It’s been a busy day—my wife’s birthday. We went to lunch, spent some time together.
But I usually plan my blog posts a few days ahead and write them the day before. So I need to look back a day or two to figure out why I didn’t plan and prepare a post for today.
All I can say in my own defense is I have no excuse. Yes, I was busy with medical appointments. Tuesday I had a Pulmonary Function Test, preparatory to my heart valve replacement surgery coming up in a couple of months. Also on Tuesday I made a presentation to a club I’m a member of, the Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers Society. Preparing for that presentation took time on Monday and Tuesday.
Wednesday was a haircut. That shouldn’t have taken too much time, energy, or concentration. Between all of this, I haven’t been writing. I’ve been working on the two special projects: transcribing letters from our years in Saudi Arabia, and scanning/e-filing poetry critiques from twenty years ago. I’ve worked on that every day. And I had a few letters to write over the last couple of days.
Yardwork has also started in earnest, and that has taken an hour a day. Tomorrow will be longer than that.
So this blog post is late. Hopefully, over the next couple of days, I’ll spend a little more time planning and writing my next couple of posts.
Perhaps harder than cutting with scissors right-handed is taking a picture of cutting with scissors right-handed.
Tuesday night, after a quiet afternoon and evening, while the TV was running, more for background noise than anything, I had a need to cut something and grabbed scissors from the drawer in the end table between my wife’s and my reading chairs. Except only my wife’s chair is there at present. I was sitting in it. My chair hasn’t yet been returned to its normal spot after it was moved for two months while water damage remediation was going on in our house. I don’t know if the chair would know how to act if it was moved back now.
The chair doesn’t actually enter into the story. I just thought of it. Anyhow, I took the scissors out of the drawer and prepared to do some snipping. But I remembered the problem with scissors. Ninety-five percent of you won’t know what the problem is. Not that they are sharp and moderately dangerous, but that they are made for a right-handed person.
Two features of the scissors make them righthanded. One is the holes the fingers go in. Most scissors have holes that fit fingers on the right hand but not on the left. A right-handed person doesn’t know this, but a lefthander does from years of having the fingers of the left hand in those uncomfortable scissor holes. Cut long enough and the fingers hurt.
Some scissors have “neutral” holes that are the same left-handed or right-handed, but they are rarer. But even with neutral holes, you still have the problem that the sharp edges are made for a right-handed person. The left-hander, after putting his fingers in the backwards holes, learns that you have to squeeze the two part of the scissors in a way that is unnatural in order for them to cut.
Yet you learn to do it. All through grade school you cut things with the handicap of backwards scissors. At some point you learn that they make left-handed scissors. Maybe you find a pair somewhere and try them. While the holes may feel more natural, you find you can’t cut with them even though the sharp edges are, in theory, just right for you. So you keep using the right-handed scissors uncomfortably and somehow get the job done.
But what happens if you ever have to cut something using your right hand? What would make you do this? Maybe if you’re wearing a jacket with buttoned sleeves and see a thread hanging on the left sleeve. You grab the scissors on your desk, snag the errant thread, and cut. Except you can’t cut with your right hand. Though the scissors are made for that hand, you’re too used to squeezing them the other way. You can’t cut even a simple little thread without taking the jacket off and cutting with your left hand.
I suppose that is all incidental to the main story. On Tuesday, the day I reached for the scissors, I intended to use them right-handed. Why? Not for a hanging thread, but to cut three bands off my left wrist. Why did I have them there? Because Tuesday morning, I had a heart catheterization as an outpatient. You see, I have a genetically abnormal aortic valve. I’ve lived with it just fine for 72 years. But now my cardiologist believes it’s time to replace it. So last month I had a trans-esophageal-echocardiogram, and Tuesday the heart cath. The purpose of the tests was to see if everything needed is present to do the valve swap-out in the least invasive way, through the groin.
The way things are these days, I had the results almost immediately through the patient portal. While they are not in English (but rather in medicalese), they are supplemented by what the cardiologist told Lynda. He feels that it’s not very clear that they can go through the groin and I will need open heart surgery. But I must undergo more appointments and see other doctors before we make that decision. And however it’s done, it likely won’t happen until July.
But back to the scissors. I could not get the bands cut with my right hand. I tried and tried, but those scissors sharp sides just wouldn’t cut the bands. I twisted them first one way then the other. No dice, no cut. Should I call my wife and have her do it? I decided to keep trying it. On about the tenth try, I was able to stretch the band to the right place and squeeze the scissors just right, and the first band snapped.
The other two bands cut a little easier. For maybe the first time in my life I successfully used scissors in my right hand. A small life triumph.
Now, as to the heart surgery, I don’t expect it to be easier than cutting three flimsy bands right-handed. But if it must be open-heart, then so be it. I just hope the heart surgeon has the right scissors for whatever handed he/she is.
Now, I have a thread hanging from my left sleeve that needs to be separated from its source.
I usually try to have the posts for the blog go live around 7:30 a.m. on Mondays and Fridays. Usually I try to write these a day ahead so that I don’t have to rush them on posting day. But here it is, nearly 8:00 a.m. on Friday, and I’m just writing today’s post.
This week has been very busy as we are dog-sitting again. Our neighbor’s dog, Rocky, has been with us since Saturday. He’s a good dog, but he gets homesick a lot. At his house he goes outside without a leash to do his business. At our house, if we let him out without a leash he will hand around a few minutes, then run home. We then have to go uphill, pass the three wooded lots between our houses, and find and fetch him.
Still, it’s been good to have him here. He’s older now, and I figured out this morning that we may be walking him more than we need, for he didn’t come right out of his nighttime kennel and run to the door. I think I will walk him less today. When we came back from a long walk a couple of days ago, we passed some neighbors out on their porch and stopped to chat for a while. I told them one of us was worn out. The other was a dog.
It’s been good to get my steps in every day. My weight is down (helped by a little sickness on Tuesday) and I’m very close to reaching a major milestone on weight loss. Look for an announcement soon.
On the second walk today, three deer were grazing. Caught two of them in this shot.
Rocky goes home tonight and, despite the work involved with his care, we will miss him. Because of the early morning walks, twice I encountered a herd of around eight deer grazing in the lot north of us. Never would have seen them under normal circumstances. Alas, I didn’t get my camera out in time to snap a picture before they scattered.
Meanwhile, in other news, the water/mold remediation work inside the house is finally done. Two men were here yesterday to re-install the built-in bookcase. All water damaged areas have been removed and replaced. Corrective actions have been made in three areas to keep it from happening again. The painting is not yet done, for we will have Rocky’s owner, who is a professional painter, to do that, hopefully soon. But today I will start putting books back on the shelves. We’ve already put some stuff back in the master bathroom.
I’ve also been able to mostly keep up my writing schedule. Monday through Wednesday, I completed one chapter in the Bible study I’m writing. Yesterday I planned out the next chapter and edited the gospel harmony it’s based on. Today I will try to write one section in it. By the time my writing is done tomorrow I hope to have two more sections done, which is actually a little ahead of the weekly schedule I’ve set for myself.
As far as my special projects are concerned, I’ve fallen a bit behind on them. I’m transcribing letters from our years in Saudi Arabia, intending to put them in a book. But I found a folder with eight items in it from our Kuwait years. The last few days I worked on them, typing and formatting them. They will have to go into the book on the Kuwait years and I’ll have to republish it. All for family, of course. The project of scanning genealogy papers and e-filing them has fallen on hard times. Perhaps I can get back to that in a few days.
No, the taxes! I forgot I still have our taxes to do. Got the business taxes done and in before the March 15 deadline, but still have to do our personal income taxes. I suppose I will have to start on that tomorrow. Alas.
I’m writing this post Sunday afternoon, just in case I’m not able to write more before my deadline.
The last two days have been strange. I have been beset by waves of tiredness. Part of it is we are dog-sitting for our neighbors. We’ve done this before. Rocky is now getting older (like us), and makes fewer demands on us than years ago. Still, there’s walking him. That forces me—and Lynda—to take him out. Yesterday the app on my new Samsung phone had discovered workouts amounting to over a mile.
I found myself exhausted by 4 p.m. yesterday, and today I was exhausted before leaving church. Yet, Saturday was a good day of accomplishment. I started with my weekly accounting (spreadsheet) for stock trading. I had a mistake somewhere, but was able to find and fix it. Next was going through books on my literature/writing bookshelf in the storeroom to see what I could get rid of. I brought a couple of dozen books up to the garage and inventoried them.
I’m working on transcribing letters from our years in Saudi Arabia in anticipation of putting them in a book for family members. Though similar to the project I did a couple of years ago with the letters from our Kuwait years, this is, I think, a bigger project, one that I’m tackling at a slower pace. On Saturday I transcribed 5 or 6 letters from 1982. Alas, the 1982 pile doesn’t look any smaller than it did two weeks ago.
I took Rocky outside to drink up the sun while I did some yardwork. That included transplanting one tiny evergreen tree from where it shouldn’t be to a place where I hope it will grow. One down, three more to transplant. I also was able to pull weeds from front yard, staying ahead of the main weed growing season.
In the afternoon, after yardwork, I was able to take an hour to write a section in the Bible study I’m writing. That was sort of unexpected, as I wasn’t sure I’d get to write at all yesterday.
We began moving a few things back in place in our master bathroom. The water remediation work in that part of the house is done but we put off moving our stuff back due to the work involved. But we got a little done.
The evening was dedicated to studying to teach Life Group today (Sunday). I don’t know that taught a very good class, but at least I was reasonably well prepared.
So that was a fairly full day. I suppose the tiredness was earned, not a result of sickness or something unexplained. Today was less busy, as a Sunday should be. I just got back from walking Rocky almost a mile, and we’re both tired. I’m glad we have enough leftovers that I don’t have to cook.
Possibly I’ll revisit this in the morning before it posts, and see if anything should be added.
As I write this on Thursday evening, I’m too tired to think. The last two nights included sleeplessness. Tuesday night after around 3:15 a.m., Wednesday night after 2:30 a.m. The reasons are complicated and don’t need to be stated in detail.
Wednesday morning, I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t. I finally got up around 4:30 and went to The Dungeon and got to work. I was reasonably productive, writing over 2,000 words in my work-in-progress before I was too tired to go on. Last night, I got up around 3:20, got shoes and a shirt on, and went outside to complete a task—yes, outside in the dark. Then I went to my chair instead of back to bed and tried to sleep there. I may have slept some, but not much. About 6:15 I gave up trying, got fully dressed, and went to The Dungeon.
I got some writing done, but not much. I ate breakfast as usual around 9:00, met with the contractors doing work on my house, then was back in The Dungeon at 10. The writing was simply too difficult to concentrate on in my weakened condition. I gave up around 11, went to the sunroom to read, and fell asleep. I managed a 30 to 45 minute nap in the blissful coolness of the rainy day.
At 12:30 p.m., an e-mail arrived announcing some good news. That kept me going through my afternoon meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes, my writing critique group.
But, alas, I have no mind for a post other than this one telling you why I have no mind for a post. So I’ll click “publish” without proofreading. I’ll proofread tomorrow, early I hope, and make any edits required.
Here’s to hoping I’ll be able to post more intelligently on Monday.
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.
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.
I asked my granddaughter to do a sketch for the covers for the Bible study series. This is her first cut at it.
My to-do list remains long. About every two weeks I start a new one, taking the one just done, transferring uncompleted tasks to the new list, and adding more. I suppose the habit is a continuation of my engineering career, and hard to break. Yet, I’m sure thinks would fall through the cracks if I didn’t organize the things I need to do. Like this morning, as I’m writing this in The Dungeon, I see on my computer desk a business card for the auto dealership where I have our vehicles serviced and realize I need to add calling them to have our minivan in for an oil change.
This week, I finished two tasks that I will today cross off the list. The first was writing A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. It’s always good when I finish a book. As I work on a book, I will add it to my to-do list. The entry for this one would look something like:
write AWTHW M T W R F Sa
Each day I would then cross out the day as I did my writing work. I may have a future blog post that says more about the specifics of how this book came about, how the writing went, etc. Suffice to say for now that it came together fairly quickly.
Now the editing starts. I’ve been editing as I wrote, so I’m a little further along than I would typically be with most books at the first draft stage. Last night I emailed it to my beta reader, so things are truly in motion. My next to-do list will have this entry:
edit AWTHW M T W R F Sa
Before too long, I’ll have a to-do list with the following:
create publication files for AWTHW
As for the second task, that is to finish scanning a large notebook of genealogy papers, saving them to my electronic filing system, and discarding the files and the notebook. This is part of a larger project to reduce the amount of possessions we would have to move in a future downsizing—an event that is not on any to-do list and is unlikely to be for a couple of years. I’ve already done that to 15 or so notebooks before this one.
This notebook contained information on relatives in Lynda’s paternal like, the Cheney family. It was kind of a difficult task. My electronic filing system is really set up for ancestors, not relatives. Therefore, I found this notebook harder to deal with than the others.
But I figured out a way to get relatives in an ancestors filing system. I don’t remember when I started on this task. The notebook is (or rather, was) thick, with loose papers as well. It was probably two months ago that this item first appeared on my to-do list:
scan/save/discard Cheney relatives papers M T W R F Sa
I took several breaks when other tasks took precedence, such as when family was here over Thanksgiving. But my revised filing system worked, and slowly the notebook emptied out. I finished the last of the bound papers on Wednesday, leaving only the loose papers to go.
Alas, yesterday the scan-to-computer function quit working. I’m not a tech guy, but I was able, in about 20 to 30 minutes, do some diagnostics and get the scanner and computer recognizing each other’s existence and get back to scanning. I got a few more pages done, leaving only around ten loose papers for today. As I won’t be doing any book writing today, I should easily be able to get all those done and check this task off the list.
Of course, that will not be the end for these two over-arching tasks. My to-do list is upstairs. Next time I go up, I’ll find it and bring it down to The Dungeon. I have two new items to add to it.
edit AWTHW F Sa M T W R
begin scanning next genealogy notebook
So one task leads to another, and the to-do lists never end. Still, I’m feeling good about things. I’m slowly getting done what I need to do.
Ah, the first of the month comes on a regular blogging day. Perfect time to address progress and set some goals. First, the November progress.
As always, blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. I missed one day, Friday of Thanksgiving week. Otherwise, I had a meaningful blog post on each scheduled day.
Attend three writers group meetings. I managed to do this. Thought I was going to miss one, but was able to make all three.
Finish editing Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution, and schedule all chapters to publish to Kindle Vella. Yes! I got this done. All are published to Kindle Vella, no one is spending any money to read them. Alas.
Finish the first draft of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. This will be a stretch, but I should get close. No, did not quite get this done. As of yesterday’s writing, I still have a little over two chapters to go. I lost more than a week over Thanksgiving. Before that, I had a hard time with some of the writing, often missing my daily goal, occasionally having to spend the day in study and write nothing. But that’s okay; it was still progress in small steps.
Get a little more done on the ideas for The Artwork of God. I’m still in the research stage on this project. Ideas continue to come, so I guess I met this goal. I didn’t put much on paper, however, just brainstorming it. Found a couple of good quotes to go in it. So the goal was met, but just barely.
Begin writing down some plot ideas for the next volume in The Forest Throne series. My granddaughter and I sat and talked about this one day while she was here. I told her my ideas and she gave me feedback as well as some of her ideas. Since the book will be about the girl in the Wagner family, I will really need her help.
Now, what about goals for December? It’s the time I’ll have to try to get much done to meet my goals for the year. I haven’t looked at those for a long time. But, without looking back, here’s what I hope to accomplish this month.
Blog twice a week, on Monday and Friday.
Attend three writers meetings. I’m not sure the third one will be held, as it will be getting close to Christmas.
Finish the first draft and much of the editing of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. As I said above, I’m down to the last couple of chapters. If I can maintain my writing schedule, I should finish the writing by December 10. That gives me two weeks to edit, enough time to go through the whole thing.
Type up some of the ideas for book 3 in The Forest Throne series. I don’t intend to begin actually writing this for perhaps a year, but I want to lock in the ideas generated so far.
Work some on Nature: The Artwork of God. This may be the next book I write (still trying to decide), so I need to expand the notes I’ve already taken.
Finish the new Danny Tompkins short story and decide what to do with it.
Read for research for the next book in the Documenting America series. Actually, until I do my research, I don’t know if this will be the next one or not.
Oh, one more: Finish and submit my article on a genealogical brick wall to the NWA Genealogical Society. The contest deadline is Dec 31. The article has been done for almost two months. Time to dust it off and do a final edit.
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.
