reddragdiva | It really moved me.

The complete Dilbert (courtesy wyrdrune).

Today I took two loads of stuff on my own while redcountess and arkady went to a dollie meet. GAH. House is a lot clearer. Neo jumped into one of the boxes in the car and nearly came with the first load.

Afterwards we went to the Pembury Tavern for dinner. It's strange but nice being in an active pub with completely clear air. Both hairyears' teeny Vaio (whose DC port is already flapping about ... Vaios are pretty but the build quality is shocking) and secretlondon's ancient Thinkpad running OpenBSD got lotsa 'l33t points. I wanted several therapeutic *pint*s and probably a box of cloves after the day I'd had, but was driving. Bah. By the way, driving in London is ridiculous and I want Ken to fund a city of tubes and trains and trams and buses by taxing the pounding santorum out of any car that comes near the place. Unless it has a disabled sticker, of course.

Liz appears to have had a good birthday weekend :-D It's quarter to ten and I'm ready to collapse unconscious.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

seahorsemystic.livejournal.com

I was curious, is it considered more normal for people to rent in England, than to buy? Is that a wholly American thing, this owning of land and property? We were looking into a homestead in Italy, and found that most people don't buy there, they rent.

Thank you for any information, I truly am curious.

*When I lived there, I rented a room with several other students, so my experience is limited.

reddragdiva

We would like to buy, but property prices are goddamn insane.

damerell.livejournal.com

Because people rent, buy-to-let is a practical option. This pushes up prices, meaning people can't buy-to-live, so they rent, so...

This can't happen in a country with a low population density where "build more houses" is a more viable option.

mouseworks.livejournal.com

...is that its population shrank from 1950's high of 3 million to present 1.5 million, so if prices get too high in any one neighborhood, there is always another neighborhood to gentrify. Sort of like Manchester there, I suppose.

We're now in a situation where renting doesn't bring as much as selling if the house needs major surgery, so rehabbing older houses to live in is quite common, even buying houses to rehab to sell.

When I was waiting to hear about a job in Surrey (they already had a science fiction writer, so decided to pass on me, according to my source), I looked at prices and was kinda stunned. And what's wrong with Croyden?

Ah, yes, that should have struck me. Adam Roberts is at Royal Holloway; I saw him at Picocon a few years ago, and he seemed interesting enough to try one of his books. He does unremittingly grim SF (which I liked all of) and (for some reason) the current series of cash-in parodies (The Soddit, The Matrix Derided, etc) which I haven't read. But yes, they have a science fiction writer.

ronebofh.livejournal.com

What i'd really like is a text index of Dilbert. I recently had an urge to find a strip that contained "Watch me not care," and it took me quite some time to figure out what the timeline for that strip would have been. At least i happened to have that collection on my bookshelf...