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 first 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 second 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!

 

 

Three quotes; three vastly different prices:

Quote 1: $41,747.43 (which did NOT include installing the new beam and guttering, for which Quote 3 gad added an additional $4,737.70)

Quote 2: $24,499.20

Quote 3: $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 buy all the material myself and then look for a carpenter - even a handyman would do - who would to the work on an hourly basis.

 

 

The hardwood underneath 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 along the top beam (neither of which is even included in the most expensive quote, Quote 1) has been quoted to me at under $800, giving a total of $3,955,38 or, rounded up, $4,000 for material.

No wonder that not one of the quotes of $41,747.43, $24,499.20, and $17,316.20 showed separate totals for the cost of labour and material.

Would you have accepted a quote of $37,747.43 ($41,747.43 minus $4,000) or $20,499.20 or $13,316.20 for the labour component alone for what they all agreed was going to be just a little over a week's work?

Any carpenter wants a week's work for $6,000 ? CASH IN HAND!

 

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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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"It's too late for that!"

 

 

I had got up early to phone a supplier who had received the wrong order from the carpenter I had contracted to rebuild my verandah. Not being able to get through on the phone, I shaved and showered and was just about to drive into town when he returned my call, and I was lucky to cancel the order just in time. Being all dressed up with nowhere to go, I said to Padma, "Let's drive to Ulladulla for lunch at the bowling club".

 

The finger points to the Ulladulla Bowling Club

 

Which is what we did but, of course, no visit to Ulladulla is complete without a visit to my favourite bookshops, of which there are three: the Uniting Church op-shop, Vinnies, and the Lions Preloved Bookshop.

 

 

I came away with "Knowing What We Know Now" by Simon Winchester, which had been released only a couple of years earlier but here it was already in a second-hand opshop, and in mint condition at that. Then there was "Seriously Curious - The Facts and Figures that Turn Your World Upside Down", "Kevin McCloud's Grand Tour of Europe", and Paulo Coelho's "The Pilgrimage" along the road to Santiago de Compostella in Spain (which is a walk I have always wanted to do but now never will).

 

Read it online at www.archive.org

 

Then I found "Understanding the Woman in Your Life" by Steve Vinay Gunther (written by a man???), and I asked Padma, "Should I buy this?"

"It's too late for that!" she said, and so I spent the two dollars I had saved on that transaction, on Peter Schweizer's "Secret Empires", which is about America's top politicians' scams to end all scams. It's too late for us to do anything about that, too, but it's still worth reading about it.

 

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That "On Golden Pond" Moment

 

 

I have this "On Golden Pond" moment every morning as I look out the window and see the river shining in the early-morning sunlight. I look at it and am reminded of all the people who have brightened my life and who are no longer here. I look at it and I am taken back to those many magical moments in my life.

And as the early-morning sunlight loses its golden sheen, I am also reminded of how fleeting life is and how much we should hold on to those precious moments before they are no longer here, before we are no longer here! Then it is time to feed the ducks on my own golden pond and give the possum in the possum penthouse his banana and then to brew myself my first lemongrass-and-ginger cup of tea of the day.

 

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