OS Singlies - We Do It Our Way!

I've got the perfect excuse not to springclean;). As the house is still being renovated at the moment, then what's the point? Any time I try and clean a surface more dust descends upon it soon afterwards...

Think I'll wait until about a month after the inside of the house is as finished as its going to be now for month and then do so. Should be long enough after plaster dust and the like has been flying through the air at regular intervals to ensure it's all settled and I won't be wasting my time.

I thought a few days "after the event" would be enough to ensure the dust had settled, but doesn't seem to be...

Anyone got any useful experience in that respect?

Must go and google "how to remove coloured wood stain from concrete" though, as I've found some "invading" of my garden space has happened again and there's been a bit of that stain splashed around in the process.

I made it plain to the workmen concerned that it's the norm for permission to be asked to come into someone else's garden (even if that isn't what usually happens here), but didn't realise until after they'd gone that they had a clearing-up job on their plate I would need to tell them to come back and do...:(

Am generally having to find ways to make it plain that "my garden boundaries are my garden boundaries" even where they are invisible...:(. I'll get that message fully over yet...

GrouseScot

Personally, work was..ahem...more than a little problematic for me and retirement was a big relief in that sense.

My work problems went on for years one way and another and it did get me really down sometimes. There was basically no way out either, as I had a comparatively-speaking secure job and had to bear in mind the pension at the end of it. But..yep..you name it and I probably had it:(

In the end, for the sake of my sanity and knowing how trapped in the job I was, I developed a couple of self-preservation rules:

- I made sure I went out at lunchtime every day, even if I had nothing I wished to do. If there wasn't shopping or something to do, then I just went out anyway and had a walk.

- I learnt to "put up the shutters" mentally as soon as I left work for the day and try to only remember I had a job JUST enough to make sure that I was back in there again come the next workday. It did take some time and practice to get those "shutters" in place, but when you've had a point where you came very close to committing suicide because of the pressures of the job you've got two choices. Either "Go down" or think "They are NOT going to do that to me" and develop your strategies to deal with the job.

- If it's the type of job where it would be perfectly possible for you to receive mobile phone calls (if you need to for "running your life type purposes"), but there are rules preventing you from having your phone on at work regardless. Well, the view most of us had was we would have our mobiles on anyway (provided it wouldn't interfere with our job of course) and have them in our pockets and set to vibrate, rather than ring and that way we could still receive a message if we needed to and then make a phonecall back, if need be, at the next break we had. It helped us to feel a bit more "sane"/less "imprisoned" to know that we could still manage to have that bit of contact with the outside world if something came up we had to know about.
Our employer was pretty darn intrusive, but even they didn't resort to "frisking us" at least to check if we did indeed have phones in our pockets.:rotfl:

Get those strategies worked out now, even if you don't feel too bad right now, because a lot of us can handle work problems OR we can handle personal problems. But, when both things come together, it can lead to feeling pretty desperate. Hence you need to mentally "shut off" work after the workday is over to ensure you keep enough "reserves" to hand for "you and your life" in case of any problems coming up in that too.

EDIT: you do need to work out which work colleagues you can trust personally too. I was just thinking what the few I found trustworthy had in common with each other and I guess ideal combination for trustworthiness was intelligent/cynical/kind nature/a bit unconventional. Trusting the wrong ones (ie the career-minded ones or the conventional/follow rules for the sake of it regardless ones were the ones to be a bit more "cautious" about I found personally).