On All My Motions

I just hit the one-year mark at my ‘new’ job. We’re working out of a new operations center now, better facilities with better parking and twenty minutes closer to where I live. (In fact, my drive time is now almost exactly the same as used to be necessary for my previous, lesser-paying, less enjoyable job.) I seem to be doing decently well, just got an associate-of-the-quarter type award which is good for bragging rights but not a lot more, but it opens the possibility of advancement.

***

Last week Susan saw a homeless person standing on a street corner just as it was starting to rain. She’s been working with veterans for decades now, many of them homeless, so she’s sensitive to this particular issue, and was only a few blocks from a Salvation Army center that she knew provided shelter, so she gave him a ride there. He thanked her by stealing her purse. With her phone in it. No surprise that she was greatly distressed by this, but she was lucky in that she wasn’t carrying any credit cards. Then we got double-lucky on the phone. First, when we went to report it, it turned out that she had in fact purchased insurance for it (advisable, since the phone cost about ten times as much as the model I carry); second, once the replacement arrived, we found that she had allowed someone to toggle on a backup-enable setting, so her information was retrievable. She actually started crying when she saw the granddaughter photos she thought were gone.

***

September is my favorite month. Past the heat of the summer, well below the cold of winter. I also like October quite a bit, so we’re in the beginning of a pleasant stretch.

***

The job Susan starts on Tuesday (she’s already done the orientation): it’s back at the place which was the first teaching job she ever held, more than thirty years after she left it. No familiar faces, of course, but lots of familiar sights. And new stuff as well; even if the days when we were there, there was always construction going on, and that doesn’t seem to have slowed down.

***

Finally, we live in the country, but not way out in the country. Next door to our house — as in, right over the fence is their parking lot — is a diner specializing in country-style cooking. It’s a local favorite, and popular outside the immediate area (the Chinese soon-to-be in-laws were favorably impressed), so there’s a decent amount of activity there about four days a week. Recently, there’s been an addition to that activity: an adolescent bear has taken to swinging by now and then and digging through their dumpster. (Oh, yes, we also live right at the edge of a national forest.) Susan has seen it a time or two; she called me out today to look, and I saw … movement, between trees and shrubbery, which she said was the bear. Doubtless something will be done eventually, but for now it’s just part of the background of existence.

***

Life goes on. We go with it.

Okay, I have another car.

I wanted to move things along, so as soon as I knew the other insurance company had approved a payment amount, I worked at setting a physical appointment, so I could physically hand over the documents they needed (signed title and odometer statement). Once I was on hand for that, I had the settlement check within minutes; with that in my possession, I made it to the bank and deposited the check something like three minutes before the bank closed.

On my way back toward home, I phoned the small auto dealership where I got my last car. They’d worked with me before, and I figured that could facilitate things.

Did it ever.

My now-defunct vehicle had been a Toyota Corolla. It was the first such vehicle I had ever owned, but I liked it enough that I had planned to get another Toyota when replacement time came. The rental I was provided over the last few days? a Toyota Corolla. And when I told the dealer I was on my way to see about getting a ‘new’ car in place of the last one, he said he had a Toyota Corolla waiting that ought to suit me. Was this destiny, or not?

Not, as it turned out. It was familiar and comfortable, things seemed to work right … but it had 60,000 more miles on it than my previous vehicle, there was heavy tinting on the windows, and the seal on one of the windows was just enough off to make a very distracting whistle at highway speeds. So I went with the second choice he had pulled up, based on what I had been looking for the last time: a Kia Spectra.

I’ve never driven a Kia before. I know nothing whatsoever about Kias. This one, though, was agile and responsive, two years newer than my wrecked car, and had 45,000 fewer miles on it, rather than 60K more. So I drove my rental back to Enterprise and dropped it off, and one of the dealer’s guys drove me back to pick up the Kia, which I drove home.

Mark this: I haven’t paid for it yet.

I do everything with debit cards and online bill-pay, I don’t even have a checkbook anymore (or if I do, I don’t know where I stashed it). However, in the same way I returned to the same dealer because he’d given me a solid deal before, he was willing to conclude the sale on the spot and let me deliver the cash later because I’d always made my payments on time during the last purchase.

Oh, and one other thing: even with all the aggravation, I made a profit on the deal. Yes, the insurance check was for nearly $700 more than the cost of the vehicle I chose as a replacement, so even after I deliver the purchase price (tomorrow morning, if I can get to the bank quickly enough), my bank account will be larger than it was before the accident. (And, once I get back the rental deposit and compensation for the cost of a taxi to get me TO the rental place for the initial pickup, larger yet.)

I’ve spoken lately of ‘annoyances’. They truly are that … and yet, somehow, there’s a continuing trend where the bad things that happen to me and those closest to me, always seem to happen in ways that — short of never happening at all — are about as painless as they could possibly be.

I’ve been lucky. I know that, and know that I can’t count on continuing to get all the breaks (as in, my bad luck winds up being the least-bad-available). Still, I’ll take it for as long as it keeps coming, and be grateful.

Five days a week, I drive 50 miles to work and then 50 miles back. Last night, I got to 44 when someone decided it would be a great idea to make a left turn across the highway in front of me once I was too close to miss him.

Good news: his insurance is paying for my rental car while an assessor is deciding whether or not repairing my regular vehicle will cost more than its book value. Bad news: based on the damage I saw, I figure the odds are that they’ll just declare it totaled and cut me a check for what they decide it’s worth.

Since I just got back from China (and then had to replace my laptop), my ‘emergency’ fund is quite a bit lighter than usual. In fact, I already was going to be watching my expenses till the next paycheck, since my first on returning to the States was only a partial and it’ll be another ten days before I draw a full one. I’ve been in worse shape — probably won’t even have to borrow any money from my wife or brother to make it through — but it’s one more annoyance.

I seem to be dealing with a lot of annoyances lately. I suspect it’s because I don’t want to let myself consider them to be any worse than that. Am I keeping my head level, or denying the truth? Right now, I don’t actually care as long as I can keep on going.

During Skype with Susan yesterday evening, she started going over a list she’d seen of places outside the U.S. where you could live well for … well, for approximately what she and I will have via pensions and Social Security when we finally do retire. Some of it was interesting, even if I feel a certain skepticism (we’re six years from paying off our mortgage, in one of America’s lowest cost-of-living states, economically we’d probably be better off staying here), but I suspect it was mainly her way of getting through the fourteen-plus months she still has to remain in California. Even though I was mostly humoring her, however, it caught my interest to some extent. As we get older, some opportunities diminish, but that very fact opens out the possibility of others. Where would we live if we could afford it and didn’t have to stay with our jobs? Austria? Czech Republic? Guam? Panama? Australia? I learned long ago that there are always more potentialities than actualities (“Most neat things don’t happen” is the way I put it forty years ago.), but then nobody — including me — would have foreseen me becoming a soldier and then a truck driver, or that we’d host two international weddings within four months, or that our kids would now be living not just outside the U.S. but on different continents.

No telling. Probably won’t happen, but it could.

* * *

Today was my second of two days off, and I took my car down the hill to a little shop to be checked over for any problems I would prefer to deal with in advance. Took me forty-five minutes to walk back up to my house, and I was barely in the door when I got a call that the car basically needed only an oil change. So, I let them do that while I rested a bit, then I walked another forty-five minutes downhill to pick it up. Yes, if I’d known it would be done that quick, I’d have taken a book and waited there. But I didn’t, so I got some exercise. Time not wasted.

* * *

In the late afternoon, after things had cooled a bit, I saw clouds gathering and decided to try and mow the lawn before rain arrived. I was mostly done — with the front, still have to do the lo-o-ong strip by the highway — when it started to hail. Not little pro forma hail, either, we’re talking respectable lumps the side of marbles. Finished, and retired inside for cool air and coconut rum. Am I living the dream, or what?

* * *

Of such thrills are my life made these days. Try to keep your envy under control.

The windshield wiper fluid is now flowing properly again (which is good; even with no precipitation, schmutz from the road would collect on my windshield, which especially was a problem when driving home at night with oncoming headlights turning my view into a near-opaque sheet), and the snow is melting, but the day is gray. More snow coming? Could be.

Scheduling changes at work look positive. I have two days off after tonight’s shift — looking forward to it — and two next week. For several months, it was work a few days, off a day, work a few, off one … it’s not the same thing, you just don’t get the feeling of as much rest even if the totals are technically the same. As I observed a few days ago, I’m almost at two years on this job; aside from the Army, that’s the longest I’ve been in one place in the past fifteen years. Which makes it a shame that, now the new year is here, I’m looking around for something different.

Lots of stuff at home that needs to be done, and I let it go undone for far too long. Maybe I can begin making inroads again.