... Kai has made me a clock.
Well, sort of. I've had to buy it.
Let me explain...
Ken took him scooting earlier while I worked on coding up the directory for the BCP site: in their travels they ended up at the tiny newly-discovered charity shop in Sandy Park Rd. Where Kai bought a finger watch (a lovely little thing with diamante around the dial) and saw a pendulum clock (not a grandfather clock - something a bit more suitable to his room... [off on a tangent] We checked out the grandfather clocks again at St Nick's market while we were in town on Friday, and the stall owner said he'd do me a deal since he was keen to sell the clocks (Briz not being the sort of place that many people would buy them), and would reduce the big one from £349 to £200, and the little one from £249 to £150 for us... Ken and I discussed it later and (regretfully) agreed that that's still an awful lot of money for what is effectively a piece of (modern) furniture that's both too big for our house and which Kai may very well not want in a year or so's time. We could do so much more with the money... Back to the main narrative...)
The clock at the charity shop is £15. Ken told him he'd have to buy it with his own money. The shop is closed until Tuesday, now, since Monday is a bank holiday over here.
Kai arrived back asking me if there's anything he could do for me to raise the money...
So to start with I commissioned a Spiderman birthday card for my brother (it's his b-day this month). We originally agreed a £1.50 commissioned price, but what Kai's produced is so good I upped that to £2. Then I commissioned another for my father (his is in November) and Kai's started work on it, but I think it was all a bit much, and it went wrong, so he stopped for the evening.
I have no idea where the clock idea came from, but he came out to me with it an hour or so later and asked what I thought. And it's exquisite! He's taken the circuit board from a floppy drive, fitted a quartz movement behind it (with delicate hour and minute hands) and popped the whole thing on a stand... I can't describe it properly and I can't scan it - it might damage the face (and the sharp metal on the board will scratch my scanner!) but I'll try to take a photo tomorrow. It keeps great time too!
ANYway - long story short, I said I'd love to buy it, and after some discussion we decided £8 was a good price. (Which beat Ken's offer of £5!) So I now have a gorgeous little clockwise clock (as opposed to the backwards clock on my wall) beside my monitor.
Be forewarned, friends and family - we may be commissioning more of Kai's original clock designs for Yule pressies! (Heh, that's assuming we can afford them! [grin])
And Kai now only has to earn another £5 for his pendulum clock. He's dead chuffed!
And no, we're not being mean. Kai gets pocket money, of course, but he currently owes us quite a bit for things he's bought on borrowed cash, so his pocket money gets split, half to pay off his loan and half to him - all agreed beforehand. Given how badly my notion of cash flow was skewed as I was growing up, I don't want Kai to have the same kind of problems I had when it comes to dealing with money. (We pay cash for everything these days: still refusing to have credit cards despite the almost desperate pleadings of the credit companies... The only loan we now have is for the mortgage, everything else has been paid off. That's a nice feeling. Heh, I digress...)
... I haven't started the next AC. I got distracted...
Labels: barter, clocks, Kai
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Joules *Dances with Haddock* Taylor
pontificated this at 3:55 am
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