Kitchen walls

Last night I played a few turns of Total War: Warhammer 3 with R. Often there are three of us, with M rounding out the set, but it was just the two of us last night so I loaded the game we started a few months back and we played through about ten turns. My basic strategy in this game can be boiled down to keeping my armies operating in pairs and only building an additional one when I have the income to cover it. This hardly qualifies as advanced or even intermediate, I am sure someone like D, who loves to optimise and find the best path in every scenario he encounters would develop a more careful and effective method for playing the game.

Before we started to play I had a few minutes to myself and so cleared all of the things from the side of the kitchen which includes the interior wall with the dining room. The neighbour across the street tells me this is a breeze block wall and not load-bearing, so I can take the units out and then gently knock it out block by block. This is my intention, and I will then either stack the blocks in the back garden to re-use in other projects, or more likely take them to the tip as hard core.

This last warrants a little bit of thought as there is a reasonable chance the better path would be to get a skip and through everything into that. It means fewer trips in the car and given I will need to pay to drop off the material too could well be cheaper. I will see how much I can get into a skip and then make a decision. I do sorta enjoy my weekly excursions to the dump to say hello to the guys working there and drop off my garbage.

Despite living here for three months now I haven’t quite worked out the sequence for waste collection, so I don’t think I’ve actually had a successful bin collection. This is a solid example of a thing which could be easily resolved but is simply far to low on the list of priorities to actually get fixed. I did look the schedule up on the council website when I was setting up the direct debit for my council tax. A disappointingly stiff direct debit, but then that comes with living in a bigger house, were I really so concerned about paying less council tax I could have moved into a room.

I think about that sometimes, whether moving into a shared flat might have been the smarter option. Try to invest any extra money I can scrape together into savings and investments. This is idle brain-yapping as I have already made the decision to buy a house and pour my effort and money into that. Whether it works out is to some degree immaterial as I have a home I like with good neighbours in a pleasant village. It’s a new place, so my desire to make and have some more local friends is sensible enough, but that will come as I socialise and connect with the people around me.

Not this weekend coming, but the weekend after my brothers are coming over to spend a day working on the garden with me. This is very kind of them and I will certainly enjoy spending the time with them and there’s heaps to do in the garden. Really I should allocate a minimum amount of time to the exterior of the house each week, as this would make it easier to stay on top of things like weeds, litter and the many other little things which need to be done outside the house.

Turns out it is easier to buy a house than it is to adjust to living in one, and integrating all of the little tasks and practices which are required to keep it going efficiently and cleanly. Who knew?