Last weekend we were in Atlanta for a wedding (Karen’s son Adam). We stayed in a hotel near to Piedmont Park (using up some of the points we had built up on our travels last year). Fortunately, the threatened thunderstorms on Saturday did not materialise, and all went off well. We spent Saturday night with Karen and Dieter. On Sunday we drove home to face all the building issues, stopping en route for some upmarket grocery shopping at Harry’s Farmers Market (= Wholefoods).
This week we have been busy working on the building project and generally living – we actually had an opportunity on two mornings for a bit of a lie in. This retirement business can be quite stressful. We also had very definite confirmation from our friend Charles that he would not be visiting us this week – he is still hospitalised in Peru after a trekking accident and by all accounts will be going straight back to Ealing once he is well enough. We had a FaceTime chat with him one afternoon – at least he got a chance to see the house via video if not in person.
After nearly a week of promises that the weather would be wonderful (no rain, low humidity, warm), the meteorologists got it wrong again. It’s supposed to be much easier to forecast the weather here than in the atmospheric battleground between fronts over Britain – I am starting to wonder if the quality of meteorology training is pretty low. And yet there is still a TV channel dedicated to 24 hour rolling forecasts. Anyway, it has been damp and cool – it is drizzling and has been since Saturday morning, and is predicted (huh!) to continue like this until Sunday evening. Just like Spring in England.
Never mind, we are not letting a bit of rain stop us waterproof Brits – we went off for a late brunch and sparkling wine seminar on DIY finishing of sparkling wine at Wolf Mountain Vineyard on Sunday. We sat on the covered deck for brunch as the rain came down, skeins of mist stretching up from the trees to the cloud base. Then we had a very interesting session on degorgement and dosage – the final stage of making a classic sparkling wine. We came away with a freshly prepared bottle of method champenois wine – I did the exciting bit of explosively opening the semi-finished bottle and ejecting a plug of frozen dead yeast prior to addition of our selected choice of top-up (liqueur d’expedition) and resealing.
On the Build site
Most of this week’s progress has been outside, with a lot of planning focussed on the interior work. We are now into a phase where co-ordination between all the different craftsmen is essential to keep things on track. This is obviously the Master Builder’s responsibility, but we went to ensure that there is nothing we do or don’t do will hold up Bill’s efforts. The scope to save money is also diminishing. We’re now at that stage in the project where most of the costs have either been paid out or committed fairly tightly (about three quarters of the total), so the scope for saving is shrinking. So far we are looking at a chunky overrun, about 20% of initial budget, but most of this was things over which nobody had any control or knowledge at the outset (flattening the ridge where we are building and a much longer driveway to satisfy local planning officials, for example).
So, we are squeezing every penny to keep finances under control. We were busy over the weekend with a meeting with the tiler whose proposal for the house arrived on Thursday. We spent a couple of hours haggling with him (well, Lisa does most of that) finding face-saving reasons why he should cut his costs to meet our budget
As repeated ad nauseam, we have run into a bottleneck over bricks. They are all sitting sixty miles south in Lisa’s cousins factory. And after the difficult first delivery of 16 pallets a month ago, no carriers seem to be keen to take on the job of shifting two more similar sized loads. No bricks = no bricklaying. By shifting our brickie Alfonso and his brother onto putting up the decorative rock veneer at the front of the house, we have kept him busy, but that work is also running out now. Bill was talking about hiring a truck capable of carrying a smaller load that 16 pallets and getting his own crew to shuttle up some supplies. Finally TJ, our concreting and groundwork specialist, went down to pick up three pallets of bricks using his own pickup truck and trailer – that gives a few days breathing space but the hunt for a carrier continues. TJ’s crew has also poured the concrete slabs for the lower level porches at the back of the house this week.
Inside the house, the painter should have been busy this weekend putting a white primer coat on the walls. With that done, Bill’s crew headed up by Tom will be starting on the trimming of the interior – installing doorframes, doors, window frames, skirting boards and the like.
Robin’s Thoughts on America
Continuing my intermittent Thoughts, Likes and Dislikes section, here’s my personally opinionated thoughts for this week on life in USA.
In theory, elections in USA don’t take place until November this year. These elections cover local, state and national positions of power, from US Senator down to County Sherriff. Given the US love of checks and balances, not all positions are elected at one time. So only one of the two US Senate seats for Georgia is up for grabs, and only two of the five County Commissioner positions in Lumpkin County are being elected this this year. But electioneering here is a long drawn out process full of illogicalities. The first Primary ballots are on 20th May (postal and advance voting has been going on for a week and Lisa has already exercised her democratic rights, but I have no rights at all).
Again, in theory, nobody gets elected at this stage – but it not as black and white as that. These Primary ballots are where the two main parties select who will be their official candidates. In practice, it is a different shade of grey. Careful selection of constituency boundaries (did anyone mention my old friend Gerry Mandering?) means that it is pretty certain which party’s candidate will triumph in the real election. Thus winning the correct Primary is pretty much the same as being elected to office.
In this part of Georgia there isn’t even any need for careful boundary management – the only party in the running is Republican. The Democrats can’t even summon up enough signatures to get a candidate on the ballot paper. So for local power here, you only need to win the Republican Primary.
For the elections for one US Senate seat for Georgia the race is a little more open. The Republicans are close favorites at present, so becoming the official Republican candidate is a good bet and so is hotly contested between 7 candidates (only three with a real prospect). Messy business, and as the Primary approaches it is turning very nasty. Television adverts are the main campaigning tool and the Republicans have already spent $8 million on this. To amuse and appall you, three examples:
One candidate presents himself as a frugal legislator. I think it casts doubts on both his financial acumen (is driving a 20 years old gasguzzler a real economy?) and his family man credentials (opening accusations of child neglect).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjVi4HJHsIk
Another candidate runs down his opponents as career politicians who are to blame for making USA into a total mess:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBCq7jwkN_E
So, here comes a carefully argued rebuttal of the policies in the previous advert:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzi0NVfqZ_M
All this muckraking won’t stop at the Primary. It is probable that there will be another nine weeks of increasing vitriol as the two top polling Republican wannabe candidates go to a runoff ballot. The only winners of this internecine warfare are the Democratic opposition! And the losers are us poor TV viewers subject to these appalling adverts every five minutes. I await the day when an advert full of positive policies is aired.
Just to add a further complication to this electoral process – if you actually want to vote in next week’s elections, you have a choice of three different ballot papers dependent upon which sort of person you claim to be – Republican, Democrat or Non-Partisan. Lots of scope for tactical voting by getting a Primary ballot for the other party to try and improve the chances of the clearly unelectable!
All in all, it is a funny way to run a democracy – though it probably has something to be said for it in comparison to the unverified postal ballot systems in Great Britain.