@OldBastard 13 January 2022

Fixing Lola's House - Part of a Continuing Series on How To Go Broke In The Philippines for Westerners. I am continually dismayed by how much money we are spending here in the Philippines. Our latest expenses deal with repairing the house to keep out rats. As I have written about before, ( https://noise.cash/post/l69j6v6v ), we have rats in our attic, because despite assurances to the contrary the house wasn't complete when we moved here. We are lacking what I believe is called "soffit", (or is it "fascia"), the stuff that goes around the overhang part of the roof to keep the damn varmints out. With the start of the new year, we decided to go ahead and spend the money necessary to get this problem resolved. Of course, I haven't finished paying back the money we borrowed to buy the new farm truck yet, (I complained about that expense here: https://noise.cash/post/ljww65kz ), but what the heck, another broke family in the Philippines isn't going to make much of a difference. And if we can control our spending for the rest of the year, (ha, ha, ha!!), we might actually come out of this okay. The workers have been diligent, when it's not a "fiesta", or they haven't gotten drunk the night before. They put up a bamboo scaffolding, which they climb on with bare feet. Slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, access to our attic is being sealed off from the outside world. To think that I was sold on the idea of moving to the Philippines to "save money". What a sucker I am! Bill Gates would go broke here, (which quite frankly would do him good), because there is so much that needs replaced, fixed, developed, maintained, or reinstalled properly. Sure, you can live cheaply here, if you don't mind that your neighbors, who at times you will depend on, are still living in a dirt floor shack. (More on that later.)