April Update
Spending
Rent - 212.5
Rain Gear - 149.59
6m Car Insurance - 133.30
Groceries - 105.88
New Tags - 61
Records - 59.76
Garden Supplies - 40.48
Electricity - 36.19
Engine Projects - 31.31
Phone - 17.79
Internet - 17.5
Came it at $865.30, just a hair over my $833/m average goal. Nice weekend + realizing I should get some stuff in the ground resulted in a trip to the garden store. So that $40 expense pushed me over the edge. Not bad considering the infrequent car insurance + tags + necessary work rain gear added up to $343.89 by themselves.
Income is a little low this month because I didn't work a full 40 hour week the whole month. Not covid related and I can expect the same this month. In the beginning stages of a job, before things have really broke loose, work is spotty. After the shoring for the second floor starts getting pulled we'll have a bunch of underfloor plumbing and that's when things will really pick up.
I don't mind the extra long weekends/half days, but it has made me realize that the way I currently have my life set up I don't have enough stuff to fill endless free time. Reading, running, a couple raised beds, and other minor hobbies only take up so much time. The necessity for an exit plan if/when full ER comes is clear. A space for a much larger garden and an actual workshop so I can properly work/build things will definitely be part of that plan.
The sporadic work has also made me realize semi-ere might very well be for me. What I'm really coming to understand is that 40 hours/week and 8 hours/day is simply too much. Each in tandem is soul sucking. If the standard work schedule was five fives I don't there would be as big a movement attempting to game the system. For me, I think the structure of a few hours on the schedule every day that I have no say over would really keep me motivated in my free time. I'd like to think I'm a self-motivated enough person to self-start all day of my own accord, constantly accomplishing stuff, but I'm afraid I might be fooling myself. I've never actually gotten to test that hypothesis so I don't really know.
/totally rehashed thoughts every FIRE person is thinking
Reading
22. Survivor - Butler
She disowned this book after only a sigle printing of it so I had to find it online. I think she might have had second thoughts about how she portrayed a couple characters. However, the book was good and had her masterful presentation of complex human relationships set within a fantastical backdrop that I'm learning is her signature.
23. Atomic Habits - Clear
Nothing super groundbreaking here, but it had some good descriptors and ways of thinking of things. I think the strategy he outlines that I personally use the most is implementation intention: "a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act." I state a goal on here such as "I'm going to run 500 miles this year", in order to achieve that goal I know I need to continue making steady progress, to that end I map my weekly runs out in my head to give me an idea of what staying on track will look like. It's all mental, but works pretty well for me.
On to...
24. Tightwad Gazette II - Dacyczn
I think I'm mostly reading this for the recipes at this point. Lentil burgers, soft pretzels, and quick pizza crust recipes have been gleaned. However, adding a 1/2 cup warm water to the end of the ketchup bottle, shaking, and using as tomato "soup" for a grilled cheese ain't happening. Aside from that it's astonishingly outdated in many aspects. Quote: "Banks will rarely allow your mortgage payment to exceed 28% of your income." How quaint. I went to a mortgage broker back in the fall to try to learn a little about the process of getting a loan. Just a little light research for whenever I do intend to buy a house. He told me he could get me a mortgage with a payment up to 50% of my monthly income. I told him even 25% would make queasy and he looked at me like "who the F%#$ is this guy?"
Running
DR: 47
MR: 248.7
Added 6 5.5 miles runs and a half marathon I ran yesterday. I'll say it again: running in the morning and not after work is sooo much better. The half felt good and was enjoyable the whole time.
Work
I was threatened at work this week. Here's the cliff notes and necessary background information.
This is a concrete structure building. Concrete columns support PT (post tension) slab floors. A slab on grade (on graded earth) will be poured for the first floor, columns already poured and in place, then shoring will be installed with plywood on top which is what the second story slab will be poured on. Once the deck is up the MEP trades (mechanical/electrical/plumbing) get up there to install anything that gets poured in the slab. For plumbers we have sleeves we put in that will later have pipes going through them, embedded "bangers" used to hang pipe from under the slab, and sometimes fixtures like floor sinks or floor drains. After the MEP guys are done the rodbusters come in to place the rebar and pt cables.
The building designers and engineers do not run clash detection programs between the MEP stuff and the structural rebar so there are always clashes where one trade will have to work around the other. Sometimes the clashes are bad enough that things will need to be redesigned and approved by said engineers before the slab is poured.
Here's a picture of a standard section of deck. This was from a 5am pour, though not the exact location of the incident described below. The blue cables are the pt cables, those white deals between the two column cages are our sleeves.
This particular crew of rebar guys are pretty rough and tumble. The head honcho, J, in particular is loud, ornery, and angry. He scares me to be perfectly honest. He flies off the handle regularly and is not in any way in control of his anger. This week he started kicking our sleeves out if they were in his way. We replaced them without saying anything the first time. The second time the general contractor got involved, the third time the general had a sit down with him.
It was on that day, when I was there fixing these sleeves for the third time, that he yelled, no screamed, at me for standing on his rebar/pt cables and "fucking his shit up". If you can't tell it is impossible not to step on the bar/cables, everybody including the rebar guys walk on them. The absurdity of the accusation, considering I was literally holding the crumpled remains of the sleeves he destroyed, really galled me. I gave him some lip: "Gee, wouldn't want that to happen" to which he replied: "I'll fucking stomp you".
That's not the type of shit I put up with so I told the appropriate people and the wheels started turning. Nobody likes this guy, every trade has problems with him. He smokes on site (not allowed), unloads his delivered material so as to block other trades access to their material (dick move) and is generally hard to work with. The GC had already been fielding lots of complaints about him before this incident, but even this wasn't enough to get him booted! The superintendent for the general didn't want to fire him, he wanted us to have a sit down and work it out, as if I had anything to do with J's ongoing terrible behavior. My boss told him there's a common denominator, that it's not me, and that if J wanted to apologize he was free to do so but that we all knew that wasn't going to happen. Later that same day J had another incident and got fired.
Oh the joys of working with adult children.
Construction culture and way too much toxic masculinity is the absolute worst part of my job. To be fair, many people had my back here, just getting beyond the event horizon of the old ways is hard.