I Drew This

Now that I’m in another job that actually requires me to do anything other than a) sit around waiting for my supervisor to give me something to do, or b) figure out what I want to take photos of this week, or c) drink coffee and surf the net and wait for something to land in my inbox, I’m finding that every second outside work is really really precious.

I know I’m only a week in, and that the pace will slow (a bit) soon, but I’m in a much busier environment in general so things have definitely changed. So too must things around the house.

What I’m trying to say is: ADSL bites. I just can’t sit around waiting for these pages to load. I need ADSL 2, ASAP.

That is all I have time for now.

While I mostly blog just for myself, it sometimes would be nice to have a few more readers. There are times, such as a few minutes from now, when I’d like to be able to ask a group of people something so it would be good to have a decent sample size.

What’s been on my mind is this.

I’m just about to change jobs. This will mean that I’ll get a bit of money paid to me when I leave my current employer, mostly from leave entitlements and such. Now I have an idea in my head of how much it will be and I know I could blow it all in an afternoon with the things I really want. Easy. If I had twice what I’m about to get I could blow it in an afternoon and the following morning (even with a hangover).

But I’m a family man. We (C & I) have a mortgage and credit cards and school fees and accounts for our daughters’ futures with not as much money as we’d like to have there. We also have plans to improve our home: stick in some doors and build a bit of a deck, get a new carport and do some pulling up of plants, moving the dirt they were in from one spot to another spot,  and sticking new plants in the now-over-there dirt (I’m told it’s called “landscaping”).

So as much as there’s stuff I want, how do I justify spending a large amount of money on stuff that’s only going to benefit me directly (though, it should be said the family would benefit indirectly) when it means money can’t be spent on other areas we, as a family, would like to invest in?

Case in point: I have a Canon 20D. It’s an 8.2megapixel Digital SLR. But it’s an old model by today’s standards. I have one pretty good lens, one OK lens and one really basic lens. I do shoot the occasional wedding or stuff for work and on these occasions I’ll either borrow or hire, so there’s no loss to me. So do I need a 50D? I know I’d like a 50D (or a 5D) but how do I justify spending money on one of those if it’s not related to a direct stream of income? It’s the same for L-series lenses: should I really be spending money on a top-of-the-line lens and getting great pictures, when I can get ‘good’ pictures with the lenses I have? The question is the same for TVs, computers, musical instruments…

The thing is, I have a hard time spending money. It’s not that I’m miserly; I’ll invest good dollars in something if it’s worth the investment. I can appreciate buying quality over buying average. But I was taught to save, save, save and not make impulse purchases. The downside of this is that for me, every purchase of just about anything is an excruciating decision to make because I’ll always find a way to talk myself out of it. If I need new shoes (which I do) I’ll tell myself “Well, I’ve lasted this long with the shoes I have; I can last another day/week/pay period without new ones” and before you know it I’m in the market for new shoelaces because these ones have broken and the soles are nearly worn through.

I mentioned that it’s hard to see the justification for anything unless there’s a direct income stream to be derived from it. It’s even harder when it comes from purely leisure activities. I find it hard to reconcile the expense of something that is purely for fun—and I’m not just talking financial.

How great would it be to be able to come home from work, pick up a guitar/laptop/wii and spend hours just playing. And yeah, some of my creative pursuits are productive: I often touch up photos in photoshop, which I’m pretty skilled at, only to click ‘No’ when it asks if I want to save—because I know I’m never going to get any of them printed/published so there’s really no point (which is kind of the point of leisure, isn’t it? Pointless amusement? Something that’s fun but really unimportant? If it were important, would it not be called work?). But I get home, cook food, spend time with kids, get them to bed, sometimes cook food again if C & I don’t eat with the kids, clean up after cooking, have a nice cup of tea with C and by the end of that there’s precious little time to do anything productive (or loud) anyway.

So what I want to know from you readers, both my regular half-dozen or so, and any random traffic that happens to be passing by (I know you’re there, please contribute on this one) is…

How much time do you get to spend taking part in leisurely pursuits? I’m talking hours per evening/weekend on stuff that’s just for you.

And if you were to have a nice separation cheque handed to you, how much of it (either a percentage or whatever dollar figure you imagine you’d like to get as a separation cheque) would you be able to justify on spending on yourself (whether it’s on a car, electronics, a holiday, chocolate, hookers, drugs, whatever floats your boat)?

Comments or emails welcome.

Little Miss L turned six last week. This meant that a party to celebrate such a milestone would naturally fall on the weekend. Friday being Halloween, it seemed natural to combine the two occasions with a creepy All Hallows Eve/Birthday party.

C was a trooper in getting most of the organising done. She’s rather a star in the party-planning arena and played to her strengths in terms of coordinating the whole thing. We had all sorts of spooky party gear. A chocolate cake with a large jelly spider on top of it; some rather unsavoury lollies including eyeballs, lollipops in the shape of skulls, the old-style teeth—only with vampire fangs; and we even spent an afternoon clearing out the garage, which was then adorned with fake cobwebs, glowing plastic jack-o-lanterns from Cheap as Chips, plastic skeletons and cutouts of bats and witches on brooms. I took the aforementioned confectionery items to the neighbours and asked if they’d be so kind as to be “in” on the trick-or-treating thing. All agreed.

So come Friday after school, the house filled up with 15 or so smallish people, all dressed in their Halloween finest. We had some pizza and some mini-weiners in puff pastry ready to go in the oven and once the kids were all gathered and had collected a bag each, off we went.

The trick-or-treating went as well as can be expected. The birthday girl got a bit bossy towards the end and started to tell the other kids off if they dared ring the doorbell or get their treat before her.

But when we got back, the problems had already started. Though, it wasn’t so much a problem as bad timing. Our plan was to get them back, feed them, then play a few games, have some cake, parents come to collect and they’re off with their bag of bad-taste, sugar enriched loot home to mum & dad. The thing was, the hot food wasn’t, well, hot. It still needed another ten minutes before it could be brought into the garage.

And what are 15 or so kids going to do in a garage at a party at which they’ve just collected a bagful of sugar-enriched loot?

That’s correct. And they did. And all of a sudden, I was helping with the crappy wrappers, getting vampire teeth, disembodied eyeballs and mini-skeletons out of their plastic bags, trays and wrappers. And when they were all just about finished, the hot food came out. And sure, they tucked in to it. It was all good. But the damage had already been done.

So they ate, then played a game or two (involving more sugar) where they had to get in teams and two teammates had to feed jelly to a third, seated teammate.

And then C had to go inside to get the cake ready, so told me to take the kids inside the garage and tell them a spooky story. I thought it would be a good idea to do an equisite corpse kind of thing, where I’d start the story off, and we’d go round the room with each kid adding onto the last bit.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a darkened room with 15 kids, smacked up and off their faces from sugar treats, and attempted to get them to sit quietly and, ahem, concentrate on telling a cohesive, linear story but let me just assure you that if you haven’t, it’d probably be easier to get a dozen cats to take a bath.

I started it fine, with some story about a girl dying and coming back as a zombie and trying to find out what killed her. We found out that she died in the bathroom after she’d done a poo. The poo had landed in spider venom that was in the toilet. The spider in question had come from space, in a rocket. No explanation was given as to how the spider got in the toilet, whether it was present when the poo touched the venom and how, indeed, it’s possible for contact between venom and poo to kill the person on the toilet (my favoured theory is some bad chemical reaction that stunk her to death). And it took a while to get even that far. As soon as one kid suggested something, another kid tried to top it with something more outrageous. I had other kids dropping their food on the garage floor and I was having to intervene to make sure they didn’t try to eat a zombie tongue after having it land in the oil spot, one kid was getting all the little cutout bats and rubber spiders from around the room trying to shove them in my pocket (because I was dressed as a vampire and they were “my friends”); the large, car-sized, door of the garage had been covered in black plastic and one girl leaned back on her chair and landed, head outside the plastic (and therefore the room), staring up into the branches of a pine tree (probably too drunk to know what was going on) and meanwhile every other kid was arguing over whether the spider came from Mars or Jupiter.

I’ve never been so happy to see a chocolate cake show up, especially one with a large, jelly spider on top.