Seems like every part of the house is a mess with photos to be sorted through.
On Saturday last (so two days ago), I completed a project. No, this post is not about that project. It will be the subject of my next post.
Nor am I going to go into detail about what the next project is. I’ve made enough posts over the last year about what my plans are—how they get fulfilled or derailed—that I suspect my readers are tired of hearing about those plans.
Suffice to say I’m moving on to something else. Actually two something elses. Or maybe it’s three something elses. I’m not really sure what’s next. I’ve consulted my last list and have started on the one listed next. But my brother-in-law threw a monkey wrench in the works of two projects and I need to wait on him to send me something. Other ideas are floating about in the space between my ears. I may make a few jottings on them, see which one presents the lower-hanging fruit, and shift to it.
Meanwhile, I still have family budgeting work to do (dreading it and so avoiding it), at which I’m falling further behind. I still have filing of bills and paper (same), which still show up in my mailbox even though I’ve gone mostly paperless. I still have boxes and boxes of “things” to sort through after our move (tired of it, and still irked by it). I worked on photographs on Saturday and Sunday, because two of my projects involve dealing with photos. While I made progress, the living room is not yet free of boxes of photos, folders of photos, and loose photos waiting to find their place. It’s possible that by the end of today or tomorrow, I will have all photos in clearly marked boxes, arranged by locations or subjects, and ready for me to do what is needed for the next two projects. That’s my goal, at least.
On Friday, I finally found a box of photos I’d been looking for in our disorganized new home. “It was poorly labeled” will be my excuse. Of course, I’m the one who labeled it. I sorted through the photos and, on Saturday and Sunday, began scanning them to put them in the right format for adding to the WW2 letters book, learning more about formatting photos in G.I.M.P. in the process. It now looks like I might be able to finish the book, complete the formatting, and publish it within the week.
Not related to writing, other photos finding/sorting/evaluating is also in progress, with some progress, though also with some dismay at finding many more photos than I realized we had. The task I thought was merely humongous is actually gigantic.
I’m sticking to my reading and making my reading goal almost every day.
Today, in writing a letter to a friend, I made the first tangible documentation of an idea for another book. I know, I don’t need another book in the queue, but nor do I need this idea consuming so much brainpower with no outlet. Perhaps now I can direct more energy to projects already in progress.
After three or four weeks of undisciplined eating and failure to exercise, I’ve at least partially righted those wrongs and my weight is dropping a little. Gotta keep it up. Also seeing progress on blood sugar daily readings.
Perhaps related, perhaps not, my sleep seems to be better regulated.
The wall I hit, at mentioned in my last blog post, hasn’t totally come down, but it has enough chinks in it to see to the other side.
Bulleted items aside, I start off this week in a significantly better mood than last.
That’s what happened to me yesterday. I hit the wall. By 9 a.m., I felt like I couldn’t do another thing. Yet, I had done very little except for Monday morning stock market work. I couldn’t work family finances, at which I’m falling desperately behind, couldn’t work on my three letter projects, couldn’t work on post-move organization. I did manage to get my wife to her cardiology test appointment. I also managed to get a long message chain done with a newly found cousin on Lynda’s side.
Today has been somewhat better. But here is it not quite 4 in the afternoon and I’m out of steam. I guess I’ll try to read for a while.
The mirror over the piano was tricky to hang, but the guys did a good job on it.
Yes, taking it easy today. Remembering, though, our service personnel who died while serving. No one in my immediate family did. Lynda had a great-uncle killed in the first day of fighting on Guadalcanal in WW2.
We just finished a busy three or four days. Our oldest grandchild, Ephraim, graduated from high school. The ceremony was Saturday evening. Uncomfortable stadium seating, lots of walking, some rain. But the accomplishment was excellent and I’m glad I was able to witness the event.
Also on Saturday, our son Charles and his husband came in for the graduation (also for a birthday in Mario’s family) and became our first overnight visitors since moving here. We went to the furniture store on Saturday and, with their help, finalized the purchase of living room furniture. It will arrive on Thursday.
We bought this grouping on our trip to Greece in 1988.
On Sunday, as Lynda and I skipped church to be with Charles & Mario, and to hang pictures. Or I should say I found pictures stuffed in packing boxes in closets and they hung them. I have no artistic sensibilities and Lynda has no energy. So I got the pictures out, fetched and handed tools, and they found good places and did the hanging. We concentrated on the living room and breakfast nook. With furniture selected, we knew what spaces we had to fill.
Once the furniture arrives, with the walls decorated in the room we use the most, it will seem less like camping out and more like home. There’s still a lot of pictures to hang, but we had done all we could and they are for other rooms that can wait another day.
Cloth items bought in China in 1983 on the left; our kids’ graduation photos on the right.
And this relatively small amount of exertion over a couple of days has worn me out. I expect to do relatively little today. Maybe some household budgeting. Maybe get through 20 or 30 pages in my current read. Re-stow a few boxes and photos; prepare other boxes to go out next recycling day. Empty one box of table games to put in closet spaces no longer occupied by wall hangings. Perhaps work a little on my three books of letters projects. Maybe write a letter. And watch some TV.
Try to come to Tuesday rested up, ready for regular routines with a smidgeon of helping a friend out with transportation to a couple of things.
Bought by mistake, read with hope and anticipation, abandoned at the halfway point.
My wife claims I don’t look before I grab things from the grocery store shelves and make the purchase. I think she exaggerates. True, I did somehow get home with jalapeno ranch salad dressing instead of regular ranch. And I’ve been known to buy frozen peas and carrots when I wanted mixed vegetables. Ah, but these are minor, and they are still edible. And I never buy decaf when it’s regular coffee I want. I mean, priorities matter.
So maybe it should not be surprising that, when I saw a book titled Orthodoxy at a used bookstore I grabbed it, thinking it was G.K. Chesterson’s famous book of that name. It sat on my bookshelf for some years, came with us in the move, was reshelved, and then finally selected by me for my next read.
Only then did I notice the subtitle: The American Spectator Anniversary Anthology. This wasn’t a Christian text: it was political, commentary on life, sociology, economic systems, and all that jazz published in 1987. It’s a magazine I don’t remember and am not familiar with. The titles of the sections are:
Media, Books, and Criticism
Americans
The Sexes
Communism and Fellow Travelers
America and the World
Conservatives
I quickly concluded that the American Spectator must be a conservative magazine and that the title of the book meant to imply that the mag’s stories defined some kind of orthodox view of conservative beliefs. I.E. if you didn’t agree with what the mag said you weren’t orthodox in your conservative thinking.
What the heck, I thought. I might as well read it. I might find much I agree with and it will be entertaining, maybe even captivating. Alas, no such thing. I gave it a good go, reading about half of it. I read all of the first three sections and then spot-read the rest. I found the first section, book reviews, to be essentially a ridiculous rehashing of books of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, books that no one has read for fifty years and no one cares about now. Here’s how I saw the reviews (note that this is not a quote from the book):
Schmidt wrote his autobiography in 1955, claiming he never agreed with the communist Smitty’s views of 1926, but Schmidt’s contemporary Smith has proved otherwise in his analysis of Schmidt’s ten magazine articles in the 1930s.
Not even knowing who Schmidt, Smitty, and Smith were (names changed because I don’t feel like thumbing through the book to find a real example), I found myself not caring a whole lot. But I suppose the American Spectator published that article in 1980 and included it now in the anthology from 1987 to say that the article’s author, I’ll call him Smythe, was a true orthodox believer in anti-communist views.
I tried to read 10-15 of the book’s 504 pages a day, making it some days, never exceeding it, and falling short somedays as I quickly zoned out. I consider myself a conservative, but just couldn’t get through this. The world has moved on to new issues and new discussions on old issues. Maybe that’s why most magazines are for contemporary things but rarely have contents that pass the tests of time. The articles in this anthology, which I assume R. Emmett Tyrrell, the editor, selected as being both the best of and most representative of twenty years of the magazine’s history. To me, they seemed more for the purpose of showing off the authors’ obvious brilliance rather than informing readers or convincing them to orthodox thinking. These are not my kind of articles; this isn’t my kind of book.
So, despite my general agreement with the worldview underpinning much of the book, I rate it a measly 1-star. If you find it on a used bookstore shelf, leave it there and look for something by Chesterton. This is not a keeper. But I may not donate it to Goodwill. I have a friend back in Rhode Island who might eat this stuff up. I’d be willing to foot the bill to mail it to him.
It’s a mess for a while, but it will all come together fairly quickly.
Retirement sure is a busy time. As much as I have to do, I wonder how I survived 45 years in the working world (not including 8 years pre-college graduation). But I did, and am now—surviving, that is.
By saying “surviving” I’m not implying a lack of enjoyment. I have plenty of enjoyment times: my noon reading time on the covered, screened patio, evening TV time, before bed reading time, morning devotions, church activities, frequent times with our daughter’s family. Yes, in the midst of my self-imposed busyness, I have plenty of time for enjoyment.
Take this last week, for instance.
On Saturday, I pulled out a large box of packed photos with the intent of sorting them and finding permanent filing for them. That job is half done, and the office floor is a mess. I hope to finish today, Monday.
Last week I made major progress on the book of my father-in-law’s World War 2 letters and journal. As of work completed yesterday, I have only 27 letters left to proofread, a one-day task including adding them to the book file. Between 20-40 letters require comparison to the original letters, a Tuesday task. Hopefully I can get that done in a day.
Then I scan to text his war journal, which may not be as many pages as I thought it was. No prediction on when I will get to that, though hopefully it will be this week.
Now that our home in Bella Vista AR has sold, it’s time to get serious on replacing the tub/shower in our bathroom with a walk-in shower, and buying the furniture we need (chairs and a table, maybe a replacement couch). I’d like to get the ball rolling on that the week, but fear it will slide to next. I did a little scouting last week on Friday.
Two of the ideas for future books, which are far enough out that I can’t predict if/when I’ll ever get to them, have started to gel in my mind. I hope to have some outlines done, at least in part, by the end of the week.
So yes, life is busy. At least in part fulfilling. Oh yes, two more things I should really do this week: Catch up on mail/filing/budgeting/bill paying. And figuring out how much I have to pay the IRS in quarterly payments this year in anticipation in next year’s taxes. That’s a two or three hour, spreadsheet-driven task I’m not looking forward to but which will be very good to have behind me.
In the full cover, the photo and text is not out of center. This Amazon photo of the cover is, though.
About a month ago, I wrote about the projects I had on my to-do list and what I might tackle next, what would come after that. I have no shortage of projects in some stage of thinking through.
So after thinking through my projects list, and after having finished my income taxes, I spent a little time at paperwork reduction, then jumped into my list. The first item that seemed best to me was revisions to my book The Saudi Years in Letters. This promised to be the shortest of my projects, and it truly did go quickly.
First, I loaded the recently found letters into the book and formatted them. That added around 16 pages to the document. Next, I proofread the book using Word’s text-to-speech read-back feature. I was able to go through the book in three or four days. I probably could have done it all in a day and a half except for the concentration fatigue. Proofreading caused me to flag four letters to check against the originals. That took only an hour to do.
That brought me up to formatting the overall book. I had to do that page by page, making sure to have text and photos in right relation to each other, eliminating excessive white space and adding white space where needed. This took a day of work and eliminated about five pages from the file. I uploaded the new text file to Amazon without re-doing the cover. Alas, the extra pages from the extra letters were a few too many for the existing cover to work, so I had to re-do the cover. Fortunately , I was able to re-size the cover and upload the book to Amazon in about an hour.
So the project is finished, right? Not quite. As I went through the on-line layout checking of the book, I saw that it would be possible to add six to eight photos without having to reformat anything. Should I do it? That would mean finding the right boxes in storage closets (not impossible), going through the photos, making selections, scanning and formatting. A day or two of work, most likely.
I decided not to do that right now. If I let the book go out to my kids and grandkids, the intended audience, with a little extra white space, I’d say no big deal. I’ll take a few weeks to work on something else, then maybe come back to this.
Will I ever finish reading this poem, one of the major parts of Lewis’s book? Doubtful, but not impossible.
A while back, I posted about reading The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis and having a difficult time with it. In that post, I said I was about 1/3 through the book but was setting it aside for a while due to not really getting anything out of it. I put it back on the shelf, for it to await my picking it up again.
I did that very thing a couple of weeks ago, and read more or less the second 1/3 of it. While I maintain it’s clearly an academic book not intended for an engineer like me, I have to say I had an easier time with this 1/3 than the first 1/3. Lewis had moved in his discussion from works embedded deep in the Middle Ages, with a generous sprinkling of much older works known only to the most anal of academics, to works of the later Middle Ages to almost of the Renaissance. And from authors heard of only by experts to authors we of the 21st Century might actually have heard of.
People know about Chaucer. I’ve actually read some of the Canterbury Tales—not in the original olde English, but in a modern “translation.” But Lewis did not deal with the Canterbury Tales in this book, but another of Chaucer’s long works, Troilus and Criseyde. This is a poem dealing with courtly love, right along with the subject of Lewis’s academic work.
As it turns out, I’ve read part of Troilus and Criseyde, back in the days when I was actively writing poetry. I don’t remember much about it, didn’t blog a review, and don’t remember if it’s still on one of my bookshelves. But at least I had heard of it, which to me was progress. Here’s a sample of some of Lewis’s analysis in the part I most recently read.
Successful panegyric is the rarest of all literary achievements, and Chaucer has compassed it. I believe in the ‘gode faire Whyte’, as I have never believed in Edward King, or Arthur Hallam, or Clough.
Not easy to understand, but easier than what one encounters in the earlier parts of The Allegory of Love.
Once again, having reached a stopping point but not wanting to abandond Lewis’s book, I put it on the shelf to await a more opportune time. I picked the next book for reading, which turns out not to be what I expected. But I won’t blog about it until after 504 pages set in 10 pt font.
Or interest due to our time living in the region, but not a keeper.
As I mentioned in a prior post, my wife and I don’t read many of the same books. I rarely recommend a book I’ve read to her, and when I do, she rarely reads it. She recommends books to me more often, and when she does, I seldom read it. One she did recently and that I read was The Rise of Babylon: Signs of the End Times by Charles H. Dyer with Angela Elwell Hunt (1991, updated 2003). First, a little about how we happened to have this book.
My sister Norma sent this to our dad in March 1991. It was one her church in Indiana was studying. Lynda and I were relatively newly returned from Kuwait (in July 1990), Iraq had invaded Kuwait (Aug 2, 1990), and the USA had led the coalition that liberated Kuwait (Jan-Feb 1991). Hence, the book had family interest. We must have taken this from Dad’s house upon his death in 1997, but tucked inside it was a letter from Norma to Dad transmitting the book, along with a photo of Norma. I have no way of knowing if Dad ever read the book or not. Since Lynda read the paperback before me, it had the signs of having been used.
I read this over about a 10-15 day period ending a week or so ago. I found it to be an easy read, helped along by excellent layout and typesetting. Dyer wrote this between the waning days of the Iran-Iraq war (which was 1980-88) and the invasion of Kuwait on 2 Aug 1990, although with a few changes to reflect its publication in Jan 1991. Dyer had, on several occasions, been in Iraq in the second half of the 80s as a guest of the government to witness how Iraq, at the instigation of then-leader Sadaam Hussein, was working on rebuilding the ancient city of Babylon. I believe Dyer’s intention was to demonstrate how Hussein’s intentions for Babylon were a movement to the end times as predicted in the Bible.
While the book is informative and interesting, I don’t think Dyer achieved that aim. He tried to do too much in one small-ish book. He started with the pre-biblical history of Babylon from various extra-biblical sources. That was well done, though a bit short of detail for my historically minded mind. He also failed to give a simple list of the ancient sources, forcing his readers to make their own list from the handful of footnotes and other research. But what the book contains, assuming it is a faithful extraction from the ancient chronicles, is good.
Dyer then gets into the Old Testament era, dealing with people groups and mentions in the historical and prophetic books. Once again, there is almost too much there for a book of this length. I felt that the treatment was shallower than I wanted.
The last part of the book was based on mentions in Revelation, and how judgment will yet fall on Babylon, how the ancient ruins Hussein was desperately wanting to rebuild to his own glory, touting himself to be the new Nebuchadnezzar, would be annihilated before the return of Jesus foretold in Revelation. Once again, I felt that this part of the book was shallow. Dyer presents his case (interpretation of the prophecies) well, but not in enough depth to allow me to really sink my teeth into it.
I read the 1991 version of the book, which must have been written mostly before the events of 1990. The 2003 updates might be interesting to read. But, I repeat that the book is trying to accomplish too much in too little space. Either a larger book or two volumes or more references to other sources would have been most helpful. I must say though that the book has spurred me on to want to do more research, so in this sense it succeeds.
Yet, from me it has earned only 3-stars. It is already in the donation box, and our over-stuffed bookshelves are just a little thinner.
This year, filling out my taxes was worse than normal.
At the moment, I still don’t feel at home at our new house. At least in part, this is because I don’t feel like we’ve gotten into a rhythm yet. Daily tasks are a mixture of the old routines brought here, trying to finish unpacking and finding a place for things, and doing tasks that are one of a kind.
One of the latter has been dealing with Lynda’s eye infection. That has required four appointments with a new eye doc, with one more to go. Another one-of-a-kind task has been setting up autopay on our new utilities and cancelling the old. That’s about done now, with a few glitches along the way. Learning to use an unfamiliar range top, unfamiliar streaming service, stores with things in unfamiliar places, all of these are making life difficult.
But the big task that has been a weight around my neck has been the income taxes. I was able to complete my home business taxes calculated in March and the partnership forms filed by the March 15 deadline. Then other things got in the way. I finally got back on our personal income taxes last week, mainly last weekend.
And to my horror, I owed over $1800 in additional taxes! How could this be? Every year since I’ve retired, the amount withheld had been enough that I never owed much, sometimes even got a little back. What happened this year? Had the law changed a lot? Or had I missed something? Or did my spreadsheet have an error?
Then I realized: I had made more money this year than normal in our stock trading business. Despite trading only about six months of the year, a new way of trading of my own design had been successful, and the profits proved it. To test the theory, I took a little time to re-figure my taxes with no business profits included. Sure enough, the IRA withholdings were about right with the taxes owed. That makes sense. Make more money, don’t pay in taxes as you go along, expect to have to pay more at the end.
On Tuesday, I was able to get the tax forms filled out, printed, signed, copied, and the painful check written. I wrote it on the business account, since after all that was the cause.
Of course, then I had to do my Arkansas taxes. Those are normally easier. My spreadsheet fills in all the blanks. I just need to verify that I’ve entered the data correctly and make sure the forms didn’t change since last year. I completed those forms on Wednesday and mailed them Thursday. Since they owe me, I don’t think Arkansas will object to my being a day late.
Having this done for another year feels like a great weight having fallen off my shoulders. I think now I will feel comfortable moving on to other things. On Thursday I tackled the family budget. That was after Wednesday was filled with church activities and dealing with the potential sale of our house in Arkansas. Friday will be setting up my files for next year and entering data for the start of the year. Saturday will be a mix of work around the house, looking at the status of my writing projects and maybe getting a little done on one. Also Saturday I have an author even, the Stacks N’ Snacks adult book fair at Brazoswood High School for two hours in the afternoon. I’m looking forward to that.
