deconstructing_class | Member Posts

I put £800 into the house account this month, but I'm not sure I'll be able to stick with it. Maybe. I'm supposed to be pet-sitting later this month and I have two weeks off work, so my bills should be a lot lower. If I got a job at the place four minutes away, not only would I have to worry a lot less about retirement savings (their employer contribution to the pension is almost 30%) but I could just start hiring the dog walker ad-hoc, and stop buying bus passes - a savings of about £310/month, give or take. Well, insofar as it can considering inflation has been so high compared to wage increases that I've barely had any cushion left.

Patrick's dad came out and measured the fencing and figures we can get the supplies for about £1,000. So, figure to be safe, around £2,000 should mean we have adequate cushion for the supplies. If I could only get one thing done this year, I'd want it to be the fencing! And the inside decoration, which I imagine would help a lot with any adoption applications for a dog foster or rescue.

They brought family over and they helped destroy and remove the hydrangea. Now Jake has a lot more space.

I only have to get through two more sections and I'll be on Pivot Tables on my current Excel course. I have a separate course just on Excel Pivot Tables as well, so, I'm going to try to watch the basic course sections and then break from the course to focus and specialize on the pivot tables because Project Management and Data-based careers all put a lot of emphasis on it. (I also plan on getting a course they do that specifies a lot on formulas). I'll probably do the same thing with VBA, eventually. When I get around to it. I'm coming out this year an expert on Excel compared to most of the people I work with, that is for sure.

It's a bit silly because I learned Excel in Uni, and it's actually more user-friendly than it ever was when I learned it. That said, I am learning a lot, the brilliant part is, most of it I can just learn from the lecture without practising the exercises (which is good, because I can't afford to pay MS 365 for access to the MS Word applications - I'm just trying to practise what I learn with relevant data for work on my call logs.)

I'm trying to do a lot of basic cleaning this weekend - Dad knows this place is still 'under construction' but I want to clean what I can. I went by ReStore to see if I could find some bookcases or a bed, but I just can't bring myself to buy one that I'll just be getting rid of when we get the money together to replace the flooring.

ETA: It's gotten sunny and hot outside, and I was letting Jake and Marty play earlier so I'm letting it cool down before I take Jake for another walk so I'm watching the Pivot Table introduction now, and hopefully I'll be able to move to the separate course specific to Pivot Tables tomorrow, however... The instructor is right, the complexity and difficulty of Pivot Tables is over-exaggerated. If I'm reviewing Excel over my holiday break, I should actually be pretty good at this stuff after I get back from holiday, and I can use reports from our software to use this data to practise all sorts of things.

iosonochesono

I'm working through the 102 course now. The 101 course was really easy. It was mostly all stuff I knew (that said, I did not know that Excel is so much 'smarter' than it used to be and was doing things manually that I do not need to be doing manually anymore.)

The 102 course has lots of new knowledge for me, but so far nothing is hard - pretty easy monkey-see, monkey-do. The Pivot Table review is the fourth session in, so if I do one session in the morning and one session at night, I will have done the Pivot Table review this weekend which would be nice. I should have done this course before the data analysis course, I would have easily made the accelerated course. Then I could have had Project Management and Data Analysis completed.

Then by the end of next weekend I'll hopefully have finished the course and can move on to other common softwares and try to find capstone projects with public data to show off my skills. I'm thinking dogs or the rented sector.

naraht

Felt I was primed to respond to this one: overtly literary (published in America by New Directions) with significant speculative elements, strong sense of place in the university city of Göttingen, themes of memory and haunting, even a touch of climate (geology?) fiction through its focus on the 2011 Japanese tsunami. Not to mention the Planetenweg. I mean, have a look at these blurbs:

"An exquisite, mysterious novel of mourning on a planetary scale." — Booklist

"A work of great delicacy and seriousness. Ishizawa anchors the temporal and the ghostly with a transfixing pragmatism, and the result is a shifting, tessellated kaleidoscope of memory, architecture, history and grief."
— Jessica Au

"The Place of Shells is a meditation on art, death, and belonging. It reads like an eerie, shimmering fever dream where the boundaries between past and present, reality and fantasy, life and death often shatter. A strange and beautiful memento mori of a novel."
— Jenny Mustard

The premise: "In the summer of 2020, a young Japanese academic based in the German city of Göttingen waits at the train station to meet her old friend Nomiya, who died nine years earlier in Japan's devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami but has now inexplicably returned from the dead." She takes this very much in stride – or at least finds herself unable to speak about it or directly acknowledge its strangeness – but then more intrusions from the past begin to appear across the city...

What's interesting is how my genre expectations led me astray, because ultimately in its resolution I felt that Place of Shells was much more in the tradition of Japanese "healing fiction," along the lines of What You Are Looking For Is in the Library. In a way it's a social-harmony-restored novel. For me that didn't work, but I often feel that I'm reading Japanese literature in slightly the wrong key, or at least without sufficient genre context.

Although the novel addresses the Holocaust, and in a way uses mentions of the Holocaust to strengthen its themes around memory, loss and haunting, it is definitely not about the Holocaust. It would be a bit churlish to object to that: this is a Japanese novel set abroad, rather than one about Germany's past. But having been reminded by the Wikipedia article about the city that Leó Szilárd and Edward Teller were on the faculty at the university before the Nazis came to power, it strikes me that this could have been a bigger book (it's very slight), perhaps in conversation with When We Cease to Understand the World, or at least with the metaphorical tsunami of the atomic bomb and its impact on Japan. Author missed a trick, perhaps?

In summary: I've never read a book that was so strongly in the tradition of WG Sebald while at the same time being so completely unlike WG Sebald. Which fascinates me.

Review by Glynne Walley
Review by Anabelle Johnston in LARB

iosonochesono

Because of all the smart passwords across all my devices, I can't get logged into my email right now. I set my 2FA up through my business email, but my business email has shut down because I closed the card its fee came through, so I'm having to go through an entirely other means to get into my email. (I may see if I can just re-create the email again, since it was a business email, but I definitely don't want my back-up to be a domain-based email.)

Only I need to get logged into my email, to apply for jobs at this location where I wouldn't have to drive. I hear it isn't hybrid, but I don't care because it's such a close walking distance I could visit Jake during lunch, which is good enough for me. It just means I have to keep my daily clothes appropriate for work as well to reduce waste. If I do get in there, it pays about £6,000 more than I make now (so after taxes, about £4,000 more, maybe a bit extra).

I also wouldn't need a dog-walker anymore (which I think as mentioned before, she'd welcome, as long as I introduced that slowly, because she wants to focus on training), and I wouldn't need a bus pass, saving me £310/month or thereabouts (presuming I don't drop the dog-walker completely and some days, weeks, and months it may make sense to have a bus pass).

So, not only would I have £4,000 more per year with no car if I got into one of these jobs, but I'd be able to pocket almost £4,000 per year from the money I've been spending, so it would almost be like a 30% raise in spending value. That's almost half of what I could overpay per year this year, easily 10%, so if I lived like I was living now, I could have overpaid 50% of the house by 2030.

Well, or at the very least, overpay 5% and do a big project or two per year. I'd really like to prioritise the fencing and gates (I mean, by 2030, Jake will be nine years old. I'd like him to actually be able to safely go back and forward between the garden and the house during the day while I'm at home.) If we do it ourselves, I think we can keep it under £4,000. Solar panels are also around £4,000, heat conversion is actually closer to £8,000 if we do forced-air heat pumps. Possibly more if we're looking at air conditioning too.

In the current reality of not working a four-minute walk from my house, I'm still trying to find a weekend job to keep with my 5% overpayment minimum plan, preferably closer to 10%. There's a veterinary receptionist job I'd love (more if I could get one at the vet clinic just up the street, but anyway). The problem is, again, I never get shortlisted.

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