The heat and amotivational syndrome ☀️
For some reason, I took a phone call last night as I sweltering in my apartment from an unknown number that didn’t get automatically blocked asked if I was still looking at buying a house. I said I think you have a wrong number, thinking it was a scam and hung up.
Going back over it I realized it was the real estate agent that I toured that house, homestead next to my parents house 🏡 🐐 last year, probably trying to sell me one of the latest dumpy houses and land on the market out in country, as she knows I have the cash 💵 and I’m the kind of person who would buy a rundown house on acreage that’s next to a dairy that smells like cow shit. 🐮 A place less then perfect, that banks would probably turn those nose 👃 up at financing. I’m sure at one level I’m walking away from the perfect opportunity to shovel grain and manure in his heat. 🐽 I know you can own a house without hogs, goats, and a burn barrel. Lots of people in suburbs don’t have such things, and their white-vinyl homes made of plastic and plywood are perfectly air conditioned and heated to 72 1/2 degrees year round. If they’re woke they have solar panels on their roof and a heat pump to provide the perfect temperature year round. ❄️ ☀️
And I’m just sweating and just generally miserable in the heat. 😰 By the time I got home last night riding my bike up through the Norman’s Kill Hollar I didn’t really feel like doing much beyond laying in bed 🛏️ next to the fan. I was so tired. So no fresh blackberries 🍓 from the Norman’s Kill Preserve last night or grocery shopping. 🛒 Maybe tonight if I’m more motivated. Cooking a pot of brown rice with onions and spinach up this morning for lunch and dinner. Then it’s off to work on my bike. 🚲 If it’s really too ungodly hot, I could take the bus back home in the evening. 🚍 It’s not like the bus is that expensive at $1.35 with the bus pass. More then I spent on bananas yesterday. 🍌
If anything with the heat, my emotions and energy levels are just dulled. 😴 It’s hard not to feel sapped out with the dew points in the 70s and mercury in the 80s and 90s. But you could have air conditioning, like the inefficient floor-duct unit my neighbor has, but I don’t want to pay for it as it steals from my future and I don’t want to be over-dependent on it. 🚨 I want an excuse to spend my weekends in laughter in the wilderness. And I’m so tired of excessive targeted advertising lately I’ve been seeing about not driving stoned and for drug-rehab places. ♋ And cancer screening and treatment. Everybody knows cigs cause cancer. I guess it’s better then the endless ads about schizophrenia after I clicked one last year, in curiosity about psychosis and power of psychoactive substances. Truth is I just think too much about the weekends in wilderness 🌲 giggling on the tube ⭕ and having rip-roaring fires 🔥.
Summer vacation is either a week from Friday or two weeks from Friday. 🏕️ I am thinking the later, but I need to check with the people who will be covering for me and I kind of would prefer the earlier option as then if the week turns out to be shit 🌧️ I could postpone for a week, though I prefer the last week of July as it breaks up summer better, 🏖️ and means when I get home from vacation it’s already getting dark early in the evening, and often is cooler especially when I get home from work. But a rainy vacation is no fun, everything gets wet, and everything smells like wet cow 🐄 in the National Forest. I have tarps and whatever, but I’d rather have a sunny ☀️ nice week for vacation. I know it’s the dog days of summer – best spent on the hammock and by the swimming hole! 🐶
I also need to call about LASIK like today or yesterday. 👀 I have more and more problems with my contacts, last night I was having trouble removing one from my eyes – it got stuck under my eye lid, and irritation is only a growing problem. LASIK is expensive, but it’s a permanent fix for my eye problems. Without contacts I’m legally blind, and I hate wearing glasses, 👓 especially on a hot and sticky morning like this. I’d rather pay the big bucks and never have to pay-pay-pay for refills contacts again or deal with eye irritation. I am sure if I just put one call in it will be real estate salespeople, pushy, pushy to buy shit. 🗑️ In some ways now that I’ve researching more into depth about modern off-grid solar power and also building materials, some of the ads are actually much more interesting to me and find myself clicking through on them more. I’m not against modern building materials, despite reading a book about Timber Frame building, it’s that I care about self reliance sustainability and waste I can’t burn, not wokeness. 🏗️ I want something better then the white vinyl and plywood crap that dominates the suburbs and sadly in many cases rural country too. 🏠
Yesterday, I was reading the New York Times newsletter which I was required to sign up 📰 as part of getting free access to the newspaper through the public library, They had a Q&A section with readers questions being answered by experts in their field. ⁉️ They noted the following:
“When to build
Is this a good time to build a house? — Janie Spataro, Ringgold, Ga.
Conor Dougherty, who covers the housing industry, offers this advice:
Can you afford to build it, and do you plan on living there for seven to 10 years? If the answer to both of those questions is yes, then it’s as good a time as any to build.
Housing is an unusual good in that it is both a consumable, like a car, and an investment, like a stock. Most of the worst home-buying decisions — overstretching on a mortgage, buying in an area you don’t really like — come from thinking of housing as an opportunity to make money instead of as a place to live. A house is only a good investment if you think of it as home.“
