This may not be a terribly long post—we’ll see how it goes.
Over the last couple of days, I’ve felt a little more like my normal self, settling into my normal routines, getting normal things done. When I wrote on Friday, I felt overwhelmed by the things I had to do. But by the time Saturday wound down, and I looked back on the day (and on Friday), I realized I had accomplished things close to normal, as well as having completed a couple of special projects that would allow for doing normal things. Here’s what I got done,
Worked 15 minutes out in the yard. That may not sound like much, but that’s the first outdoor work I’ve one since Thanksgiving.
Did the final edits on A Walk Through Holy Week, Vo. 2. I did that over Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Since I’ve done writing only one day since before Christmas, I can’t tell you how good this felt. I figured, If I can’t wrap my mind around writing, I have much editing to do. Perhaps that will be a stimulant toward writing.
Finished transcribing some journal sheets from 2014-15 that I found in an old file cabinet. This took a lot of effort. But getting it done was a huge relief. I have a couple of small journal books still to transcribe, but somehow these don’t seem as daunting.
Got a smallish batch of family photos (21, I think) sorted, saved electronically, and agreement reached on how to dispose of them.
Completed some major reorganization of the storeroom. We have sold off enough things that we have a little extra shelf space available. This allowed me to fairly easy to move things around, getting like things together, exposing some things I hadn’t seemed for years. We still have a long way to go at decumulation, But it’s looking a fair amount better.
Despite doing all this, and working my hardest at a cardio rehab session on Friday, I felt good. My energy level remained good. I took sitting breaks when I needed to, as well as a reading break at midday.
This week I plan on getting AWTHW-V2 ready for publication and actually publish it, maybe by Wednesday. After that, I hope to get a start on the last week of writing to go on the next volume followed by editing and publishing tasks.
And tomorrow morning a woman is coming by to pick up some surplus office supplies for her non-profit. It will be nice to have some surplus materials gone and space recovered.
Well, it’s one to finishing a good Lord’s Day with reading. Nothing better.
Tonight is the alignment/parade of the planets. Just after sunset, we are supposed to be able to see seven planets, a highly unusual event. Except, if you read the fine print, Saturn will be so close to the setting sun you really won’t be able to see it. The one further out from Saturn (Neptune or Uranus, I forget which), will only be visible by telescope. You need to have a cloudless sky to see it, and a rural area not beset by light pollution will help quite a bit.
I don’t know what our cloud cover will be tonight, but all the other conditions are right for viewing in my area. The light pollution is to the east of us, and the viewing will be in the western sky. But we have one pesky problem: trees. We live in a forest. Mercury and Saturn will likely be below the tree line. I’m not sure about Venus, Mercury, and Saturn. So for us to see the planetary parade, we need to go somewhere that gives us a vista to see the four, or maybe five, planets.
But the bigger problem for me is the busyness and tiredness of the last few day, which will continue today. By the time sunset arrives, I will certainly be too tired to drive the three miles to the best venue close to me.
What’s making me so busy. In a word, decumulation. In another word, decluttering. In a third word, cleaning and organization. The last three days I’ve been working hot and heavy at these three thing, and will continue today. I’ve been purging business records, and stacking the paper for shredding. Other papers go straight into the recycling pile. I’ve also been transcribing old handwritten journal sheets into my electronic journal, and checking the odd genealogy paper against my electronic files.
I could write pages and pages about this, but I need to get to decumulation and decluttering work. I’ll let these few words speak for themselves.
Oh, by the way, yesterday I got back to writing. Editing old stuff instead of writing new stuff, but it’s part of the writing process—the first I’ve done in over a month.
Yes, between decumulation and getting ready for a trip and dealing with health issues, finding time to write a meaningful blog post just isn’t there. I thought of it Thursday night, but was dealing with purposeful sleep deprivation for an EEG on Wednesday that effectively took three days out of my week. Friday found me too busy trying to wrap up several decumulation tasks. Last night I sorted through two 3-ring binders, and got rid of one and all the papers it held.
Work continues on that decumulation, but I see lots of progress. I’m hoping that this week we will take a load of miscellaneous things to the new Goodwill donation center that opened just a mile from our house. I’m hoping also this week to begin going through old family photos of Lynda’s paternal family, take electronic pictures of those we want copies of, and send the rest on to relatives. That depends, however, on Lynda being well enough to look at them.
Today I will do two main tasks. First, create electronic forms for 2025. I didn’t do this in January because I didn’t get December’s finished. So to do his, it means first finishing December, copying the files to 2025 files, making the few alterations for the new year, and entering January’s data. I’m talking about family budget, book sales, and stock trading records. This will take about two hours, I think. Second will be filing a mass of papers that have accumulated on my worktable in The Dungeon. A lot of these are health papers, and I hope they go into place fairly easily. Still, this is probably an all-day task.
Whether I get to do a little writing or not is up in the air. It would be nice to find an hour to write, but I make no promises.
For the last week, I’ve been quite busy with small decumulation tasks. I sell a book here and there, including two on Saturday, one yesterday, and one today. Saturday I re-discovered a bunch of old computer floppy discs in The Dungeon. They are now on the way to the trash barrel, including an empty case for holding another 20 discs. I transcribed 21 old journal sheets from 2014 and 2016 from when I was working hot and heavy on Thomas Carlyle writing/research projects. I just finished that work. And today I identified two more items to list for sale.
Consequently, I don’t have a substantial blog post for today. See you all on Friday, hopefully with something a little more meaningful.
Oh, year, I also spent a couple of hours planning out a trip. It’s amazing how much time that took, and it’s not done yet.
The legacy books on the built-in shelves in the living room.
No, not sick of reading. I’m in the midst of reading two different books, one print book and one e-books. Actually, it’s 3 books. There’s one other one out in the sunroom that I’ve almost given up on. Maybe I’ll read a little more in that. And, when I’m done with these two, or three, I’ll transition into two more. Wait, it’s four. There’s also the book I read in the mornings for devotions.
The books on the left are waiting for the buyer to pick them up. The books on the right are waiting for reshelving.
No, not sick of writing books. This last week I finished the first chapter in my next Bible study. I enjoyed doing it, though after almost two months of writing nothing due to my health problems. And the two months before that I was writing at reduced capacity due to the two freak injuries I had in mid-July. So I’m having to get re-used to taking a portion of my day for writing. And working through my fine motor skills for typing. Yes, re-learning the elements of being an author.
Keepers to go back on a shelf, or possibly to be revaluated, but right now adding to the decor in the dining room.
No, what I’m sick of about books is selling them. You see, in the interest of a future downsizing, which after this year of health problems is much closer than we though, we decided to make a big dent in the 2 or 3 thousand books in our house.
That includes what I’ve been calling my legacy books, or more properly termed heirloom books. These include a large number of books published in the 1800s. This has been a lot of work. Looking up the books at on-line sales sites, deciding on a price, placing an ad on Facebook Marketplace, fielding queries, scheduling buyers in, dealing with no-shows, etc. It’s a lot of work.
Books on the dining room table.
I could also say gathering books from various places in the house. We had many boxes of books on shelves in the basement storeroom. Lynda was the one to identify the boxes and carry them upstairs (since I wasn’t allowed to go on stairs after my operation). Our daughter, Sara, also helped carry books upstairs while she was here. The basement is now much cleared of books. Yet, the bookshelves in the basement living room still have lots of books. We have no shortage of building material.
Books on the garage worktable.
The garage worktable is covered by boxes of Christian novels, mainly for women. The dining room table is covered with boxes of misc. books, a cross between legacy and modern books. All those are for sale. Then we have boxes of books in the living room and dining room that Lynda hasn’t yet made the keep/get rid of decision. We also have a pile of books on the hearth, waiting for the buyer to pick up, and another, smaller pile near of books we have decided to keep but haven’t yet looked where to reshelve them.
Why not just give the books away, you ask? It may come to that, especially with the modern ones. But for the legacy books, it seems a shame to not first try to get something for them. Some of them have been in the family for 130 years—first on bookshelves of some kind in the houses David Sexton rented, later in boxes in the boxes in the basement of the house I grew up in in Cranston, Rhode Island, then finally on the bookshelves or in boxes in our house. All that storage and transporting deserves compensation, don’t you think?
At some point, the inventory will be small enough that donation will be more likely. Or the few that are left will be manageable to keep. We’ve already done that with children’s books, 400 of them donated to our church for a special event.
But at some point, I’ll be glad for the dining room table to be clear, the living room clear, and the garage clear of book boxes and loose books to be gone, either sold, donated, or re-shelved.
On Wednesday, our son and his husband fly in from Worcester, MA to give us some help. One primary project is moving my workstation from The Dungeon to someplace upstairs. This involves moving two monitors, the docking station, the wireless printer, and various supplies. I know where I want it to go. In that scenario, they will also have to move the computer desk, both top and bottom portions. They’ll also have to move a small cabinet for the printed to rest on. And, of course, a chair.
That will be done either Wednesday night or Thursday morning. That will be the start of a new era. But it will be nice to have my remote keyboard again and a surface for it to rest on.
Will it work? Maybe. Our kids are worried about me going downstairs. Other tasks, such as filing business papers, and sorting through things in the storeroom, will for some time require me to go downstairs.
Other projects are on the agenda for while Charles and Mario are here. One is for Charles to look through my stamp collection. He said he wanted to look at it before I listed it for sale. Stamp collecting was extremely important to the Todd family over the years, but those years are over and it’s time to sell it. I don’t think there’s much market for stamp collections, so I don’t expect to get much for it.
Then there’s that spare bedroom set. It’s in the basement storeroom, tucked away to form a wall that divides the storeroom into different areas. We need to pull it out into the light, take some photos, and get it listed for sale.
Moving my workstation will result in freeing up a 6-foot worktable. Hopefully we will move that into the storeroom for staging stuff.
I’m sure we’ll have a load or two of miscellaneous things to take to donation. And boxes of books to move to the garage in hopes that they will sell. Some are already advertised on FB Marketplace, but they seem to be generating little interest.
So, will I get any writing done this week? Probably not, but we’ll see.
I’m late with my Friday morning post. Chalk it up to busyness.
I won’t say all that’s going on that made the days busy, but here’s a little of it.
Monday I went to the hospital for a test, only to find out the test was no longer needed because a test they did back on April 15 covered the same area. $20 miles of expense just getting there, and about two hours I would never get back.
Wednesday I went back to the same hospital for a different test, an MRI to take a closer look at a small mass of “neoplasm” found in the April 15 test. While the final report isn’t complete, it appears to be just a cyst on my kidney. Nothing to worry about.
We had painters at the house Monday-Wednesday, finishing the work needed after repairs from water damage to the house. I think I’ve blogged about that before.
Yardwork continues, though I’m pretty much on top of it and need to do only a little every day. I hope to get in an hour today.
We are slowly putting everything back in place from the house repairs. Got some done last night.
We continue to sell a few things in our dis-accumulation efforts. Sold two items this week, and brought a bookshelf to the garage for work to strengthen and repurpose it.
I’ve been writing this week. Today I wrote the last two sections of Chapter 2 of Volume 2 of A Walk Through Holy Week. I feel good about the progress.
I’ve had several items of correspondence this week with other writers—some for our critique group and some just for pleasure.
Yesterday I finished transcribing letters from or years in Saudi Arabia. I still have a travel journal to transcribe, then I’ll start putting them in a book for family. No hurry on this project.
I have made great progress with scanning/formatting/e-filing the poetry critiques I did from 2001-2010, which I had printed and saved. I’m down to less than thirty still to do. No hurry on this project either.
I’m working on plans for three special events over the next two weeks. Not going to say much about them now, but will likely blog about it later.
So with all this to do, I sort of forgot about my regular Friday post. Still, I’m not terribly late with it. And I won’t be late with my Monday post, for it’s already written and scheduled.
The 1980s wallpaper we “bought” in 2002 is easy to remove, even the backing layer behind it.
Several times on this blog, I wrote about the home repairs we had done due to water damage. Without going into detail, we had three separate places with visible water damage. One place was discovered when we had work done on our deck. That caused us to look around and we found the second place. I was fairly sure there was a third place, which proved true when I checked it out.
Three damaged places, three different sources of water. An almost 40-year-old house cried out for maintenance.
The work began in January, and finishes next week. As I write this on April 24, the painters are hard at work, covering the repair areas. They’ve done the outside areas and almost all of the inside. They will likely be done on Friday, the day this post goes live.
they actually had a hiccup when painting over new drywall, discovering that the taping job by the remediation contractor resulted in some bubbling of the tape that had to be taken care of. I emailed that contractor Tuesday night and he sent someone on Wednesday to fix it. It wasn’t really a slowdown for the painters, as they shifted to the outdoor work while waiting on that repair to be done. Good thing, too, as Wednesday evening was the start of several days of spring rain.
Or, if work is a little slow on repainting the entire master bath (necessary due to having to replace dry wall, which damaged the wallpaper. We had wanted to get rid of the wallpaper anyway but were too lazy or busy to initiate it. Well, I stripped the outer paper on Tuesday and Wednesday. Now, the painting is all done there except the final touch-up.
That’s not all the work to be done. We still need to replace the master bathroom flooring, a project that is stalled and will be done who knows when. We are contemplating replacing a bunch of our old carpet with flooring, but that project is also stalled in the decision-making process.
Even though we have more to do, it’s a great relief to get to this point.
Writing this Thursday evening for posting Friday morning at my normal time.
I had a busy day today. This morning I started with transcribing letters from Saudi Arabia. I managed to get four items documented in my files. I made a count of the letters not yet tackled. It’s 29. So if I can do four a day, the transcribing job will be complete around the end of April. I can deal with that.
Next, after a few stock trades and my usual breakfast, I scanned poetry critiques and saved them electronically. Each scan requires proofreading and some formatting to make sure the scanning was accurate. I managed to complete critiques for four poems, a couple less than my typical workday. After that, I counted the poem critiques still do be done in the small notebook. It’s 69. If I can average five a day, I can finish this notebook by around May 8th. I’m good with that. However, still looming in the background is the larger of my two critique notebooks. I’m actually not anxious to shift to that.
While I was doing that, I received a call from the admin assistant of the local insurance agency for my homeowner’s policy. Last week I received a letter from the national company, saying they were aware of the repairs needed to the house (certainly from their rep came out to evaluate our water damage claim that they denied) and asked to submit evidence we had repaired the damage, implying they might drop our coverage if we hadn’t. Last week the agent said she would come out and look at it. So the admin assistant said the agent had been at our house today and wanted us to submit invoices for the repairs.
I have to tell you that this irked me. They refuse to cover our damage, threaten to cancel our coverage, the agent comes out to look at our house and never even knocks on the door, then asks us to submit receipts to her? And doesn’t call us but has the admin assistant do it? I told the admin I was very upset. She put me on hold and in a few seconds the agent came on. I said I couldn’t believe she didn’t even knock on the door—most of the damage, which has already been repaired, is viewable only from the inside or our deck which is reachable only from the inside. She said would come out on Friday. Meanwhile, despite my displeasure at this company, I sent electronic copies of the receipts.
After that, I headed to downtown Rogers to attend an author event. I wasn’t the featured author, but I know the two women who were featured and their two book cover artists. I went mainly to support them. The venue was the Rogers Experimental House, which is the headquarters of the Artists of Northwest Arkansas; it was their meeting. The presentations and readings were fine, but then they transitioned into doing art exercises based on the readings from the books. I don’t do art, so I used the time to brainstorm my writing and make a to-do list of sorts.
From there, it was on to Scooters for a large house blend, then to the Rogers Public Library. I had two and a half hours to kill before the meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes, my writers critique group. We had eight people attend, Four people shared writing, and one passed out a copy of a short-ish book for s to take home and review.
We had one tense moment when, on one of the pieces shared, we disagreed on the effectiveness of the writing and suggestions on corrective measures. Protocol on how critiques are given were broken. I don’t know if I’m the only one who noticed it or if others did. Now I’m trying to figure out what to do about it.
It’s now just before 10 at night. The day is winding down. Tomorrow will be busy around the house, with no outside appointments. Plenty of time to transcribe, scan, maybe edit a little, complete a few stock trades and a little yard work.
Sometimes a partial sun, sometimes darker clouds on my Wednesday walk.
I just got back from an afternoon walk, the first since last Sunday. Various circumstances prevented me from going on Monday and Tuesday. I hoped to get in 1.5 miles, which would be the longest since my stroke.
But before I could walk, I had to figure out how to dress. The temperature was 72º with a 10 mph wind plus gusts. Should I put on a long sleeve shirt over my t-shirt? Change out of the t-shirt into a long sleeve shirt? Or just go as I was? I decided the breeze wasn’t all that strong, and a t-shirt was enough.
Step by step, I made my goal distance.
I didn’t bother with a warm-up since my normal pace these days is really at warm-up speed. Out the front door, up our steep driveway and to the left, uphill to where the flatter roads are. After passing three unbuilt lots on both sides of the street, the first thing I noticed was that my neighbor’s trash can was out, and it had been emptied! I hadn’t put mine out since I figured trash was delayed a day due to the Presidents’ Day holiday on Monday. I obviously didn’t get the memo that the trash company did honor Presidents’ Day.
I made it uphill without any angina. It’s not all that steep, but last summer and fall even a gentle walk up this hill brought the pain on. I checked my speed on my phone app, and it was 2.5 to 2.6 mph. That’s about where I wanted to be so, since there was no angina, I decided to push it just a little. Or at least keep pushing myself at that speed.
Trash day, and I missed it. Next week will be overflowing.
Out onto the main road, I turned west, intending to go to the top of the next hill—a fairly gentle slope—go down a little and around a circle, coming up to the same top of hill. I checked my watch, and was surprised to find a screen showing with my heart rate. This is a new watch, synced to my new phone. My cardiologist suggested I get one that did EKGs and tracked the heart rate. I didn’t realize that if I opened the Samsung walking app the phone heartrate tracker would also open. My heartrate rate 93 at that moment. I decided to keep pushing.
My thoughts wandered to the many things on my to-do list, some fairly major things. It is similar to a storm. Some of those things are:
Keep pushing contractors to finish the water remediation work in three places in our house, and do some repairs in another place that involves some remodeling.
Keep pushing the contractor for our gutter replacement to come back and finish the temporary solution he put in while I was in the hospital because the proposed solution wouldn’t work.
Push my proposed flooring contractor to call back so he can come out and give me an estimate for replacing our 38 year old carpet with flooring. I’m about to go to someone else.
Continue with PT for my injured shoulder from last June. Twice a week at the clinic, every day at home and now added exercises twice a day.
Get ready for a heart valve replacement, probably in July. Hopefully this won’t involve open-heart surgery.
Plan a road trip back east to see our son and do other things. Hopefully it will be before the valve replacement.
Short on sleep for the second night in a row; not sure why.
Donate our ancient minivan; it’s no longer road worthy.
Keep pushing forward with my book, which is drawing close to halfway done.
Keep pushing on my two special projects.
Keep pushing on dis-accumulation, which does indeed require constant pushing.
Make a major financial decision that will take some research.
Yes, all these make up a storm. As I walked, I remembered a post here about turning into the storm when the storms of life beset you. That’s what I’m going through, and I decided I would do that when I got home. First thing would be to pull out the vehicle title and call the Salvation Army. Alas, their phone system didn’t work either locally or nationally. I may have to find a different place.
Gotta call that contractor and have this temporary solution changed to a permanent one.
I rounded the circle and made the uphill leg, without stopping for breath. Normally I have to do that, so maybe this indicates I’m in better physical shape than five months ago. Or maybe it’s just that warmer weather brings on the angina more than cold weather.
As I headed up to the next leg of the walk, I heard a loud sound like thunder. Impossible, I thought. The thin clouds all around barely hid the sun, the disc being clearly visible. It must have been one of those empty trash cans blowing over and echoing.
My next thought was how much I love this walk in winter, mainly because I can see through the woods. Houses show on side streets and even across the valley. Hollows are not just opaque with undergrowth, but you can actually see down them. Evergreens are visible scattered within the naked hardwood forest, and how I enjoy seeing them.
On the return leg, just as I passed the street before the street I turn on before I turn onto our street (is that clear?), I heard another thunderclap. No mistaking it this time. It seemed to come from the south, so I made a note to check radar when I got home.
As I walked the homeward leg, every empty trash can laughed at me. The sky continued to belie any thunderstorm approaching, and my watch told me my pulse was 105. I stopped at the mailbox and retrieved one lousy little piece of junk mail that would go straight into recycling.
Just at I turned down the drive my app announced I passed the 1.5 mile mark. Goal met. No angina. Heartrate about where it should be. Just a slight sweat on my t-shirt. Thirteen cars passed me during the walk (yes, I count the cars)—no fourteen. That delivery truck on the street before ours. I have turned into the storm.
Oh, when I got home, the “all clear” report came from the mold specialist. One hurdle in remediation cleared. Now, if only the Salvation Army would either answer their phone or fix their website.
