Title. Title??? Title!
What to write about? I promised myself (and you) I would write each week, but that was before Covid-19. Before going to the hardware store was an ordeal.
I’ll do my best.
First, I have only one photo this week. I didn’t take it, but here you go:
That’s the the house we’re buying here in North Vancouver. We’ve removed all the subjects (“contingencies” for my American readers) and now we’re waiting for the close date. We expect to be moved in by the end of July. I will share more photos later, once the place is ours and not full of other people’s stuff.
Buying a house in these times feels strange, but also very much needed. Depending on your level of doom and gloom, we might be in for a huge drop in housing prices in the coming years, or only a somewhat middling fall. And recovery might be next year, or ten years from now. There is, of course, no way to predict accurately, but it seems we can either pay rent for a long time and wind up with nothing to show for it, or buy a place of our own. Plus, the current rental is less than ideal in several ways, while this place is quite nice.
It was originally built in 1960 as a single story bungalow. In either 1994 (when the permit was pulled) or 1996 (what the owner told us, and which might be the completion date) a second floor was added and the entire place was remodelled.
The garage will be my studio for messy stuff, including woodworking, and there is enough interior space that Anne can work from home without feeling the urge to murder me for making too much noise while she writes assembly code that causes computers to scream in agony.
This purchase also explains why I went to a hardware store. We needed packing tape to reassemble our moving boxes. I bought a lot to avoid a future trip for the same thing.
This is a major step. One we are happy to take, even in these uncertain times.
Speaking of uncertain times, we’re entering the “opening back up” stage here in BC. It will be phased in over some time, and I don’t know all the details. My worry is that opening up too soon will result in a big second wave of the disease. That has happened before — look up the Spanish Flu for example— and thus far I don’t see any reason it won’t happen again.
As a result, I expect Anne and I will continue our hermit like ways in the coming months, but I should have access to more space and tools to create things that interest me, and those creations may eventually show up here in photographic form.
On the art front, I haven’t done anything at all in the past week. Partly that’s down to dealing with the house, and partly it’s been lack of motivation. But I am trying to get a digital collaboration going with at least one of my fellow art students from Langara. It might not pan out, but I am hoping we can make something amusing happen. Details later, should it actually come together.
And finally, this seemed important when it came up in conversation:
Phlegm is axiomatically inconvenient.
Don’t ask.