Yesterday I went to the rental house with a friend who is the wife-half of a fence-building business (they also happen to be the daughter and son-in-law of the couple whose herbal business I work for). We walked around the yard and assessed dog-constraint options. I hate the idea of having to fence the dog in when there is plenty of room between us and the neighbors, with only forest behind the house. But Luna (my 6-year-old lab/chow/misc mix) has shown me plenty of times that she can’t be trusted to stay home when she’s in a wandering mood. Case in point: today, for the second time, she and Ellie (caretaker’s dog at my current abode) showed up near my work, over ten miles from home. A friend saw them at about 9:30 am, stopped, and got Ellie into his car, but Luna wouldn’t let herself be caught (even by someone she knows). He came to my work and told me, I drove out to where he said he’d seen her, stopped the car and called for her, and she came bounding up from behind a dune and jumped happily in the truck, all out of breath. She had to wait in the truck all day until I got home at 6pm. I took her out of the truck on a leash a few times to offer potty breaks, and gave her just a tiny bit of water to drink, but otherwise shunned her all day, with several stern “Bad Dog” refrains said to her in the first few minutes after I picked her up. No way to know if she got the message or not.
Friends keep warning me that ranchers shoot free-roaming dogs out in these parts, and it makes me even more grateful that she has, so far, managed to be found by friends. But once we are in the new house we will be in unfamiliar territory, with only one of the neighbors being known to me at this point.
So, it looks like I’ll be shelling out some fairly hefty bucks for a fence to be built. (Actually, more than half the fence posts are already in place, but strung with barbed wire which won’t contain a dog — so they’ll be doing a fair amount of merely adding field fence to an existing fence. Even with that ’shortcut’ this will still be a chunk of change.
Financially, I’m both worried and not worried at the same time. I’m not worried about running out of money in the short term — I’m extremely fortunate to have enough savings to tide me through these transition costs. On the other hand, my feeling of financial security stems from having that savings cushion, and that comfort zone recedes as that money is spent. On the THIRD hand, given what’s happening with the plunging value of the dollar, I might as well turn as much as I need to into useful stuff like rolls of fencing and fenceposts, which will at least hold its value, as opposed to dollars, which don’t seem likely to.
Also today, two things happened which hold potential for increasing my financial situation. One is that I was informed of an upcoming vacancy at the local Post Office, by a postal employee who thinks I’d be good there. I would indeed enjoy working there, I think, and in this locale there is hardly a more stable employer than the US Postal Service. I informed the right person that I’m interested. She is still waiting to hear what kind of position she’s permitted to hire, and once that is known, I’ll analyze the facets of the job (how many hours, which days, pay scale, etc) and see if it still seems to work for me. I don’t want to quit any of the jobs I already have, but if they REALLY don’t compare I might think about it (the library, for example — while I totally love working there, my shifts add up to a grand total of five (5) hours per week, unless the other employee is sick or out of town. The library is only open twelve hours per week, so that plus about an hour of administrative time is the maximum I’d ever get there. Plus, the pay is not very high. Frankly it might not take much for any other job to out-compete the library, but I do really love working there. So we’ll see.
The other financial plus thing that happened today is this: I’m pursuing the possibility of buying a Geo Metro from a friend. He still has to get it up and running and pass the smog test, but I’ve told him that if he can get it that far I’ll buy it. He had offered it to me together with a refurbished 50,000-mile engine, plus two “parts cars” (other Geo Metros with dead engines but with most other parts working, that could be used for parts to repair the working one) for a set price. Today he said he’d like to keep one parts car plus the “new to him” engine, and would reduce my purchase price accordingly. This works fine for me, since I’m not a mechanic and only half interested in having the parts cars anyway (dead cars plus rental house do not happy neighbors make).
So, I have a job possibility to pursue, and I’ve just saved $500 on a car purchase which, itself, will halve (roughly) the amount of gasoline I’ve been using. All in all, not too bad an equation.
