It’s hot out. Not as hot here at the north end of the southern states as it is in the Northeast, but our heat is definitely up. But of course, that’s to be expected for late June, almost July.

So I’ve changed my schedule. After rising, weighing, and checking my blood sugar, instead of going down to The Dungeon to begin various projects or work on my books, I go out and walk in the cool of the morning. I walked Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday this week, going 1.07, 1.28, 1.37 miles respectively. Thursday and Friday were slightly longer distances. And, as evidence of my healing from the many maladies of the last sixteen months, I’ve been able to walk without taking a walking stick to serve as a cane.

Now, I wasn’t regularly walking before Monday. My excuse? First, the rain. Then the heat. Then tiredness. By the time I come upstairs from The Dungeon and eat breakfast, it’s already a little too hot to walk comfortably. Then evening, when you can walk in the twilight shadows, I’m either busy with TV watching or just too tired after the labors of the day. In fact, it had been well over a week, maybe closer to two, since I’d walked for exercise.

I made the decision last Saturday that I would shift to a summer work schedule on Monday, and so far, I’ve been faithful to it. My target is to be out the front door by 6:00 A.M. The first three days I was right on the money. That’s a little earlier than my normal rising time, so a longer midday nap time is part of the new schedule.

I see very little activity at that hour. A car or two with people heading to work. One time a jogger. One time a neighbor on his front deck drinking coffee and reading something. I’m back home in around 30 minutes. At that point I head to The Dungeon for my normal routine: devotional reading, prayer, check e-mail and Facebook and book sales (actually non-sales. Then, rather than editing, I do my two special projects.

One of those is digitizing my father-in-law’s letters, limiting myself to one a day, either scanning or transcribing as the case may be. At one letter a day, that project will take a couple of years. The other special project is cleaning up old scan files. All the genealogy research papers and letters I scanned had been saved to a proper filing system still resided on my computer and cloud drive as scan files. Perhaps them being in two (really three) places doesn’t hurt anything, but it’s not “clean”. So I’m going through those scan files, verifying that I saved them to the right folder and gave them the right name, then deleting them from the scan folder.

My goal is to clear away 50 scan files a day, six days a week, so 300 a week. I started with 3400 scan files to deal with. As of Thursday morning, I have 1,700 left. Thus, I have around six weeks more on this project. I’ll check back in with you around the end of July or sometime in August to give a report on this as to how the project is going.

After that, I do my morning stock work, eat breakfast, and maybe work outside awhile in the blackberry patch. I come back inside and go to The Dungeon to cool down and do a little editing.  Midday is still reading in the sunroom, though that is now getting so hot I’ll need to move outside to a shaded area on our woodlot.

So what’s the new project, and how am I going to fit it in a busy schedule? Well, the new project is transcribing the wartime correspondence of my father-in-law, Wayne Cheney. These have been sitting in a plastic bin in our house for close to 30 years, waiting on someone to get them out and read them, do something with them. I decided that time had come, and that these letters from 1942-1945 were of greater importance than the newer letters I had been digitizing. Thus, I have suspended working on the newer letters in favor or the older ones.

I’ll work on them at the rate of one letter a day until I finish the scanned files project, then will accelerate the letters until I finish. I have no idea how many of these letters there are. Having now put together four letter collections, I have a system established and have learned to do this fairly efficiently. But I really have no idea how long this will take me because I don’t know the letter count. By the beginning of August, I hope to have 50 or so letters transcribed.  At that point maybe I’ll count the rest and figure how long the whole project will take me, and make a report.

Sounds like I’ll be busy a while. Busy is good: stimulating to the brain and enforcing discipline. Hopefully, while letter transcribing is going on, I’ll be able to finish the old family photos project and get my next Bible study edited and published.

Stay tuned….