Ned Harr

There are some good responses here so far. Know where your money is going. Stop buying stuff you don't need. Try to need less stuff. Find cheaper ways to get what you do need. We are big on making sure lots of our money goes directly to savings, in a variety of places, before it ever hits our checking account.

I guess another thing worth mentioning is, if you're trying to save money, it helps to get more money in the first place. When I was younger (in my teens and 20s) and needed a job, I went around to places like grocery stores and filled out applications. This usually resulted in me getting a crappy job I hated going to that paid very little, which I rarely kept as long as a year.

The other stupid thing I did was go to college to start a career that didn't require a college degree, in an industry where labor supply far outpaced labor demand--i.e. there were always lots of people competing for a small number of jobs. So I was often filling out applications at the grocery store even though I had a college degree. Plus now I have college debt to pay down.

If I could go back in time I would have told my younger self to do what I did last year, which is to decide on a trade and then go be an apprentice to a tradesman. You can find a tradesman the same way you would find someone to fix something in your house. If you present yourself professionally and show up on time when you meet them and demonstrate any mechanical aptitude at all, you will likely be hired on the spot. ("Good help is hard to find" is something I hear all the time.) There's a bit of luck required to not end up working for someone who's a jerk, but there are usually enough tradesmen around that I bet if you get a bad feeling about the first one you interview with you can easily find another. If you ever hired someone to fix something in your house and got a good feeling about them, I'd say call that person up and start there. Even if that person doesn't want an apprentice, I bet he or she knows someone who does; good people tend to network together.

Even as a first-day apprentice you would likely already be making more than you'd make cashiering at a grocery store, while doing something much more interesting and useful (not to mention fun), and which puts you on a path to earn a lot more money in the not-too-distant future. The trades teach a set of skills that make you incredibly valuable, as opposed to a lot of other careers that teach skills which are only useful in a very narrow way. Often within 5-10 years in the trades you can reach a 6-figure earning potential. (Thus I know some 23 year-old electricians with paid-off houses and car collections.)

It's a lot easier to save money when you have more of it.

Dwayne Hendy wrote:Did anybody eventually snag this blessing ?

Yes...from the curb in front of my house.

Paul, I think there is indeed a specific psychological phenomenon where people assume a lower-priced thing is less valuable than a higher-priced thing, within certain parameters. (Typically this applies to customer beliefs about the quality of physical goods, but it probably could apply to services as well.) I don't know if I'd assume, necessarily, that that's what's going on with PIE being only $3 vs. $10. Like, to the average person who has no idea how running an interactive website really works, $3 might look cheap or it might look expensive, $10 might still look like a bargain or it might look like a total ripoff. There's not much to judge it against; other forums have very different systems and typically just say "donate as much or as little as you want, or nothing at all".

If the PIE thing has been working for ten years, then I'd say it's proven itself and that's at least one good reason to keep at it and adjust prices as needed.

Just be aware, raising prices might hint at higher value and attract more PIE buyers--or it might price more people away from buying PIE. Which outcome is more likely is a judgment call you'd have to make based on the demographics and psychology of Permie's website users, which maybe you either know well or have privileged ways of finding out.

I'll just say anecdotally, for me, I found "PIE" very confusing. Right off the bat, it's rendered in all caps, which makes it look like it's an acronym for something (this impression is easy to get on a site laden with esoteric acronyms--SKIP, PEP, GAMCOD, etc. etc.--to newcomers these acronyms act like a pile of shibboleths), implying a more complicated concept rather than simply "donations you can make to help offset server costs". In fact I am still not sure whether it is or isn't an acronym, but "donations you can make to help offset server costs" is so simple and familiar to web users in general I think it would be unwise to muddle it more than necessary.

But also, the benefits of PIE are rather complicated and unusual also, especially once you get into transferring it to other users, and the fact that it unlocks usability features that on any other forum would be standard. Like, as an experiment I wonder if you'd actually get more donations-to-help-offset-server-costs if you simply had a button that said "Donate a few bucks to help keep the site running", and donating unlocked just one or two simple but valuable features, instead of trying to motivate us with sticks (bad usability, limited content/features) and carrots (good usability, little icons, additional content/features, etc.). For all I know you've tried this already and found it doesn't work as well as the current system, but it's just an idea I had. I dunno. Just trying to be helpful.

From what I can tell in the photo (and I am 99.99% sure it's a photo, not a drawing), R Scott is right on about the roof structure.

It does resemble a pergola more than a gazebo, but if it is a gazebo--that is, if there is roof decking--I'd guess the decking pieces are simply secured between the rafters (perhaps with hangers/gussets) instead of on top of them. If you were to walk a sixth of the way around the outside of the structure and take another photo, you might see the decking (and whatever type of sheathing/shingles is on top of them).

Poison ivy is easy to confuse with boxelder saplings; not sure how anyone would mistake it for Virginia Creeper. (Virginia Creeper always has clusters of 5 leaves; poison ivy always has clusters of 3.)

The way I control poison ivy is a 2-fold approach:

First, I cover my arms and legs and wear good rubber gloves or put plastic grocery bags over my hands, or both (you can use rubber bands to get a grocery bag to stay up past your elbows), and I go out with a garbage bag in one hand, and I pull up the poison ivy by the roots and place the entire plant in the garbage bag. I am relentless, and I pull up every bit of it I can find. It all goes in the bag. Then, without taking my gloves/bags off, that bag is tied shut and put in the trash. Then bags and gloves are taken off carefully and also disposed of.

Second, any poison ivy that comes back I spray with poison ivy killer.

Split hose wrapped in gaff tape.

Gaurī Rasp wrote:I planted 1 Concord grape vine so that it was supported by my cattle panel arch. Worked beautifully. And I made the most delicious grape juice from the abundance of grapes. And this was year 1! Looking forward to this year’s harvest!

What was the size/state of the grape vine when you planted it? I can't imagine getting grapes in year 1.

Jay Angler wrote:

Ned Harr wrote:I was going to suggest gaff tape, which is similar to hockey tape.

Is gaff tape easily available through most hardware stores?

I would not expect to find it in a hardware store, but you will have better luck in a photography supply store. For example you can get it through B&H for sure: (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?q=gaffer%20tape&sts=ma)

And of course Amazon, where I see there is more price diversity (and I suspect, quality diversity): https://www.amazon.com/s?k=gaffer+tape If you end up trying one of the $8 rolls on Amazon and it's any good, please let me know!

I was going to suggest gaff tape, which is similar to hockey tape. (It's been a while since my hockey-playing days--does hockey tape have near infinite peel/re-stickability but with consistently high tack? Gaff tape seems to!)

In fact, I would suggest gaff tape anyway because it is so useful for other things around the house, and you're not going to use a whole roll on a bucket handle.

Based on the cursory search I just did, gaff tape appears to be slightly less expensive than hockey tape too.

I have a vague long-term goal of weening myself off of my coffee addiction.

Recently I was down to one cup a day, though in the past week I went on vacation and my daily habit ballooned up to 2-4 cups per day.

So today I'm going to try to tamp it back down to a firm 2, then gradually decrease it again. I doubt I'll be able to fully eliminate it as a daily habit for several more years, but the idea is that I should one day be able to enjoy coffee recreationally again, instead of just having this dependence on it.

The problem is that I use coffee in the morning, for its...um, "assistive" properties...to, you know, start my day off in an unburdened way...because otherwise this activity would naturally want to happen in the afternoon which is very inconvenient. So a lot of this will depend on how thoroughly I have retrained my lower digestive system.