On journaling
I had in mind doing monthly updates on the journal, but I might just have them a bit more frequently, perhaps every forthnight'ish.
On living arrangement
Where I live turns awesome. I am still in this old Victorian house on my own, i.e. with DW most of the time. Spring is in the door. Wi-fi is strong enough for me to come out on the patio and write from here. There are loads of lambs in the field just in front of me, view of the hills and forests, really nice. And yeah, days are getting longer, it is sunnier and warmer. It is going to be brilliant having one month off in June here. That being said, there is a plan to renovate the house so I brace myself for this unwelcomed info (I will need to be informed 28 days prior to it as I will likely need to relocate to some other accommodation). If that renovation happened after June, would be swell.
Having a housemate - I actually would not mind, it is a big house and two rooms upstairs are useless now. Unless it was a total temperamental mismatch. As it is now, there is space for one more person in the house. After the renovation it is going to be an HMO house which means there will be space for 4 people in total. Then it is when DW is going to officially move in I think (if we are still around at the community then, ha!).
On gardening / food
We grow salads and greens, herbs and flowers around the house, and experiment with carrots. There is also a 70 sq m patch we have in the huge beautiful walled garden and there will be peas, broadbeans and brasicas over there. I have interest in permaculture, but in fact what I am doing with growing food is I think just plain gardening. Double digging the garden but still growing in dirt. I did however bury some compost that still had bits of food visible in it (this is after reading Wheaton's book). So I am growing some of the food on this.
A year ago (in two days) we inoculated 8 logs with shiitake mushrooms after taking the Cornell Small Farms course on mushroom cultivation. Soon will be the time to shock them and see if there is any yield! We need a basin for shocking, I am systematically emptying a very big disused council bin that was around with old carpets, ruining the view. I just put bits of the carpet to a regular bin that council collects every two weeks. Nearly finished, actually today I think I will manage to finally empty it. Then we will use that big bin as a shocking basin for the logs.
Last year we tried growing Stropharia or Wine caps. On the patch, there is lots of mycelium but no fruiting bodies. The patch is very sun exposed. We took some of the mycelium and put around poor looking strawberries around the house, and covered this with sawdust. Apparently Stropharia is good at improving soil, so I hope for some synergy happening there.
We are yet to find Morels ☹
On bike touring
We went for a 8 day cycle touring trip around Scotland, back some week and a half ago. This was when non-essential travel was allowed but before it was possible to go to other council areas, so was kind of not in line with the guidelines of the time. But I thought, we go wild camping anyway and have super limited contact with anyone + both vacinated, so we went. It was really needed and refreshing! We saw some great hills, sea and Isles, views that made us cry.
8 days without a shower or a bath! And DW seemed to have been more comfortable with it than I. We had a long nice bath when back.
It was generally sunny but pretty cold with temperature at night dropping below 0 Celcius. A few days were pretty windy, particularly on two days there was a headwind of around 30 mph. Cycling with a headwind can be tough! Then on the 7th day I though we would reach home but with a 50mph side wind it just plain unsafe to cycle on the road with the panniers and all, so we had an emergency camp, ate all the food we had left, and arrived home the next day in the morning.
Around 300 miles for, say, 7.5 days gives roughly 40 miles / day. I’d say, with the head wind and low temps, pretty good.
On health
I am still curing the skin on my hands after the bike trip, it turned pretty dry because of the cold and stupidly I did not get an ointment I have from a doctor for it.
We have realised that the swollen face while camping is a result of dehydration. We did drink too little water during the trip, I think.
So maybe my body is hydrating to this day, because I am like, more ripped, haha. Anyway, after the trip I carried on doing my 200 burpees a day.
Also, the cycling trip reset my coffee drinking which is great.
On reading / Studying
I am tackling the ‘Economics in Context’, trying to write an assignment for it now. I already submitted the first one for ‘Essential Mathematics 2’ and got a 100%.
Aside from formal education, I have read
• ‘Finite and Infinite Games’ by Carse which I enjoyed. It’s definitely a generalist book. I hesitate to say there is a simple message that is just reiterated in many metaphors, because the metaphors are of various flavours and perhaps all bring some novelty to thinking about life. Like, I would like to say ‘ultimately, life is not a race’ could be a message of the book, but then I would not like someone to just take this message and forgo reading the book.
• Seneca’s ‘On the happy life’ and ‘On the tranquillity of the Mind’, and I will read ‘On the shortness of life’. This is basically following the list given by Irvine in his book ‘A guide to the good life’. I really enjoy reading this stuff. So I think getting more and more into these writings might just become a long term project of mine.
• I spend a good few hours going through Jordan Peterson thread on the forum and watching some youtube of him talking. Not my style, I am not going to be reading his books, I don’t think.
• I found on the forum a link to a website by David Chapman, who writes a book online about
Meaningness .I read perhaps half of it. It is not really the time for me to spend a lot of time on this book now. I appreciate the basic tenets of meaning or lack thereof being nebulous and patterned, and of confused and complete stances. Chapman is a bit like a street philosopher, like ancient Greeks.
• Prompted by the thread about systems, I spent some time looking at the sociological theories of systems, something I read bits and bobs of years ago. This is a very different take from systems taken from the engineering perspective. With Chapmans’ musings in mind, I think
this table could be made for systems in engineering | systems in post-modern social science | systems in ERE, respectively.
On money and financial affairs
With the four weeks of unpaid leave that we will have in June 2021, our basic outgoings will be slightly less than 20% of earnings, and in any case around 0.54 JAFI per person. We will spend more than that, but not more than 1 JAFI per person.
I tried to find the median world per capita income that I sometimes read about on the forum, but numbers on the internet wary wildly so I am not very sure what to follow / if to follow anything. Anyway, the money is fine. A while ago I have settled that for more money, I will need to change line of work.
We are putting some cash away to a first property / retirement account that pays a bonus for each deposit but has virtually non-existent ROI. I found a calculator for checking out the effective ROI for it, it goes like this (in %):
1 year: 14.2/annum
2 years: 10.3/annum
3 years: 8.137/annum
4 years: 6.773/annum
5 years: 5.814/annum
6 years: 5.101/annum
7 years: 4.547/annum
8 years: 4.104/annum
I don’t mind keeping it until the circumstances are so that we will want to get a property.
DW got herself a new (second hand) phone which is the highest outgoing expense in our time together, at about $670. I am then getting her phone, and a relative gets my phone.