Gardening Tools

Happy birthday, honey!

I am fascinated by "Early Retirement" blogs although it really is too late for me to retire by 40, let alone 30. Why people are writing about this only now (or, to be honest, from around ten years ago--I am always late to trends) is beyond me. I seem to recall pondering how much money people make in their lifetime but not that they could SAVE most of it.

While thinking about what careers would best fund a writer, it never occurred to me to work like a slave for 10 years, save at least 65% of the money and shove it all into index funds that eventually make me $20,000 a year. Then I could quit and write all day long. 

If I wrote advice for teenagers, that would be my advice. Get trained in something highly valuable, work like a slave for 10 years while saving as much as possible, and only THEN go to Paris to sit around writing/painting about Le Beau Homme Sans Merci or whomever.  

This rather flies in the face of my advice to have children as soon as you graduate from university, so either marry a young man who is eager to retire in ten years, and do the hard graft of scrimping and saving from the distaff side, or start work at 16, doing your pre-university courses at night school. 

Dear heavens, I have just looked up the UK wages for apprentices. Never mind starting work at 16. Finish high school, do a 3 to 4 year uni course in something useful, work like a slave for a decade/get married to willing-worker-like-slave (if can find), have babies (if applic.), then work part-time for fun when can. Do not read Vogue, Elle or Marie Claire.

I do not know about you, but I think if I were a man I would find it very thrilling if I took a woman out to dinner and she told me her life goal was to be financially independent by 32 so she could retire and have babies and fun forever more. I imagine this person having one tube of lipstick--a Christmas present from her mother--and one date dress--ditto--carefully preserved in a cloth garment bag when not in service.  

I have wandered far from my chosen topic, which purports to be garden tools. Well, the one extravagance allowed by my Early Retirement gurus is high-end tools, possibly because they are men and really like high-end tools, but also because such things retain their resale value and last decades. Now that B.A. and I have a garden, and we need tools, I did some research to determine which garden tools count as high-end and went out this morning to buy some. 

It is a bit odd, after buying supermarket own-brand pizza on the grounds that it is £1 cheaper than our favourite, to spend £132.95 on garden tools, but that is what I have done. The big expense was the Fiskars hedge shears, which cost so much that they will live indoors, not in the tool shed. 

"Happy birthday," said I to Benedict Ambrose upon mentioning the price of these hedge shears. 

For I correctly intuited that BA would enjoy the thought of cutting the hedge with such a righteous piece of kit, and the pruning shears alone inspired him at once to cut up the embarrassing sapling sprouting over our rose bushes towards the neighbour's garden. 

Mr Money Moustache says that when you go shopping you should have a hot shower afterwards to wash off the shopping juice. I am both horrified that I have spent £132.95 all at once and deeply desirous of adding grass shears and secateurs to my arsenal in the tool shed (and spare room).  

Over supper I casually mentioned to B.A. that I might dig up part of the lawn to make a vegetable bed, and he thought this a good idea as long as I pick a spot not under the clothes lines.  I am pleased by this although, speaking as a North American, it seems slightly heretical to dig up part of the lawn. I mean, the  LAWN!