Dilapidation and deficit

My fiancé and I recently decided that we’d had enough — the grinding traffic gridlocks, the high-and-rising rent, the ever present noise of construction and the near complete lack of public green space in Beirut were daily agitations we could no longer bear. Our move — to a house with a large garden and mountain views 10 kilometers above Jbeil — was possible, we reasoned, given that we are both able to work remotely, via the Internet.      That was the theory anyway. In reality the infrastructure in our area provided for no functioning Internet network, and so we had to purchase an illegal, snail-speed connection. The other shock was regarding electricity, with power cuts vastly more pervasive than in Beirut, meaning we had to shell out for a UPS system for uninterrupted power — a viable solution but with obvious annoyances. All this made us tangibly aware that