Had it about an hour ago: a sort of one-pot pasta and lentil stew thingy, made in our slow cooker. I wouldn’t call it it a particular favourite of mine, but it has the advantage of being dead easy and surprisingly substantial.

Jona Lewie - Stop The Cavalry. Apparently not originally intended as a Christmas song anyway.

That good eh?

Hopefully the weekend will improve things.

With us, anything that is/would be smelly goes in some kind of container.

Cleaning - I would say once every 3-4 months or so in normal circumstances. Quite possibly longer.

I am not a dog lover. I find them needy, melodramatic and hierarchical: some of the features that I try to avoid in humans.

I work in an office around one day a week which often has more dogs than humans - since one of the regular staff has two dogs. In general, however, they aren’t much of a problem. One frequently nudges people’s elbows to get attention and howls whenever a phone rings. Another gets in the way of the door an awful lot - resulting in the owner installing a child gate at an inner doorway, and another has been traumatised in the past and needs to be taken out whenever a fire alarm test is due. However, this is not more that the needs and quirks of other people, really, and is fairly easy to work around.

I am glad that I do not have to work in that office all the time, but overall it is not a big deal.

Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy. I used to spend lot of time on TheEnvironmentSite.org some time before Slashdot, but I cant recall whether anything else came in between those two.

Working from home today - or supposed to be. I finished a couple of Big Things at the end of last week and am really struggling to get stuck into any one of the dozen other things that are on my list now.

I’ve deleted a lot of photos and sorted the recycling though. I’ll be sharpening pencils soon…

I did get out and do a bat monitoring session last night - part of the national waterway survey in August each year - without getting wet. There were a few pipistrelles about and a couple of noctules and serotines passing by, but no Daubenton’s which is what this particular survey is looking for.

Today will be getting the chores out of the way then - if the rain shows any chance of dying down - out to an open air Shakespeare this evening. It will be ‘Exit pursued by a very damp bear.’ I expect.

Tomorrow: third attempt to get these shelves up. It has been postponed twice so far.

Sounds blissful to me. I can’t recall the last time I had a complete weekend reading.

They always say that you should stack up everything that you think you’ll need and then put half of it back in the wardrobe. The problem is working out which half, of course.

Hope it all goes well anyway and that you have a good time.

Relay (Pro) when using my phone although most of the time I was using RES on a laptop.

You say that you found out that lemmy.world had disabled downvotes. Where did you you find that out? I’d certainly seen nothing myself here - I know that some instances have - and can certainly see and use the downvote arrows.

I’m on lemmy.world. This thread is on lemmy.world I have just downvoted you successfully as far as I can see.

Another week to recover - yes, I often feel the same!

The play is A Winter’s Tale so a bit odd for the time of year, but the weather might be fitting…

Hope that you get through the day OK one way or another.

deleted by creator

Rosetta Stone …or Shibboleth???

The issue with being poor is that you don’t get to save a lot - if any - whilst you are paying for rent and the basics. That is a large part of the reason that the housing co-op that I mentioned has housed so few after so long.

Yes, in the right conditions it will work, but there are a lot of situations that don’t leave people with access to those conditions.

My initial thoughts would be that the priority for most poor people is housing, followed by food and keeping the lights on.

My experience of mutual aid groups is primarily in the form of local exchange trading schemes (LETS), which typically provide services such as cake making, aromatherapy sessions, bicycle repair and maybe garden maintenance etc.

So although you may be able to deal with the food side of things through that to some extent, there really aren’t many landlords who will take rent in the form of aromatherapy and almost no utility suppliers will accept payment in bicycle repairs.

I have known a group to establish a housing co-op, which is great and all, but that, after around a decade, has housed around 8 people in total, which leaves a very long way to go.

Overall, I am in favour of the idea, but it is easy to see the issues that leave most people stuck in some job that actually pays the rent.

One of those mornings where the fruit, the cereal AND the milk all ran out while getting breakfast, so the worktop was strewn with open boxes and containers and debris by the time I had filled a bowl. Plus the other half’s usual morning tea wasn’t there so I had to guess which of the dozen other fruit or herbal teas would be acceptable.

And then, we had had a new food and milk delivery thing and they had left it all (how many boxes? can we really eat all that? what the hell are half of these things?) over by the woodshed, and it’s raining, so a damp two-part excursion to retrieve it - and I needed some of that milk.

All before I had actually eaten anything or fully woken up.

Stuff going to work. I just want to get back under the duvet now.