Soggy Wet and Cold

1 July 2009 This winter is proving to be another hard one. After last year’s diabolical winter I swore I could not cope with another the same. But here we are, with winter having arrived a month earlier, and although we don’t have the endless days of rain of last year we’ve still had it by the bucketload and it’s cold to boot. The fire’s on most nights and the dryer’s the only thing getting the endless mounds of towels and sheets dry. The latest power bill arrived yesterday and it’s double the usual bill. Aaron’s banned the use of the dryer. This is all well and good but I’ve had clothes hanging on the washing line for 2 weeks now and they’re still not dry. I doubt I’ll have any more success with towels and sheets. Aaron’s plan is to crank up the fire, and use the A-frame. Which is fine by me but we have a finite source of firewood, only 1 A-frame and we need to run the dehumidifier constantly to avoid the evaporating moisture being soaked up by the curtains. The fact is there isn’t an easy answer in a Northland winter. It’s always damp. Next year we’ll be better prepared. Now we know how much wood we need to chop and stack for a long, wet, cold winter. If the fire’s going virtually 24/7 next winter then so be it. As Aaron says, firewood is a free resource for us, power isn’t. Which has me wondering if we could somehow find a way to rig up a small, water powered motor/generator that could run the drier all winter at no cost to us? It’s not like we have a shortage of water over winter so we just need to find a gravity fed system that we could use. Of course half the problem is the number of guests we’ve got coming and going. It means an endless cycle of linen washing. Maybe we need to consider cutting back on guests in winter. I guess that’s something we’ll have to decide on for next year. Recession Doom and Gloom and Winning the Big One These are interesting times financially. Every time I look at the paper there’s another story of how the recession is making New Zealander’s lives miserable. People are out of jobs, out of money, filing for bankruptcy and losing their homes. Aaron has been keeping an eye on rural property prices and in some ways I wish he wouldn’t. There are some absolutely fabulous properties in our area coming on the market and the prices are incredibly low. For the last few months he’s been looking at properties with much larger acreage than ours and suggesting that we should upsize or invest in a 2nd block. It all sounds quite idyllic but I’m having to reign him in with some basic realities. More land means more work, we’re stretched for time and money as it is. I fail to see how we could find more. Starting again on a bigger scale is not a good idea at our age. Let’s face it, we only have so many years of hard physical graft left in us. Were we closer to 30 than 40 I probably would have said yes. We’d also have to sell our land, only 3 years into our 10 year goal of transformation. With property prices low and the rural property market struggling I suspect that a sale now would mean all our hard work would amount to nothing more than beautification. I totally understand that absolute bargains can be picked up now in the rural sector but selling the land for a profit would be some years off and in the meantime the mortgage would have to be paid. I just don’t think I could face the risk of losing everything if it all went wrong. And so yet again I pour cold water on Aaron’s big ideas and enthusiasm. Of course, if that elusive lotto win comes through in the next 5 years then I think I would be hard pressed not to give it a go. We’ve just had a massive $32 million lottery prize come up for grabs. Like the rest of the country we were in for the win. Drawn on my birthday, I was convinced I was in with the show. I dreamed and I mentally spent and I disagreed with anyone who said that such a lottery win should never be allowed. So many colleagues said they would be disgusted with anyone who won such an amount and didn’t give most of it away to charity. Donating to charity was on my list but I’m prepared to be completely honest and say it wasn’t high on my list of priorities. Aaron and I had big plans. Massive plans. We were going to open New Zealand’s biggest free-range pork farm and do our best to take commercially farmed pork off the supermarket shelves. We were going to dedicate the next 20 years of our lives to improving the life of farmed pigs. But alas, it was just a dream. The numbers were drawn and a family syndicate many miles south were the recipients. They went public straight away, with names and location and all I could think was “You fools. You stupid, naive fools.” The last thing anyone should be doing in a recession is actively promoting their wealth. They seem a simple, pleasant working class family and I wish them well but I suspect their lives will be hell for a while. That bit annoys me. People who say they couldn’t spend it annoy me. Newspaper stories about people who win big and it ruins their lives annoy me. People who say big wins are immoral annoy me. It’s not my fault the world is full of fools who can’t manage their money. I could spend it wisely, I could do some good with it, and I should be the one who wins damn it! Ah well, maybe next time…