If you can't spell it, don't buy it!

 

RRP (Recommended Retail Price) $10,499

 

Lucky for me, I have owned several 'Huskies' before and can speak Swedish as well as the next guy. This particular Husqvarna was one of two of the same model cluttering up the showroom at Industrial Replacements, and I was able to buy it for $7,950.00. Not that they sold it to me at a loss, so you can only image how huge the profit margin is on the full RRP.

 

I have attached their invoice just in case you feel like paying for it. 😀

 

Delivery should be sometime tomorrow, by which time I hope to have recovered some of the money on the share market. Not that today was much of a day, as my BHP shares are down by $1.25 apiece. But that's all right, too, as they are a wonderful cash cow. As the saying goes, "A cow for her milk, a stock for her dividend". I had put a SELL-order on my lithium shares LTR at $2.49 before we left home. I missed selling them by one cent. The sharemarket giveth and the sharemarket taketh away.

It's going to be a busy weekend going up and down my seven acres, trying to tame the grass that's been allowed to grow long and thick.

 

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The poem of my life

 

 

A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. As he hesitates, images from possible futures flicker past.

Images of the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running, weeping. The series resolves at last into a view of a different young man, with his thumb out on the side of a road. As a car slows to pick him up, we realise the driver is the original man from the crossroads, only now he's accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life he's chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveller. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold — for it's a commercial we've been watching — the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears.

The advertisement I've just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice:

 

 

It is, of course, "The Road Not Taken" - routinely misidentified as "The Road Less Traveled" - by Robert Frost. In the commercial, this fact is never announced; the audience is expected to recognise the poem unaided. For any mass audience to recognise any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual. For an audience of car buyers in New Zealand to recognise a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely.

But this isn't just any poem. It's "The Road Not Taken", and it plays a unique role not simply in American literature, but in American culture — and in world culture as well. Its signature phrases have become so ubiquitous, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches, that it's almost possible to forget the poem is actually a poem.

A poem which almost everyone gets wrong. This is the most remarkable thing about "The Road Not Taken" — not its immense popularity (which is remarkable enough), but the fact that it is popular for what seem to be the wrong reasons. It’s worth pausing here to underscore a truth so obvious that it is often taken for granted: Most widely celebrated artistic projects are known for being essentially what they purport to be. When we play "White Christmas" in December, we correctly assume that it’s a song about memory and longing centered around the image of snow falling at Christmas. When we read Joyce’s Ulysses, we correctly assume that it’s a complex story about a journey around Dublin as filtered through many voices and styles. A cultural offering may be simple or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience nearly always knows what kind of dish is being served.

Frost's poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider "The Road Not Taken" to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion ("I took the one less traveled by"), but the literal meaning of the poem's own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem's speaker tells us he "shall be telling," at some point in the future, of how he took the road less travelled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths "equally lay / In leaves" and "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." The road he will later call less travelled is actually the road equally travelled. The two roads are interchangeable.

According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming "ages and ages hence" that his decision made "all the difference" only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn't a salute to can-do individualism; it's a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.

With so many forks in my path, with so many opportunities gained and lost, with some fifty job relocations across fifteen countries, "The Road Not Taken" became my favourite poem ever since I discovered it ages and ages ago. During all this time it served me as a means of my self-deception before becoming the source of all my regrets as well as my comfort in old age. It's the poem of my life. Thank you, Robert Frost.

 

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Buyer Beware!

 

 

After having spent more than ten thousand afternoons taking a nap and more than ten thousand mornings eating breakfast on the verandah, it's hard to believe that "Riverbend" didn't even have a verandah when I bought the place and immediately had one built.

That was thirty-three years ago, and the verandah is showing such signs of wear and tear that nothing short of a complete rebuild is needed.

I couldn't tell a good carpenter from a bad one if he hit me in the face with a claw hammer, and so I asked a friend if he had a friend who could do the job. He did, casually inspected it, and then quoted me $18,000.

 

 

I have little experience with tradesmen - of which most were bad - but I remembered the advice to always get three quotes. The next one was for $41,747.43 - I loved that 43 cents! - but didn't include an overhead beam which needed replacing, for which he quoted me $110 an hour. As I told him, "Not in my wildest dreams ..." He wasn't surprised at all.

 

 

The third one quoted me a not-quite-so-outrageous $24,499,20. It ticked all the boxes - as they say - and I thought I was on a winner!

 

 

But then came "Old School Quality Building" who had been the first one to show up for an inspection of the job but had been delayed giving me his quote, for which he apologised. $17,316.20. Old school indeed!

 

 

Four quotes; four vastly different prices:

Quote 1: $18,000.00 (which does NOT include beam and guttering)

Quote 2: $41,747.43 (which does NOT include beam and guttering)

Quote 3: $24,499.20

Quote 4: $17,316.20

No double-guessing whose quote I was going to accept, except that at the very last minute he and I had a disagreement over what was really a trifling matter and I decided not to go ahead with it. Instead, I decided to just buy all the material myself and then look for a carpenter - even a handyman could do it - who would do the work on an hourly basis.

 

 

The hardwood frame plus the new overhead beam cost $981.98.

 

 

480 lin/m of MERBAU decking plus 4 boxes of screws cost $2,965.40.

The guttering has been quoted to me at under $800, giving a total of $3,955,38, say $4,000, for the materials included in Quote 2 and 3.

Quotes 1 and 2 do not include the top beam ($219.60) nor the guttering $800); therefore, their materials can be reduced by $1,000 to $3,000.

Which leaves the following labour costs in the four quotes:

Quote 1: $15,000.00 ($18,000 minus $3,000)

Quote 2: $38,747.43 ($41,747.43 minus $3,000)

Quote 3: $20,499.20 ($24,499.20 minus $4,000)

Quote 4: $13,316.20 (17,316.20 minus $4,000)

Quote 2 suggests an hourly rate at $110; therefore, it allows for 352 hours (8.8 weeks!!!) Assuming the same hourly rate in all the other quotes, Quote 1 allows for 136 hours (3.4 weeks); Quote 3 for 186 hours (4.6 weeks); and even Quote 4 still allows for 121 hours (3 weeks).

All four tradesmen gave me a completion date of one week to ten days, so why do they want to bill me for three weeks or as many as eight? No wonder that not one of the quotes separated the cost of labour from the cost of the material, as the game would have been up at first glance.

Any carpenter wants to do a week's work for say $6,000 ? Call me now!

 

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German is a special language

 

Changing the upper case in 'Speisen' to lower case even changes the meaning of the preceding word in 'Warme speisen im Keller'. How subtle can you get? In fact, it is so subtle that it took me a while to dimly remember that 'Warme' was a slang word during my youth for homosexuals, a breed of men then never spoken of and certainly never seen.

 

An Austrian friend whom we befriended during his time in Australia many years ago, wrote to say that he had shaved a few milliseconds off his texting time by not capitalising German words. I hope it won't get you into trouble, Rob!

While capital letters in the English language are primarily used to mark the start of a sentence, the pronoun "I", proper nouns (specific names of people, places, organizations, and sometimes things), and the names of days, months, holidays, nationalities, languages, and formal titles, the capitalising of German words is far more subtle.

I can think of no word in the English language where changing its first letter from lower to upper case would give it a completely different meaning. It can do so in German. It's a very special language indeed.

 

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If a book is worth reading, it is worth keeping

 

 

I don't think of the books in my library as a "to be read" pile. Instead, I think of them as my wine cellar. I collect books to be read at the right time, in the right place, and in the right mood.

The narrator in this video clip, Raymond Russell, tells the story of his bibliomania, how his book collection has grown and changed over the years, which does strike a chord with me. I, too, may have gone from bibliophile to bibliomaniac, and am in danger of becoming a hoarder.

 

 

Still, thanks for the video clip. If I'm book-mad, at least I'm not alone!

 

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