guitar player's journal

[guitarplayer]

you also mentioned elsewhere Society of Mind that I remember pondering to read.

For the Geometric Regional Novel is this light and amusing or more like 1984 like? I checked it out on the Internet Archive and think maybe not for me now. He also wrote something called Awakening to the Great Sleep War.

[guitarplayer]

Oh well, I ended up starting reading Sex, Ecology and Spirituality.

We went for a cycling trip to Arran, it's an isle off the west coast of Scotland. By the looks of it, it's a mekka of wild camping. The picnic area we crashed on, there were maybe 10 people ending up pitching tents there + a few camper vans nearby. Maybe we will go again, it's along a major cycling route from our place, only about 40 miles to the ferry and it costs 5$ per person one way. We cycled off on Friday after work and were back on Sunday.

We have been getting a lot of fancy white collar worker food recently through an app DW had found (it was the same app I had been going on about for a while). Think various salads, protein sweet balls, hummous and fruit from your workplace cafe. Vegan yoghurts.

Someone was redoing their bathroom so I scavenged two bathroom sink taps because our cold water one was broken. It requires some acrobatics doing household plumbing.

Actually there was a minor plumbing accident as well over the weekend when we were away, but this is sorted now and no harm.

Signed up to the tool library scheme for £30 / year.

I have been thinking about formalising stack functions for MBTI for non stereotypical persons. I think I am along the lines of INxx, so I have been looking at these stacks and ranking various functions.

[loutfard]

The Arran trip sounds great. I'd do the same if I lived in the area.

Always open to food waste app recommendations. We have it even better than a food waste app now with the free veggie school food. It's just unclear how long that will last. There's a major school building renovation coming up that might mess things up.

[guitarplayer]

It’s olio, I see they have no presence around where you are though.

We fixed our tent, trapped larvae of moths in last year and guess what, if desperate they will feed on a synthetic tent tarp.

Also decided against paying mortgage off just yet due to the simple fact that we can put cash in current or fixed 6/12 months accounts and effectively void interest instalments whilst retaining flexibility.

=====

Atelic activities

[guitarplayer]

If it is true what they say that 3 tablespoons of my type of blood can spare a newborn, I might have just spared 15 of them.

Otherwise, I set a 8pm-8am no screen time. I’m reading through the economics curriculum in no screen time (this is my second attempt). I have a cookbook stand I got from someone for free. It looks nice, handmade by the someone’s friend from an old whisky barrel. Using the stand for the brick that is the economics textbook. Sometimes I head to lay down and then kindle and Ken Wilber currently.

[guitarplayer]

I gave in last night and spent up till 21:15 reading articles about life in Switzerland. Reason for this was that a replacement part for my coffee grinder arrived yesterday at about 3pm - and I could not resist trying it out. I had been going on black tea for about 1-2 weeks until then.

I started looking at the European ERE meetup holidays. I might be writing in the dedicated thread soon. Tonight cycling over to scavenge a summer compact 350g sleeping bag from someone living nearby. I downloaded the Forest Baltic Trial KMZ file and loaded it onto my Organic Maps. We will be in Riga on Saturday the week before the meetup which it makes sense to walk the trial, look for mushrooms and enjoy summer.

This year we will have extended summer. In the west of Scotland we are now at the peak of summer with temperatures topping 23 C. In the second part of August there will be 16-17 C, but I read in the 10 days in Latvia it will be about 23-25 C with 15-16 C nights. In September DW will be in 23-27 C Madrid and I am heading there for October and November hopefully to glide from about 23 C to some 18 C in Nov.

Sex, Ecology and Spirituality is a good book, granted Wilber is bright and also doesn't beat around the bush. I am now at about 1/5 of the book, read it before bed.

Economics - Principles, Problems and Policies - I take it easy now, not rushing like the last time a few months back which I consider false start. I mean, there's a very good chance I will be around at least 50 more years, plenty of time. I went through the first three chapters like a good student, taking notes, answering all the questions with words rather than mental shortcuts, all that stuff. Normally in the morning before I look at screens. I still plan to read all the seven books.

[guitarplayer]

European ERE meetup re-motivated me to keep on with the journal. I aim to be writing to a monthly schedule and will post a monthly post this coming weekend.

The meetup was good. It is a joy to interact with people where the Venn diagram of interests overlaps so much, I will be doing more of this. DW and I will also be looking to come to the US ERE fest next year, provided it is happening.

[guitarplayer]

August 2024 update

European ERE Meetup

It was good to meet high quality people. We had lots of chats on various things, a lot of it the sort of chatter that sparks ideas.

@loutfard is such a hospitable person and full of ideas.
@bos is so accomplished for his age.
@jean is such a character.
@J_ and his wife have wisdom nuggets.
@guitarplayer's DW - everything is just so much better with her.

We also spent one day in Riga and a total of about 4 days on the beach walking.

Latvia has pleasant beaches, woodlands ridden with mosquitoes and abundant apple trees. I think doing the coastal route of the three Baltic countries could be a good long summer getaway. No issues wild camping and I hear they have this stripe of woods along most coast.

At the meetup I had a chance to spell out maybe a dozen alternative paths for the future and others were also trying to help DW and I come up with another vine to get hold of - it being a new country, activity etc.

Then we headed off and had final two days on the Latvian coast. All the impressions started sinking in and will probably keep sinking in some more.

Breaks

When we worked in previous field we had no issue at all to go on working for 6 months and then take 4 weeks off, for example. Reflecting on it, I think it was perhaps to do with the 'maintenance' aspect of that work - it was basically all maintenance with minimal development. I had the Jim Simons effect of working (Simons did sweeping) thinking my thoughts alongside.

Now, I am in a line of work and particularly in the bit of the organisation that does mostly development with minimal maintenance for now. So this is mind consuming! I am slowly (22 months in!) realising it and perhaps approaching a point where I will try to bounce back in some way. Good is that more than 50% of the work is still interesting (@mF's metric). And also, I asked for it, as in it had been my decision to go all in.

But I realise that in terms of how my mind is occupied, I am beyond 'a place for everything and everything in its place' - it is cluttered. To add, this is a mind-occupying activity with no end - various requests are pouring in to overwhelm capacity. I approach it as a challenge and a 'creative mess' from which something new will emerge, bearing the inconvenience / relative lack of comfort associated with it. When I get some more techniques internalised, I might get more picky or generally brushing off some requests more easily.

With all that said, and after the European ERE meetup, from now on I will prioritise regular breaks. We have between 7 and 8 weeks of holidays and I plan to engage DW in going away more regularly for shorter periods of time. This goes against the grain of some principles I had in place before - particularly some environmental concerns associated with frequent travel. Let it be my small luxury, we are on a shoestring otherwise - and an opportunity for internal work on guilt and shame - lifelong pursuit for folk recovering from Catholic upbringing

I also recognise and want to point to myself that when I had been in the previous line of work I never hesitated to pursue 4 weeks of unpaid leave every two years and always had a great time doing it. And there are options for the same and also extended breaks in our current workplaces. So I am pointing out to myself that I should not have my vision clouded by pursuit of a project, income, recognition or whatever, because I know that I have great time with lots of time at hand.

Broader on work

I had some food for thought from the Latvia meetup. Great that people have unique approaches and also the capacity to comprehend others' approaches and talk about all convivially.

Where I am at now, and also DW, is that we are your classic average white collar professional. We are not making bank by the standards of that subgroup, we are average. Taking our past selves and also in the grand scheme of things though, of course we are making bank. There is this occasional desire to go further, score higher and especially make more. And this is fine. Then there is the desire to do the bare minimum, and this is fine also.

Narrower on work

I got a task to develop an RShiny app for scenario analysis and I'm rubbing my hands in joy since this is spot on one thing I want to learn.

On money

I am wary of the moving goalpost for a 'sum required to retire'. Resolution of this issue as I see it is in learning to invest. I am learning this slowly. I want to be realistic, I am not a natural if it comes to investing. I have interest in it but I am yet to discover talent, if any. Also aware of tax advantages of investing in UK tax wrapper accounts and aiming to focus my energy here. As much as investing in properties had been my first choice in 2016 when we embarked on the money saving journey with 0 savings (and recently the idea rekindled in the European ERE meetup), I am aware of the sure wins of using tax advantaged accounts which are in place for savers so that state does not have to help them later. Since I have about the same (low) skill in real estate and stocks, I am choosing now to develop skills in the incentivised one. Need to be particularly honest with myself here.

Also, I realise that with each year passing, there is less time we need to cover with investments. I bet on the state pensions, and I am very confident in how little money we need for a nice life so I think the state pensions and a small top up will carry the day from about 35-40 years from now.

That said, I am unsure how much support we will need / want to give to our folk in the meantime. We were asked in the past to contribute to an indefinite recurring expense of family members but declined on the basis that this was a 'want' in our eyes. It was hard. On the other hand, we had contributed thousands of dollars to other family expenses that were one off's which we considered needs.

No matter how I try to square it, and I had several attempts in the last few years, I get an output of tap money (within reason) from my mid forties, give or take a few years.

It has been a while since the last time I did a thorough count of all the monies we have, had too little mental bandwidth for that. Though how it often is with having a low-outflows-lifestyle and no silly money sinks, monies gather easily. They will gather increasingly easily as our flat is being paid off. We have the remaining $60k to pay off the mortgage, and the sum is earning interest equal to the mortgage. If I don't manage to learn enough on investing in one year to allocate these funds somewhere, we will just pay off the mortgage next year when there is no penalty for early repayment. Baring unexpected (family etc), we will then be living on about 1 jacob / person, but earning in the range of 7-8 jacobs / person (and growing). And already with 5-10 jacobs/person in savings (this is outside of the flat + money to pay off the mortgage). We had been there before, but in our particular circumstances where our spending was SUPER low and our living space was attached to employment. So now just recreating the same in an urban environment with living space being ours, good connections around the country, continent and world (though the second one mostly engages flying places, and third obviously too), and a favourable climate going decades forward. I am sporadically monitoring for floods - our neighbourhood is okay, and the flat is on the 3rd floor, though the overall elevation is at 14m above sea with a river about a mile away. It was stressful to look for a place, get it and move in here! I just queried DW what she thinks of getting a lodger - no way! so if we sell and buy another place, it will be not larger than this one, unless we'll have a plan to get a bigger one, divide it and sell part. And will likely involve space for growing food.

All in all, between personal circumstances such as the proforma of finding our way to break out of an underdeveloped and a developing country, learning languages, gaining more skills (professional and otherwise), retaining common decency and in all that having some good time and fun - I think we have done well. For example, we could now ditch work and go care for a family member for five years, maybe a decade. Or travel between organic farms for a couple decades or more. Or get a boat and cruise canals for a number of years (I have not done arithmetic on this but feel inspired by @J_ and we should have at least twice the (good, at hand) money for a boat). And I don't even count here renting out the flat that we effectively own outright, which could bring 2/3-1 jacob. We are one year away from 35, on both sides (traditional way). In a stoic way, I give us a pat at the back.

[guitarplayer]

Not much is happening these days.

Raised Bed

We're slowly tidying it up, went a couple days back to collect camomile and pulled out what's left of it. Got kale and beets as well as chives.

Still left runner beans as normally I would take them and eat whole with pods while now I want them to mature and get the actual beans, discarding pods. We will try to apply for a raised bed again next season.

There is a birch log there and I already collected two birch polypores from it, we are making teas with it. Good anti cancer agent and tastes good, too.

Work

My team is aiming to transform into a data science team and I am lured with a vision of promotion. On the other hand, I am also mindful to check every now and again I find at leat 50% of work appealing. I do.

It has been two years in this organisation. Two years ago I set the timer for three years, then tentatively extended this to five years. In just over a year and a half I got a promotion. I am aiming to get another one before the three year mark let's see how this works out.

The two year mark means I locked in on inflation adjusted pension that works like an inflation linked annuity but is very cheap compared to market price for annuities.

DW is aiming to be in Spain from November, we might spend Christmas in Madrid.

Apps

I am eyeing a company that focuses on contracting to build apps for other large companies. They have heaps of good material and resources. I am learning to build apps from them. This as I have a project at work that is building-app-related. I also build a personal finance app and am recreating C40's graphs, and other graphs, in that app.

Money

Tidied up records of our expenses from last 3.5 years and am playing with these to build cool visuals as in the point above. It gives me clear picture of spending, saving, patterns, net worth. Ten years ago I would have never in my life thought for present me to have so much money.

Relationships

A forumite came to visit for a few days. I aim to make more effort to meet forum people in real life.

This month will be 8 years DW and I are married. Ten years ago I would have never in my life thought for present me to be with such a person.

Health

We have increased B12 intake to be on the safe side, because we don't eat meat or dairy. There is a few other dietary and supplement things I am doing as well.

Otherwise we continue to focus on whole food plant based diet.

I now every second day do 42 pull ups and 156 burpees, those with a jump. On other days I do sun salutations, and in any case moon salutations.

Music

Music is on standby. I still practice everyday, there's at a minimum a 15 min routine I do. And play for enjoyment. But I've got a mic a while back and this sits in a drawer.

Flat

I have made an overpayment on the 5.5% interest mortgage for the second year of the two year fix. I know it is slightly suboptimal to do this. The fix concludes next year when the current idea is to pay off the remainder.

After running a no heating in winter experiment two years back and having it set to max 15 C / 59 F one year ago, we have agreed to heat the flat to 17.5 C / 63.5 F this winter. Call it lifestyle inflation.

[delay]

I am eyeing a company that focuses on contracting to build apps for other large companies. They have heaps of good material and resources. I am learning to build apps from them. This as I have a project at work that is building-app-related. I also build a personal finance app and am recreating C40's graphs, and other graphs, in that app.

Thanks for your journal update! This reads like C40 is a budgeting app, but Google doesn't find one. What is C40?

Tidied up records of our expenses from last 3.5 years and am playing with these to build cool visuals as in the point above. It gives me clear picture of spending, saving, patterns, net worth.

I do something similar every year. I search for spending I regret and what I would like to do more of. The last few years I disliked spending on gadgets and I like spending more on biological groceries. Knowing that spending will come up in the end of year review acts as a double check, I haven't made a large impulse purchase in years. It's like resisting cookies because I will weigh myself next morning.

Congratulations on 42 pull ups! I can do 10 push ups after a year of practice, but not even one pull up. My thermostat is still at 14 degrees. My body enjoys the change in seasons. I looked at deaths per week recently, and from October to March there are many more deaths. If this is related to cold, it seems like great idea to turn up the thermostat!

[chenda]

What is C40?

He is a forum member : )

[mountainFrugal]

After running a no heating in winter experiment two years back and having it set to max 15 C / 59 F one year ago, we have agreed to heat the flat to 17.5 C / 63.5 F this winter. Call it lifestyle inflation.

15-17.49 C is business as usual. 17.5 C is Your Rich Life territory! Just kidding.

What is C40?

viewtopic.php?t=1344

[guitarplayer]

@delay, so do you change your spending patterns after looking at the figures? For pull ups, DW has been learning them across the past couple of months and can already do 1-1.5 of certain varieties. We have a simple pull-up bar that sits on a door frame, no fixtures needed as it lock by gravity. If you wish to practice you could get one probably for around 15 Euro.

@mF, I can engineer the figures for average thermostat temperature following emigrating to Southern Europe across late autumn and early winter. That’s what you do with inflation, tinker.

[delay]

Thanks ertyu and mountainFrugal for pointing to C40's journal. Amazing how he set a goal, made charts, and actually made it.

@delay, so do you change your spending patterns after looking at the figures? For pull ups, DW has been learning them across the past couple of months and can already do 1-1.5 of certain varieties. We have a simple pull-up bar that sits on a door frame, no fixtures needed as it lock by gravity. If you wish to practice you could get one probably for around 15 Euro.

Yeah, looking back one year and then highlighting purchases I regret does cause change. It's like the Marie Kondo method for personal finance: keep the spending that gives you joy and discard the rest. I do this once a year, usually on New Year's day. I have not otherwise found much value in analysing the past or projecting into the future.

Thanks for the tip, I got a pull-up bar a year ago. Pull ups are much harder than I expected. I started with just lowering myself, but after a month I hadn't yet managed a single pull-up, and moved on to other exercises.

[guitarplayer]

Of course there was lots of externals at play in C40s journey as well. That said, the charts are really good and I am adopting them. I currently struggle to overcome the hurdle I usually find which is when I put the figures together, do all breakdowns, create functions (I created the ones from jacob's book) and can see the output in the most rough form, and then want to still fine tune the visuals (eg to show to DW) when I already have the information (the figures). I sense the resolution of this will be to redefine this work in terms of multiple expressions of beauty.

DW's been reading on the Marie Kondo method - maybe I will suggest what you do to her and she can take up this part of looking at the figures. Teaming up with life overall is the biggest leverage I've found so far.

On pull ups, what I'd noticed was the pull up bar would just be there and DW would spontaneously hang on it or try to pull herself up every now and again. Just hanging off of a pull up bar also helps.

[guitarplayer]

October 2024 update

So I think I sort of stopped being on top of things recently. Which is fine, occasionally, though I think maybe it is time to get to grips with a sort of new narrative to follow. I am still figuring out the narrative.

Raised Bed

I think the raised bed is mostly finished but we have not managed to go to check it out this month. There is lots of runner beans to harvest that I hope will have matured by now.

Work

DW expect to get her Spanish work visa next week and aiming to be in Madrid from mid-November. Half a year delay! I told her to request a heater to be put in her Madrid company apartment.

Once that visa is in I will push forward requests to work from Spain for a while.

At my work, I am now in a make-or-brake position to get good setup for working and delivering analysis in Python. What we work on is exploratory and there are no working frameworks. This generally can be a feature or a bug. I would have liked to have a framework in place as a blueprint, because otherwise I worry I will develop ways of working that are not transferable. So I am pushing for developing a common framework with two other colleagues I work with on the project. Also, I think a fairly quick promotion (maybe by mid 2025) depends on getting this project up and running and delivering tangible outcomes. This would be a promotion broadly speaking from 'analyst' to 'senior analyst' ('researcher' or 'scientist', depending what message is there to amplify).

I went for a two day event, a sort of conference related to what I do at work.

Personal Finance App

I now wonder if I should re-approach the personal finance app and build it in Python to in this way hone the language. Or get the R version as a minimum viable product with my wife as a judge, then do the same in Python. Then if time allows and for fun, do the same with VBA (or any other language? I mean, this topic we care about. But who am i kidding, how many times I'd used this phrase 'if time allows' - related to not being much on top of things these days).

Social

DW and I went to meet up with another forumite. I am going to continue trying to meet people associated with the forum in real life.

Yeah so we will be having our wedding anniversary soon. Happy days!

Health

We continue to focus on whole food plant based diet.

Taking 1000mcg of B12 daily has been a good choice, it definitely tweaks something for the better.

It's annoying that regardless what we do we have some mild skin issues, like skin piling off around nose, or me on chest, and dandruff. It is nothing extreme, just sitting there. I can see how you read about skin remedies from thousands of years ago, its just annoying to see it. Though in the grand scheme of things, this is nothing. In relation to this, what I do wonder is whether moving to dry Madrid for 1.5 (I) to 3 (DW) months will change anything in this respect - Western Scotland is maybe amongst the dampest places you find in Europe.

My exercising routine is sort of on hold now. I still do burpees and pull ups and yoga, but with larger gaps, like every 3 days sometimes.

DW and I were talking about getting down to 22 BMI, with all the flaws the measure is accused of.

Music

I am learning the waterfalls of Tommy Emmanuel that he uses in eg Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Flat

I wonder whether to keep the flat when we move out of Scotland.

Switzerland

So I am fairly consistent with researching Switzerland.

pension system,
what workers are needed there,
what it takes to move there,
what is going to happen with the Scottish flat and UK monies when we are there,
whether / how to declare things.

I had been living in Austria for a year started dusting off my German. [ETA: scratch this, DW convinced me it is idiotic to start dusting off German when I am moving to Spain for a month and a half soon enough. So Spanish detour it is)]
I had a chat with DW about what I call 'klettersteig/via ferrata' move: one of us is still in Scotland while the other moves across and prepares things to be sorted (always one carabiner on the line). We are going to be testing this apart-then-together-again with the Spain move later this year.

[JollyScot]

It was me

[guitarplayer]

Hehe yeah did not want to put you in the spotlight It was great to meet!

[Western Red Cedar]

October 2024 update
DW expect to get her Spanish work visa next week and aiming to be in Madrid from mid-November. Half a year delay! I told her to request a heater to be put in her Madrid company apartment.

Once that visa is in I will push forward requests to work from Spain for a while.

If you are in Madrid, I'd encourage you to make it over to La Tabacalera in Lavapies. It could be a great opportunity to make friends with fellow cyclists, musicians, artists, and like-minded people.

DW and I went there to check out the graffiti on the external walls, but there was a large community event going on with a bunch of music and galleries. The tunnels under the building are mind-blowing. We spent at least a couple hours exploring the building and photographing the art. It was one of the main highlights of our month in Spain and Portugal.

[guitarplayer]

Thanks @WRC! La Tabacalera is 15-25 min from the flat so yes I will visit it!

November 2024 Update

Job interview (advice welcome)

Happy as I am in my current post, DW told me I should apply for a Data Scientist position at her company, because there is nothing to lose, it pays much better than my current position and DW would get a recommendation bonus. I applied without much prep, then got an invite to an informal chat with my would be manager. Chat was good, tomorrow I am having a formal online interview. I read there are going to be 4 behaviour questions and 2 technical questions. The behaviour questions are in a format I am familiar with so that should be fine. I am unsure what technical questions to expect. The job would require working with SQL, Python and PowerBI and maths aptitude is highlighted as well. I have experience working with all this but wondering what type of questions to expect.

I am doing a bit more prep this morning and investigating possible types of questions. Do you have any quick advice on how to think about the technical questions?

Holidays

I am heading to Madrid in a few days to spend Christmas and New Year there! We have a flat next to the Botanical Garden and Atocha Station, central and okay (quiet etc) neighbourhood. I will be working from there through Jan and will take further couple weeks off in Feb.

It is a sweet job that allows me to do this so I am half not wanting to be successful in the above job interview! But I acknowledge that with the path I am currently pursuing, it makes sense to get some more varied experience and in particular hopefully also work in established systems (unlike currently where we are setting up systems - which on the whole is great and exciting, but given I am learning as I go, I would use some exposure to an(y) established way of doing things to do a bit more of the 'compare', 'compile' and 'compute' from the six C framework).

Actually this is altogether synergy of our little household system as DW gets a nice 2 bedroom flat in Madrid city centre that is paid for and I get to use my flexible working, generous holiday allowance and option to work from abroad. So all in all we have two months in Spain that we are paid for (DW gets an uplift).

Fixing things

I had a leaking stopcock, a drop every 20s approximately. I am not sure how long this was going on for so the only thing that remains is to hope that water found a way out or a way to dry up rather than accumulate. It is all behind a wall which is annoying and makes me think I would like to have an 'open source' set up of the property @_J is encouraging me to build elsewhere on the forum Anyway, this problem in the first instance required tightening gland packing which I had done and it worked. I still have a container underneath but I see a drop every 12h which is acceptable.

Inspired by @bos I fixed a post-work mouse that had a scroll wheel broken and was intended to go to the bin. Now I have it for my private laptop. It needed disassembled, cleaned and WD40 applied to moving parts.

Foraging

On one of our last outings with DW before she'd left to Spain I'd found lots of birch polypores (the Swiss Knife of mushroom world). These are now dried and chopped up and I drink a tea a day.

Being on my own

I have been on my own the last month which showed me just how people can grow together, which I don't see on a day-to-day basis. Had some opportunities to practice stoicism. I look forward to reuniting with DW in Spain