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.
The damaged area in the living room, after the built-ins were removed.
Last weekend, the closer it got to Monday, I knew it wasn’t going to be a normal week.
First of all, it was a week with no appointments outside the house. Lately it seems that every week has something: one of my writing groups meetings, a doctor appointment, something. No, wait, I did have one appointment. Monday night was supposed to be a dinner meeting for Life Group teachers at church. But the weekend forecasts for Monday said the day would start out icy. Sunday evening I was pretty sure it would be cancelled. Sure enough, it was. So a week with no appointments.
But I knew it would be a busy week, because, after much delay, contractors were scheduled to be at our house. One contractor was to replace our gutters. The other was to do remediation work on places on the house that have water damage. The house is about 38 years old. We’ve lived here for 22 of those years. We have done nothing much to it.
Great precautions taken to contain any mold or other contamination.
Last October we had a contractor replace the flooring and railings of our upper deck. That revealed some damage to the doors to the deck, more on the doorframes. We got to looking around and saw damage at another place, inside the house wall adjacent the deck. I also knew that some damage had occurred on the other side of the house, in a void space off the master bathroom.
I called out a mold detection specialist. He found a little mold, and a little moisture where there shouldn’t be any, but not any big problems. Still, it was enough things found that he recommended we get a remediation contractor to address three areas.
First, I checked with my homeowner’s insurance company. They sent a man out and he assessed it. A couple of days later I got the answer: long-term damage, not an insurable loss. Whatever this cost, I was going to have to pay for it myself. Off to find a contractor.
I had a little trouble finding a contractor who could do the work. One came by and assessed it, but I didn’t hear from him for another week. I finally reached out to him. He said he didn’t think he would be able to fit me in with his workload. I resisted saying, “It would have been nice if you’d called me a few days ago.”
Meanwhile, the guttering contractor was having trouble with his equipment. After many calls and texts to him, he pushed the schedule for his work out into January.
I found another remediation contractor, who came out to assess. I actually liked him better than the first. He saw things the first hadn’t, and was able to explain things to me in a way I understood. I told him he had the job. But it was now just a week or two before Christmas. He told me he should be able to start mid-January.
Let me fast forward through Christmas, our week-long trip to Lake Jackson, Texas, and two modest snow storms in the midst of a week of single digit temperatures. The guttering man gave me a date, had to move it a little due to weather. Now he is scheduled to be here Tuesday the 24th (I’m writing this on the 23rd).
Meanwhile, the remediation arrived here Monday the 22nd, a little late in the day due to morning icing. The three-man crew got to work on the damage area in the living room. The removed the build-in bookcase, removed obviously damaged sheetrock, and built a containment area. The next day they did the same in the master bathroom. In both cases, it appears they found the source of the water, and have a plan to stop it plus repair the areas. One will be fairly easy, the other difficult.
I’m not happy about the money I’m spending. But when a house approaches four decades old, I suppose you have to expect to spend some money to keep it in good repair. Yes, I hate to spend the money, but am happy to finally have answers and a good start on corrective measures. A good part of this is the plumber (who needs to repair one area), and a roofing inspector (to check out two areas) have been coordinated by the remediation contractor.
But the week has also been not normal was because of the writing I got done. On Monday the 22nd, I began work on Part 8 of my Bible study, A Walk Through Holy Week. My co-teacher and me will begin teaching this on Feb 4, and I wanted to get ahead of this. Each chapter is divided into seven sections. On a normal day for previous volumes, I have been completing an average of 1 1/2 sections per day.
But Monday, I wrote three sections in just my normal amount of writing time. Tuesday I completed another three sections. This is an amazing production. They need editing, of course, but that is a great start—even as I got the contractor started, occasionally interacted with him, and listened to his sawing and other activities. At the end of Tuesday, I was amazed at the progress. That will allow me to finish the chapter on Wednesday as well as get back to publishing the first volume in the series.
It’s now Tuesday evening, and I’m writing this for Friday posting. Hopefully I’ll find time to edit this before then to fill in what happened on Wednesday and Thursday. But even without that, I can confidently say it has not been a normal week.
And I guess that’s a good thing.
Update, Thursday evening: Work inside on the damaged areas has taken place every day. Our master bathroom is closed off from us, the counter removed, some of the cabinetry removed, and more holes cut in the diagonal wall. The good news is that the water damage appears mostly confined to the dead air space behind the diagonal wall. The floorboards there are rotted and will need to be replaced. They don’t yet know about the framing—some of the bottom framing may need to be replaced. But the lateral extent of the water damage is contained, and that’s a good thing.
So things are progressing, a little slowly perhaps, but progressing. I hope the plumber comes tomorrow to check out the leak source. The repair man is supposed to be here Monday to review everything and give an estimate for all the putting-it-back-together costs.
Is it money well-spent? Darned if I know. No, I suppose I do know it’s well spent. When we sell our house in our future downsizing, we will have an easier time of it.
It may not be selling, but at least my grandkids are reading it and seem to like it.
2023 was a strange year for writing. In some ways my output doesn’t seem very significant. But, then, the year brought many other things that pried me away from writing. We made six trips for family matters, Lynda had her heart irregularities leading to a pacemaker implant, home improvements led to the discovery of water damage that is taking much time to arrange for contractors to begin repairs.
Yet, I think I made some progress. Let’s see how it stacks up against the goals I published on January 6, 2023.
Edit and publish The Key To Time Travel. Yes, I got this done. Publication was in June.
Determine the structure of the overall A Walk Through Holy Week Bible study series, and whether it will be six parts or seven. It’s being taught in six parts over six Lent/Easter seasons, but I’m thinking it’s better as seven parts in books. I completed this, sometime in late spring. I settled on eight volumes rather than six or seven. All volumes are planned out and all chapters named.
Finish/edit Part 4 (what may become Part 5) of AWTHW.Finished this, and it’s now on hold, waiting for earlier volumes to be finished and published.
Finish/edit Part 3 (what may become Part 4) of AWTHW. Finished this (didn’t actually have much left to do on it), and it’s now on hold, waiting for earlier volumes to be finished and published.
Write Part 5 (what may become Part 6) of AWTHW, simultaneously with teaching it. I’m pleased to say I finished this. It actually became Part 7 in the restructured series. It was done a couple of weeks before the last class.
Start Part 1 of AWTHW, after determining the overall structure, of course. Not only did I start it, but I finished it and made one editing pass through it. Two more passes and it will be ready to publish.
Depending on how work on this goes, publish some or all of the completed parts of the study. I decided to hold off publishing volumes out of sequence, so all the complete volumes are waiting for Volumes 1, 2, and 3 to be published.
So far this has not found an audience on Kindle Vella. All 32 episodes have been published.
Start writing the next book in the Documenting America series. It will cover the years 1761 to 1775 and is tentatively titled Run-up To Revolution. Yes, I finished this. I decided to publish it to Kindle Vella, chapter by chapter. In hindsight that was not a good decision, as it has not attracted a readership.
One other item, which is non-commercial but which will be a book, is to start transcribing the letters from our years in Saudi Arabia (1981-1983). I don’t think this is something that I can finish in one year, given that it will be fill-in work when I have nothing else to do, but I’d like to at least start it. I’ll wait to start it, however, until I get a few more disaccumulation items done. No, I didn’t do this. The work of disaccumulation proved to be more time-consuming than expected. I made major progress on it, but I’m still a long way from done.
So all in all, I published only two items: one book, one book in serial format. Given the distractions, maybe that’s not too bad. And I did get a lot of writing done, even though it’s not yet published.
Time now to set some goals for 2024. That will be in my next post.
After having had a busy, family-full Thanksgiving week, it’s going to be a quiet Christmas at Blackberry Oaks. Lynda and I will be here alone.
That’s fine with both of us. If yesterday is any indication, we aren’t as able to do a lot as we used to be. I started my day at 6:00 a.m. after a great night’s sleep. I was in The Dungeon by 6:15. I edited the last two chapters of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. That was the only writing task I had for the day, so I moved on to other things, mainly looking for a lost box of letters. I looked for that yesterday so I could file one stray letter, but I couldn’t find it.
This morning I widened my search in the storeroom, and found it in a place I hadn’t looked yesterday. In that process, I saw four boxes labeled “travel items.” They were boxes of travel brochures we had picked up over the years and, rather than go through them and decide what to keep, what to discard, I just shoved everything into boxes to go through them in the future.
The future came yesterday. I went through the boxes, pulled out everything that wasn’t worth saving, and consolidated the rest into two boxes. That allowed me to do some rearranging of the shelves, including temporary repairs to one shelf. Then it was time for me to make the weekly grocery run. Then back to The Dungeon after lunch, for miscellaneous computer tasks, along with finishing the clean up from the morning’s work in the storeroom.
When I came upstairs around 3:00 p.m., I went straight to the sunroom with my last coffee of the day, hoping to read five to ten pages in The Confessions of Stain Augustine. Instead, I promptly fell asleep. I could read only two pages, as my mind and body conspired against reading retention.
We had planned to make lace cookies in the afternoon, but neither of us had the energy. Hopefully tomorrow.
But the day was productive. One editing pass done through a book finished last week. The clutter reduced a little more. The pantry and fridge adequately stocked. A good afternoon nap for both of us. We’ll get those cookies done tomorrow.
My next blogging day is Monday, Christmas day. I don’t expect many people to be tuning in then, so will say Merry Christmas now. May God bless you on the day we celebrate Jesus’s birth.
Games were on the schedule over Thanksgiving week.
Oops! I didn’t make a post on Friday, the first time in a long time to totally miss a day. I’ve been late a few times, but I didn’t even think of the blog.
What captured my attention? Family. Our daughter, son-in-law, and their four children came in Monday evening and left on Saturday. Our son and his husband came in on Wednesday, delayed a day due to airplane troubles. We had the normal Thanksgiving meal on Thursday, followed by a 1.6 mile hike on a trail loop near us (part of the route is on city streets).
I call this puzzling behavior.
Some of us put together a 1,000 piece puzzle. Some played games. We had other meals and conversation. Once I got up early to get grandson #1, Ephraim, out on his run on our semi-rural streets. Two other times I drove him to a track in Bentonville, where he ran timed miles. The first time he equaled his personal best. The second time he beat that by about 7 seconds, setting a new personal best.
The 2009 photo.
With #2 grandson, Ezra, I drove to the airport on Wednesday to pick up our son and his husband. That gave us some time to talk. He also helped me work in the yard on Tuesday. He and a friend of mine about his age, Liam, helped me move some large logs, both cut and deadfall, and cut out some wild thorn bushes that encroach on the blackberries. He earned his money. I also had him doing some leaf blowing, which he seemed to enjoy.
The 2019 photo.
With granddaughter, Elise, I had a lot of conversation. We worked together on the plot of the next book in The Forest Throne series. This will feature the one daughter in the Wagner family, Elizabeth. Elise and I worked out a prologue and discussed various plot lines. Tomorrow I will put some of those into a word document, filed away for writing a couple of books from now.
The 2023 photo, perhaps never to be done again.
With my youngest grandson, Elijah, I had a good time with a little roughhousing. We read together, and I gave him his first word exercise, now that he’s in 1st grade. He’s still a lot of fun, and wanted to work in the yard like others did. Almost all the baby toys we had for the kids are too young for him (and obviously the others), so I’ll be getting rid of them.
In the late evenings, after the games, puzzles, or whatever, we watched back episodes of Shark Tank. The three youngest kids seemed to enjoy it a lot, as did some of the adults. Mornings started with 30 minutes of reading. Ezra chose The Fellowship of the Ring, which is certainly a challenge for anyone, let alone a 12-year-old.
Saturday morning, as our daughter’s family were soon to leave, I remembered we had not yet recreated the photo from 2019 of me and all four kids. We shot that photo because at that time, a popular Facebook activity was to post photo comparisons from 2009 and 2019, ten years later. In 2009, I was on the floor reading to Ephraim, who was our only grandchild at the time. So we did a posed shot of me and the four grandkids on the floor. We wanted to do that again, and we just did fit it in before the trip was over. This is likely the last time we will ever get to do that shot.
Saturday, once our daughter’s family was gone, we had a quiet day with our son (his husband having left on Friday for business). We watched a couple of movies, ate leftovers for lunch, read, and went out for a simple dinner. An early morning airport run on roads we expected to have some frozen stuff on them turned out to be easy. Came home, rested, went to church to an excellent worship service.
Yesterday. I got back into reading Thomas Carlyle’s letters. He was visiting places in his native Scotland. In a letter he named the place he was at and said that this place was a piece of the universe and the time of his visit was a section of eternity. The place and time, “is very beautiful; doubly beautiful to me whose head has long simmered half-mad with brick wildernesses, dust, smoke, and loud-roaring confusion that meant little.”
That’s kind of how I feel. The last week, Thanksgiving, was doubly beautiful for taking me out of my routines. Today I’ll be back at it: writing in the Bible study in progress, trading stocks, doing housework. But last week will always be doubly beautiful, and I will think about it for a long time.
This was an okay book, not great. Not sure of its truth. Will never read it again, so it’s gone, today added to the sale/donation pile.
Our efforts at dis-accumulating continue. Perhaps not as fast as needed to do a downsizing in this decade, but we make a little progress. The last month has seen the old postcard collection acquired in the mid-1980s, having been left behind in the house we bought, for $115. But the buyer wanted me to ship it to Houston and so didn’t want the small, steel cabinet. I was able to sell that for an extra $10.
Then Lynda decided she was willing to part with the Gulf War memorabilia she brought back from Kuwait in 1991. They were supposedly Iraqi items. I listed them on Facebook Marketplace, not being sure they would sell. After one price reduction, a mom contacted me. She wanted them for her son (maybe a teenager), who loves military stuff. We were able to arrange a transfer that was convenient to both of us.
But really, the big thing we need to part with is books. For a bookiphile, that’s like cutting your wrist. But we have to do it. Despite the number of books we’ve gotten rid of, we still have at least 2,000 books in the house. I gave one away at writer’s critique group last week.
One book obviously isn’t much; we need to do more. In our living room is a built-in bookcase. We are going to have to dismantle this to repair some water damage that appears to be from improperly installed flashing around the chimney. We have already removed some books from the lower shelves and piled them, to prevent them from being damaged and allow the bookcase to dry from a little moisture found.
As Lynda and I discussed it, she suggested that we get rid of a series of Bible study books that are shelved on that built-in. We went through one of those books together, and started a second. They aren’t bad books. I learned something from them. But when you have 2,000 books, and need to unload at least a thousand, I agreed with her to put those in the sale/donation pile.
I then suggested we also get rid of two books from the built-ins, the two books in The Bible Code series. We read these aloud together. They are an easy read because the books are not long, are well-written, and have lots of illustrations of where the Bible may have a code in the books of Moses. I say “may have” because, while the writer makes a good case, I’m not fully convinced it’s true.
At first Lynda balked. She was more accepting of the Bible code than I was and thought more of the books than I did. But then she agreed with me that we read the books, got something from them, and with all the other books in the house we were unlikely to read them ever again. So she agreed to get rid of them. I’ll move them out tomorrow.
I also have a fairly large set of magazines about World War 2 that I got from my dad. I had intended to read them, but it looks as if I never will. I have them listed on Marketplace and lowered the price twice. I think I’ll do so again and see if they will sell. Also on the getting-rid-of-block is my collection of WW2 history books. They are all good. If I had a shortage of books I would probably read all of them again. But, with a book surplus and a shortage of years ahead, I think they will also go up for sale.
Six Bible studies, two Bible codes are a long way from 1,000 books. A good sized box of magazines, and perhaps ten war books are not much. But it’s a start. I’m hoping over Thanksgiving, when our children are here, we will be able to take some time to go through a few things and, with their encouragement, get rid of some things we haven’t done anything with since the 1970s through 1990s.
In my last post, I wrote about how I was grinding through a bunch of tasks, and, to keep them all straight, I needed a to-do list. I’m in The Dungeon right now, writing this, and I don’t my current to-do list with me, so I’m starting a new one.
I do these on a long, narrow note pad that we’ve had for years. I found this pad in the desk in The Dungeon, something that isn’t used too much. I was given to us when we bought our house in Bentonville in 1991. Time to use it up I would say. It’s perfect for to-do lists.
As far as what got done from the last to-do list:
Flu shots.
Heard back from two contractors. One gave me a little more information on his schedule, moving the work out some. The other apologized for not getting me an estimate yet and established a date when he would. I would have to say, I feel a little better about contractors today.
Got my hair cut.
Continued to write in my current work-in-progress, A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. I should finish a chapter today, putting me at 70 percent finished with the first draft. That puts me a little behind where I hoped to be by this time, but I’m not unhappy with my progress.
Got some filing done, though I have much more of that to do.
Attended my writers’ critique group last night. A good meeting; I might blog about it next.
Have started getting things together for Thanksgiving.
And Thanksgiving will dominate my next to-do list, which I started by interrupting writing this. Lots to do in terms of cleaning and organizing. Also buying in some groceries. I’m trying to plan our meals so that we get to Monday night’s supper, the last we will have alone, finishing the last prepared item.
It will be a good Thanksgiving, with both of our children, their spouses, and all our grandchildren here. It may also be the last family gathering at our house for a while, as henceforth we might shift these to our daughter’s house.
So carry on, everyone. My wishes to out to you, a bit early, for a happy Thanksgiving.
From time to time, life gets so busy that I fall back to a habit that served me well in my engineering career: making a to-do list. Not that my days are really so busy that I miss deadlines, doctor appointments, club meetings, etc. Those are relatively few in number, and easily remembered—at least those happening in the next month are.
But as I look around the house, I see lots of things that need doing. Some are small things, but they pile up. It is a needed task to clean up as much as I can before company comes Thanksgiving week. Here in The Dungeon, if I look over to the left, the worktable with our printer has piles of papers. The biggest pile is scrap paper, being kept for printing drafts of my writing for proofreading or critiques. It’s ugly, but it’s going to stay. Next to it is a notebook of genealogy files that I’m slowly scanning and saving to the cloud so that I can get rid of the paper. Also on that table are a few miscellaneous papers that I need to file. One is a charitable donation receipt I need to put with the 2021 tax returns. So far I haven’t felt like dedicating the two minutes needed to do that.
That work table also has two bank statements to file. That’s another two minute task I just haven’t felt like doing.
A little farther away are bookshelves lining the basement family room walls. At one time these were nice and neat, separated into fiction and nonfiction, and alphabetized. They may still be mostly that way, but years of reading and re-shelving, selling or donating, pulling other books from boxes, have resulted in some loose of organization. Fortunately, correcting that, while a big task, isn’t urgent.
What is urgent? Filing receipts! I suppose that’s number one. Many things I used to file have gone digital. Yet there’s still a big pile of them to file. Most of them are medical, the papers you get with each prescription. Some are medical info, others are receipts. Others are grocery store receipts, travel receipts, a few insurance statements, and a few brokerage papers that we haven’t yet switched over to digital. Once I set my mind to it, I can have these all sorted, ordered by date, and filed in about two hours. Maybe that will be a Monday task.
Then there are all the things involved with home repairs. We are inching forward with gutter and downspout replacement. My water damage restoration contractor bailed on me, so I’m having to go through it all again with a new one. I hope to hear something this week from him. And I still need to get the floor guy out here to figure out if I’ll be able to change out the ancient wall-to-wall carpet with modern flooring after all the other work is done. I guess I need to carve out a little time today to figure out which number I called was him and call to set up an inspection time.
Then there’s flu shots. We normally get them in early October, but couldn’t this year and I haven’t made appointments since then. That might be a today task as I can do that online. Oh, and the Silver Dragon need some routine servicing. I think Wednesday is free, if I can make an appointment on Monday. Oh, year, just remembered: I have some over the counter things to order as part of our Medicare Advantage Plan benefits. Better do that today as well.
Somewhere in there I need to work in some stock trading. The latter is mostly Monday through Friday, only 15 min to a half hour a day, plus an hour wrap-up on Saturday.
See why I need a to-do list? I have to grind through these things, trying to get everything done without letting something fall through the cracks.
I’m going to end this blog post here, and do those on-line things while I can. I hope on Friday I can post that I got lots done, and feel less stressed about everything.
