum iPad placement is impossible due to iDJ actually using his pillow as a pillow, instead of as a prop for my machinery (the nerve of the man) and having an iPad fall over and clunk into my forehead as I drift off is not only painful but isn’t conducive to sleep – but at 9:30pm, the weight of the day is heavy upon me and I can’t seem to think clearly.

Hence, me spitting out a massive run-on sentence that includes both dashes and parentheses.

I do wish that I could get up and write during those early morning brainstorms. There’s no way I’m trying it without coffee, or at the very least chocolate milk while the coffee brews. It feels traitorous, slackeresque, to get up and play in the dark when I know damn well I have to have 8 hours sleep or I will be useless. Then again, once the job listings have been checked and discarded, I am useless during the day.

During my extended unemployment I have tried not to goof off during the daylight hours. I’ve done a ton of things, some fun, some not, but all things that were needed around the house. I’ve done a ton of painting (fun) and when we got a pressure washer on the cheap, I couldn’t wait to blast the concrete patio, walls, and windows (massive fun, but really bad for my back). It’s wet here, there’s moss and mould growing on everything, and cleaning things to the point of new gives me great satisfaction. Fun and messy!

I’ve also fixed the sticky oven door, and scraped years of goop off the top of the stove (it came with the house, that shit was burned on). I installed new taps in the bathroom, too! They aren’t tight, so when you shut the tap off the whole thing moves, but that’s because it took me a whole damn day to put them on and I don’t have the right tools to tighten them up.

My best ‘save’ was when our microwave died. I found a fantastic redneck on YouTube that told me how to fix them, so I took it apart. There were a few things that could be wrong, but first and cheapest was to see if the internal fuse had blown. We went back to the shop we got it from five years ago and asked if they had fuses for that model. We were told that if the fuse had blown, there was something wrong and we should just get a new one. Saaaaay, that reeked of shite to us. “Oh, a fuse in my house blew, I need a new house now!” Feic off. To the Internet we went, and got a fuse from Scotland for about €12 delivered. I popped the old one out, wires and all, put in the new one – and it is still working. A couple of weeks later, the door fell off. I superglued it, it’s still grand. Saved a couple hundred Euros there!

When the dryer broke (also just five years old, are we seeing the planned obsolescence time frame yet?) we took it apart too, but getting a new motor was the same price as a new machine with a warranty, so we had to eat that one. At least we tried.

The fridge is a massive POS, we can’t get replacements for the busted freezer drawers anywhere. I can NOT deal with them, I completely lose my head, patience, and will to live when I need something from the freezer section; so that is iDJ’s job. He whines like a sick dog when his widdle finners get cold, too. Awww. He knows well that cold fingers are preferable to my searing hot rage.

Thanks, punkin’. 😀

I am a thrifty bitch by nature and nurture. When you have more time than money, you teach yourself whole new skills, and new ways of doing things. I make candles out of the crummy ends of ones we bought, I recycle and compost, I’d rather grow from seed than buy a plant. I save every-bloody-thing that might come in use, one day – and I keep a mental catalogue of the crap I have to hand. Just this week, I repainted our styrofoam headstones. These are Halloween decorations that are a few years old and constantly battered by the winds we have this time of year – we find them in the neighbours’ gardens all the time, with chunks missing and the white showing through. Well, hell, that’s not scary!

I’ve been different levels of broke most of my life, but I have a family history of cheap, too. My grandfather used to come to our house on Sundays. He’d be there for lunch and dinner, and drive himself back home. He would eat lunch, and then carefully fold up and pocket the single, non-brand paper napkin Mom had given him. He took it back out and used it again at dinner. Yikes! I really hope I never get that bad.

I wonder if he took it home with him…