cellini's Diaryland Diary

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It is Good to Know a Blacksmith

That blacksmith came over on Satuday to shoot clays and we had a great time. He happens to be my age and has a degree in 'applied history.' He used to be a resident blacksmith at H@rpers Ferry and spent years making parts of flintlock rifles and things like that.

The best news of all is that he's doing some custom work for me on that long-term custom Mauser project I've been working on for over a year now. He took the rifle back to his shop to forge a custom butt plate and some other other little parts for it. The rifle will look fucking awesome with this.

I've got some other ideas for custom smithing work on that rifle, like a fore-end tip and other such stuff. Hopefully I can trade him some venison and ale for more work. He likes venison and I happen to have a freezer full of it.

It all feels terribly 17th century colonial or something. Swapping my skills as a brewer, hunter and butcher for my neighbor's skill as a blacksmith. Delightful.
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This isn't schadenfreude. I swear.

For years I wondered how the hell people afforded things. Making between $75-$100k a year for the last 5 or 6 years I still usually struggle most of the year to get by, given the ridiculous cost of real estate in this area and general inflation.

I used to have a membership at Sam's Club (no more. Fuck Walmart) and I would go in there on a Saturday and look at the shit that people had in their carts. They would be picking up all of these sort of impulse purchase type things that cost $50-$300 each. A bunch of DVDs. A $200 leather jacket. Kitchen gizmos that will probably never actually be used. All sorts of random shit that they certainly didn't need. And then they'd be wheeling the cart out to the parking lot where they would load it all into their $40,000 SUV and drive home to houses that seemed like palaces compared to the places where I've been living since moving out of my parents' place at 18.

Damn, just the car alone. I've calculated the payments. How the fuck were these people coming up with $400-$600 a month just for a car payment?

The funny thing was that none of these people seemed any smarter or better educated than me. I couldn't figure out what the hell they were doing all day long to make so much money that they could afford all of this shit. Especially in this area, where we do have a lot of reclusive multi-multi-millionaires and movie stars, but it's not like there are hedge funds or lots of big law firms around.

Now I understand it. As all of the economic shit continues to hit the fan nationally it is becoming extremely clear that those seemingly lucky bastards could not in fact afford all of those nice things. They didn't generally own the $40k SUV - they were just leasing it. That fabulous $400k house? An interest-only mortgage. All that pointless shit that they were cramming into their carts on Saturday afternoons was covered by credit cards, feeding massive debts that they will never, ever be able to actually pay off.

The gaudy McMansions with granite countertops like aircraft carriers are now empty. The occupants evicted when the home was repossessed by the bank. The credit cards are maxed out and the credit ratings are ruined and those Saturday boredom shopping sprees are a thing of the past.

I took a lot of ribbing over the years for refusing to use credit cards. And I could have been in a much nicer, bigger house instead of this shit-heap if I'd gone for the ARM mortgages that everyone else was jumping on. But I don't do credit cards and I insisted on a 30 year fixed rate mortgage and I'm finally feeling pretty good about those decisions. It seems like everyone else is collapsing financially but we're going to squeak by. I'm in this God-awful shitbox of a house that I hate but the good news is that I'm in no danger of losing it.

A recession is coming and everything is probably about to get pretty tough for most people. The good news is that I won't know the difference. Things were tough for me already. But I'm not over-extended and my personal debt is pretty modest. As long as I can scrape up the money to pay the mortgage and put gas in the car, I guess we'll be ok. Groceries are getting expensive but I shoot most of our food myself for half the year and I'm probably in better shape in the grocery department than most people are.

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In other news, the main kitchen cabinet completely fell apart. I had to pull it off the wall yesterday afternoon and the cabinet beside it spontaneously came off as well. The kitchen looks like a fucking bomb hit it. We had some spare salvaged cabinets handy from Trish's grandparents old house so I immediately started putting one of those up.

What a fucking nightmare. That room was not originally built to be a kitchen and the framing of the wall where the cabinets need to go was originally a window. So there is not adequate, evenly spaced framing there on which to anchor the cabinets. Suffice to say I've had to get creative.

I'm putting up some more salvaged cabinets after work. I deeply hate our kitchen.

10:40 am - January 21, 2008

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