I should stop listening to the news

There are lots of people who have bee clobbered by Covid. It is all kinds of suck for so many people it's hard to fathom. I feel for most everyone I hear about.

However, there are a few exceptions. There are people who bought up houses and apartments and instead of leasing them to local renters put them on Airbnb because they could make signifcantly more money that way. So they made more money doing short term rentals while reducing housing supply for people seeking regular housing. Now they are facing multiple mortgages and no income. If you're facing $20,000/month in mortgage payments because your Airbnb rentals have disappeared, I don't have a lot of sympathy for you right now.

Oh, and if you bought a car just to put it on Turo because you thought you could make gobs of money and now you've got two car payments to make, when you make investments you have to face the risks of those investments.

If you are having trouble paying your rent because your job dried up, if you are having trouble paying the mortgage on your appartment building because your tenants can't pay their rent, or if you're having trouble making the payment on your daily driver car, you have my sympathy. I hope things right themselves for you soon.

about axle and rose

It has been a week a crazy weather with snow flurries early, then wind, then rain.

Yesteday it was raining most of the day, so I didn't get much done on the outdoor list. I did get the new CV joints and axles for the van moved out to the barn for assembly. Then I greased the CV joints, which turned out to be a messy job. Once it stopped raining I went up into the forest and started clearing rose out of a section by the brook (I say brook, but it's a wash that's dry most of the year). Unfortunately, the blackflies are now out in force. In just a few minutes I got bitten enough times that I started to flail. So I put on my headnet before continuing on the work. The headnet reduces visibility quite a bit and tends to get snagged by the rose thorns, so although it protects from the blackflies, it doesn't make it easy to pull the rose. So, not really anything accomplished on Friday, but some work done on a couple of things.

Today was sunny and warm, but quite windy. We started with weeding and mulching the blackberries. After that we finished cleaning out rose from the section of the forest area which I started cleaning out Saturday. The blackflies weren't too bad, but I did keep my headnet on for most of the time. We walked around the property a bit looking at things budding and things which need to be done. Trimmed a limb off the sumac by the garden to give a little more light both to the garden and the thimbleberry patch. Then I went on to priming and painting the new van axles and derien went to spreading some more grass seed. By then, the wind had died down and the sun was dropping behind the trees, so we planted the next batch of lettuce seedlings which were outgrowing their space in the seed tray. Most of the last batch is still alive despite crazy winds and heavy rains. So far we've lost I think 7 plants from the first batch, most of them literally blown away.

Tomorrow it's supposed to be cloudy but warm and not much chance of rain. With luck we can make some more progress on the list.