Great OP, FCM. It’s a shame the battery ran out on the camera, though. But I have to say, when you’ve mentioned selling prices of your items before, I too thought they were priced too low. What prices you’ve mentioned struck me as bargains – and really, I don’t know from pottery. (I did what every single kid in the universe did for my grade school pottery project: An ash tray. Why the hell do kids always do ash trays? Maybe not so much these days but years ago it was like ties on Father’s day – practically guaranteed. “Here, Dad, I made you something you can smother your stinky butts in!” No one in my family even smoked. But I digress.)
I remember watching pottery being made when I was a kid, but apart from the cool factor of watching a piece of clay seem to magically twirl itself into shape on the wheel, I wasn’t really too interested in it. (My artistic tendencies manifested in other directions.)
Painters though – that’s a messed up arena. My mother was a painter – Animal and nature imagery with a heavy focus on horses. This was no 30-minute Bob Ross stuff; Her paintings – all oil on canvas – were gorgeous. She had an amazing gift for transferring in incredible detail either photographic or completely conjured imagery on to canvas. And yet, she barely made any money at it, tending to sell at starving artist sales and the like. She even sculpted in metals for a time, turning gold, silver, platinum and palladium into beautiful and intricate jewelry. (She did this as an actual paid job, though; she did not have the materials to do such things on her own.) And yet, the one piece I remember her making on commission through her job was some massive and horrendously gauche skull ring for some neck-bearded biker dude. Ultimately she never made a living on her art. Meanwhile, the National Gallery of Canada paid $1.76 million for a painting called Voice of Fire. Yes, that’s just one red stripe on a field of blue. Pissed a lot of Canadians off, that move did. I’m sure my mother would have settled for a cool half-mil for one of her pieces. Her stuff may not make the beatniks stroke their soul patches and muse on the existential nature of the red stripe in a sea of blue, but it’s art if I ever saw it.
Anyway, it’s been an unusually eventful weekend in our household.
It began on Friday. I had to take the day off to attend a hearing at the Landlord and Tenant board because or landlord wanted to raise the rent above current guidelines due to capital expenditures incurred a couple of years back when they repaired all of the balconies, and tenants were strongly encouraged to attend. Simultaneous to that, MindWife had a doctor’s appointment to see if they could figure out what ailed her.
So, I went to the hearing. It started at 1:00pm – or rather we had to be in by then, while it didn’t actually start 'til 1:30pm. There were only about a dozen of us who even deigned to show up. Fortunately, numbers weren’t terribly important. The proceedings began with the arrival of an arbiter, which meant that Round 1 was all about negotiation. They (the landlords) evidently wanted to push for an overall increase of 4.75% in addition to whatever next year’s guideline will be, with 4% to be applied on the next increase. There was a bit of haggling back and forth – we said 3% amortized over 3 years at 1% PA, they said, no, what about 4.25% with 3.5% due the first year and 0.75% the following year – and so on. The arbiter also took various tenant complaints back to the landlords in an effort to bolster our case against increasing the rent due to mitigating and continuing problems with the building maintenance in general. One guy had a head full of steam, and the more the negotiations broke down the more pissed off he became until, at the end of the arbitration phase, a final offer of 3.75% overall with 3% due on the next increase was offered. Frankly, this was about as good as we were going to get. But Hothead was hearing none of it by this point. “No! I don’t care what you offer, I won’t hear it. We’ll fight this in the hearing!”
Great. Thanks for speaking for the rest of us, bozo. If it went to the hearing, they would push for the maximum – and they’d get it, too. We, collectively, had absolutely nothing with which to tangibly prove that their capital expenditures were unjustified or that there were mitigating factors that should count against them. It was all purely anecdotal in nature, which is useless. They, on the other hand, had stacks of competitive quotations, assessments, receipts, and anything else they needed. All of their ducks were in a row. The best we could come up with was, “Ducks?”
But because the vote on an offer had to be unanimous, Hothead’s dissension effectively shot down those of us who voted to accept, which was most of us.
I leaned over to my father, who was in attendance with me, and muttered, “For want of a brain, the hearing was lost.” Because if it went to the hearing, which it was about to do, they’d be pushing for the maximum, and unless their paperwork didn’t add up – an absurdly slim hope to hang your hat on – it was a lock.
The arbiter left, the hearing judge and the landlords entered. At this point, now that he was face-to-face with the landlords, he began trying to negotiate with them. Since the hearing hadn’t officially started yet, they were keen to open another dialog. Various points were raised, and the landlords explained things in terms that apparently Hothead was finally able to wrap his thick head around. In the end, we were finally able to accept the final offer of 3.75%. Hothead even had the decency to apologize for his unreasonable anti-negotiation tactics.
The whole thing wasn’t a complete waste at least. We got the best deal we were going to get, and I found out what was going on instead of having to wait for the judgment notice to arrive in the mail. We finally left about 3:30pm. We could have been out a good 45 minutes earlier if Hothead was able to listen to reason during the arbitration.
Meanwhile, MindWife was done with the doctor, and after my father dropped me off at home, the wife and I talked. Apparently she has been given a preliminary diagnosis of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome due to elevated levels of androgens (though without any outward signs associated with that) and amenorrhea, two of the three symptoms that need to be present for a PCOS diagnosis. She also has high blood pressure, but so far there are no other obvious symptoms presenting (no acne, no acrochordons, no dyspareunia, etc.) but it is a concern due to the increased risk of various unpleasant things, so hopefully if the diagnosis proves out, she can begin treatment.
Saturday was a chill day, so other than some shopping I spent most of the day working on a new mix.
Sunday the wife and I went over to one of my friend’s place for some barbecue and beer. And there couldn’t have been a better day for it, either. Warm but not hot, and just a gentle, occasional breeze. We pigged out in his back yard on burgers, sausages on a bun, chicken kebabs and souvlaki on a stick. It was, quite frankly, a perfect day for a B&B, and it was a good B&B, too. (Even if the beer was Heineken)
Okay, now that this has taken me about two and a half hours to write in fits and starts, I’d better post it lest the hamsters eat it and assplode from its sheer volume.
