Another thing that's different

Yesterday, I was at work. I had printed out something and when I went to the printer, a local woman was there who has worked for the company over the summer. She is a student and is going back to school in a week or so. She had had a discussion about the payback consequences for some student loans she had taken out. First of all, the tuition for a year of university is not as high here in general, and there's guaranteed tuition relief if you are low income. We're talking grants, here, not loans. But loans are often necessary.

The difference comes when it's time to pay the loan back. You pay nothing, not one red cent, until you have an income of £15,000, an amount that would be pretty easy for a single person to live on here. Families could do it, but it would be really tight. The rate is about 2%, I think she said. Anyhow, even then you could be paying as little as £5 per week, a bit more than you'd pay for a meal at Mickey D's. And if you end up still oweing some when it comes time to retire, it's forgiven.

Meanwhile, they keep raising the rate on mine back home. And not too long ago, I read that a court had ruled that they could take 15% of your SS to pay it back. At the rate I'm going, that may happen.

One of my favorite things about the UK

Actually, for all I know, this might be true of other places and other emigration circumstances as well. Maybe it's true of life, and I'm just now finding out. All I know for sure is, it works here in Norwich, Norfolk, UK.

What is it? Volunteering, especially when you initiate. Today, I had two contacts out of the blue. Only they aren't really out of the blue. they are both just unexpected results of things I did without consideration of benefit.

One came as a result of my participation in the Norwich Fringe Festival (assuming I somehow manage to get hold of a lot of cardboard tubes and other largish bead-shaped items. My initial ideas of how to manage this have not been panning out well.) Anyhow, one of my attempts to obtain these cardboard tubes (as in when you've used all the toilet paper, or the paper towels, or the wrapping paper, or the fabric, or the wax paper, or aluminum foil, or plastic wrap...Youd think it wouldn't be so hard to get hold of a lot of them!) Ahem. One of my attempts to obtain these tubes was to put a notice on the local freecycle site. (When will I learn to add links to these blogs!) I mentioned my website in the notice, and a woman saw it. Not just any woman. A woman from Hurricane, West Virginia living in Norwich, better yet, a woman artist from Hurricane, WV, living in Norwich! Cool, huh? I could have lived here a long time and never known there was another West Virginian living not two miles away. But because I decided to apply to make a giant fringe for the Fringe, now I know! If nothing else comes of my participation in the Fringe, I've earned a profit in the way that counts.

The second resulted from a conjunction of two or more things. I've been trying to figure out how to establish some sort of market/teaching venue/studio thing to be shared among artists. This idea has been through several incarnations, none of which have come to absolutely nothing in the end, because they are all still open, somewhere supposedly in the works, and none of which have come to anything what-so-ever concrete either, I confess, so far. the latest incarnation comes as a result of seeing a notice at the local art store about two rooms to rent as artists studios. One with water, one without. No way I could afford to rent them on my own, I thought, but maybe, if I got together with a group of other artists, each of whom put in enough so that we had the rent, then we could each have use of the rooms for classes, or maybe one for classes, and one for shows/sales, whatever. A friend I hadn't even told about this latest incarnation, a friend I met through taking a free business course, a friend whose website just happens to be the last one, I think, on the page of Norfolk artists on my website (www.donnajcarty.co.uk) and contains the word "shed", met someone who is trying to do the same sort of thing! So now there will be two of us, and I know another person who's interested in participating, too. This idea of mine keeps reviving from the apparently dead over and over again like something from a horror movie.

What a horrible analogy! Still and all, I am just loving how things sort of keep coming together in unexpected ways, as long as I keep acting like some kind of cock-eyed optomist trying to accomplish things on almost no budget. I get richer and richer in the ways that count here. And that's one of my favourite things about the UK.