aadler | Entries tagged with home

Susan finished signing up for her own Social Security retirement a few days ago. We were told she won’t receive the first payment till the end of April, but if the quoted estimate is more or less accurate, our total monthly retirement revenue will increase by 85%. We’ve been more or less getting by already … but, because her old job had trouble letting go of her, we’ve continued to have that pay coming in, and it’s difficult for me to tell if we would have been able to balance the books without that.

The additional payments put us well and firmly into the category of “enough, as long as we don’t start spending a bunch more”. And that’s even without the military pension I think I might finally have enough paperwork to properly submit.

This could be nice. I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes.

Susan and I completed our move to temporary lodging on June 30, which — with the work we’d already done — only required what amounted to 14 hours of labor from me. Seriously, I started at 7 in the morning and didn’t finish till after bedtime, and except for driving time I never got to rest for more than five minutes at a stretch. Moving our various possessions didn’t require nearly as much time/effort as getting them ready to move, which was a long, wearing slog. By the time I was done, I was so tired I had to have Susan massage my back (which happens only every couple of years, if that much) and my feet hurt so bad I could barely walk and genuinely looked crippled.

This time we’re on the third floor of the extended stay hotel, where last year we were not only on the ground floor but right next to an exit. It’s actually less difference than I would have expected; more time, using the elevator, but no more difficulty.

Susan wants to go ahead and move into our motorhome, even with her plan to teach for the first half of the coming Fall semester. We may wind up actually doing something like that, but it would require a lot of preparation and education first (there are still some things on the Navion that we haven’t completely learned how to operate). And she wants me to go ahead and retire, whereas I really do want to finish out five full years on my job; aside from my time in the Army Reserve, which by its nature was off-and-on, I believe this would be the longest I’ve ever worked a single job. Plus, as I think I already mentioned, it gives us time to stack away some extra savings before we try to live on retirement income alone.

Either way, we’re out of the apartment, and in probably the last place we’ll ever live before becoming actual nomads. Just that much farther down the road.

Susan and I made individual trips into town today (me for more cardiac rehab, her for physical therapy and other things), then later went in together to do a small errand and get a very late lunch. Then home to watch more vintage TV and eat supermarket sushi.

Seriously, I don’t know how much longer I can keep up this kind of fast-paced, high-energy, dynamic lifestyle. Makes me nostalgic for the deployment days when I could just relax in a combat theater.

First day in cardiac rehab, plus another visit to the VA. The rehab was actually less than the exercises I normally do every morning, but they keep a heart monitor on me throughout and will be advising me on any deficits (yet to be discovered) that I’ll need to keep up. The VA visit was to follow up on some other things, including a consult to Dermatology over what is probably a minor matter; given recent events, however, I’m not about to let anything go ignored if a bit of attention might make a difference.

This was also Susan’s first day in the Spring semester, and I drove her in to work for that. Every year she at least half-plans to be her last one, but then she signs up for just one more. Won’t keep on forever (we really do want to make our move overseas once it’s possible), but it’ll last at least until the summer.

Even though the weather hasn’t seemed that cold to me, our car window froze in the up position (I finally got that unstuck), and the de-icer froze in either the windshield washer reservoir tank or the lines leading from it to the spray nozzles. Either way, not working. The winter has been fairly mild so far — and, of course, after February we’ll be looking at clear improvements — but we’ll still have a few chilly spots to get through.

That was today.

We got the promised snow. I keep an ice scraper in my car and one in my wife’s, but I learned a new lesson: you need to have one in your home, for those occasions when you need a scraper to get into the car to retrieve the scraper. I cooked from supplies yesterday, and it wasn’t till today that things cleared enough for me to drive out for more.

My granddaughter in China wrote a ‘book’ (my son says it took her an hour and a half), on successive pages of a large-leaf notebook. I’m still waiting to get a translation from him; he posted photos of it on WeChat, but it’s a mix of hanzi (Chinese characters) and pinyin (Romanized spelling for transliteration of Chinese), so of course I don’t have any way of reading it and since it’s photos I can’t even feed it into a translation program. Funny thing is, I was about her age when I wrote my first story, one about a cowboy roundup. It’ll be interesting to learn the subject and content of her first effort.

I’m seeing the first signs (only signs, as of yet, and even if it’s real foreshadowing, officialdom is likely to be slow catching up) of encroaching sanity in the whole Covid mess. A new virus variant — Omicron — that’s markedly more infectious than its precursors, but 95% less lethal, and leaves in its aftermath a natural immunity much more comprehensive than delivered by the current ‘vaccines’? That’s a likely solution rather than a new threat. The government has cried wolf too many times; we’ve spent the last two years NOT seeing Americans dying in the millions, and even if it really had been as bad as originally advertised, crisis mode can only last so long. In Iraq I saw women walking to market with gunfights taking place two streets over, because life has to go on. I’ll just be glad when ours can get back to doing so.

Things to do tomorrow, then back to work. The longer this goes on, the more I look forward to retirement.

Following my diagnosis with a cardiac event at the end of November, I was prescribed five new medications, four of them to be taken on a regular basis and the last to be kept handy if I need it. Of the five, one of them has to be split in half, because the assigned dose is a half-tablet. So why, on that one-out-of-five basis, is the smallest one (seriously, it’s a four-millimeter cross-section) the one that’s supposed to be halved? I practically have to use a magnifying glass to see where to make the split. I doubt anybody went to that much effort just to create extra inconvenience for me … but if they had, they couldn’t have done a better job than how it turned out naturally.

Spinning off that, the as-needed medication is nitroglycerine. I couldn’t even guess how many years I spent seeing those little pill caddies that could be clipped to a key-ring, so someone could be sure to have nitro handy if they needed it; now, I’m one of those people. My life just keeps bringing in more surprises.

And — last of the my-new-condition notes for this post — I’m supposed to have orientation for cardiac rehab in three days. Because of my odd work schedule, I’ll have to go to two different cities (one Monday, one Thursday) to get in what I need, but I really am trying to take this seriously.

My current job just made a new offer: a four-days-on-three-days-off overnight shift. I actually thought about it, but it’s been a long time since I tried to work nights, and I’d just rather not at this point in my life.

The newest version in the automatic updates for my Microsoft Word program has what they call “text predictions”: you type a few letters, it’ll project what you may mean to enter next. Sounds familiar, right? we see that in phones and Google searches all the time. Only, this one doesn’t have any way for you to go, Yes, that’s what I want, go ahead and put that in. It just sits there, and you have to go on and type it out anyway. What’s the point?

Today, it got up to 55°F. So, naturally, the weather report predicts snow for tomorrow.

Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a sitcom. The weird kind, like writers used to turn out in the Seventies after dropping a few tabs of acid.

Susan and I will be spending a fair chunk of tomorrow getting air-bag repairs for our primary vehicle (one of those mandatory recall type things). They’ve been sending us notices for years, she finally got around to making an appointment.

Then, our state wants back-taxes payments. Which is going to take some working out, because I’m positive they think we owe so much because of the three years Susan lived in California … earning inflated California wages, but likewise paying inflated California state taxes. We got returns for those years submitted by a tax resolution corporation, and somehow they (and we) managed to miss that little detail where income for which taxes had already been paid to another state really shouldn’t have been reported to THIS state. I don’t doubt we’ll get a favorable resolution eventually, but for now it’s a mess.

Finally, we can both see the writing on the wall: it’s all but inevitable that both our jobs will soon require that we get Covid boosters, even though this silly crap has been going on for two years now and the dreaded Omicron variant shows every sign of being roughly as severe as the common cold … but by God we’re going to be ordered to get boosters, so by God we’ll do as ordered or get fired. Because this is America, where individual rights are no longer even a polite fiction. (They said if the country elected Trump, we’d find ourselves under a fascist government, and darned if they weren’t right.)

Slightly disgruntled, yeah.

Good result on the echocardiogram, everything functioning right and no visible damage to the heart muscle. Got a couple more appointments this month, then that should be it for a while.

Susan and I had lunch at a restaurant, just for the pleasure of it.

We’re watching episodes of a BBC series, police procedural/comedy called New Tricks. Fun, and on my own I’m gradually following out episodes of Yellowstone.

This is my life, for now.

Because of the schedule I’m currently following, I don’t so much have a ‘work week’ as two blocks of ‘work days’ with breaks. As in, Tuesday-Wednesday on, Thursday off, Friday-Saturday on, then my Sunday-Monday weekend. I never have to work more than two days in a row, and two of my days off are weekdays, which helps me get things done that regular working hours would impede.

Right now, I’m hoping to use my time off for immediate effect. Oh, there are other things I’ll have to do — Susan saves up tasks for my days off — but Wednesday I turned out 2,500 words on my most recent fic, and then went three days without having any spare time to continue that. Even assuming a 15,000 word total, I’d be one-sixth done now, and I doubt the story will run longer than that (and probably shorter). I just want to get it done, and get it right.

It’s been a while since I really focused on fanfic production. Last year, because of the rush to get the house ready, then move stuff out of it so it could be shown, then getting everything else out of it once it did sell, then living in a hotel room while waiting for an apartment to come available … I only turned out three stories all of last year, “the Song Remains the Same” and “Down the Ringing Grooves of Change” and “Hell for Leather”. That wasn’t a bad year — average, actually — but I know I can do better and I always want to, so I’m giving it another try this year.

It helps, at least in my own mind, that I’m finally focusing seriously on those stories I always planned to finish ‘one of these years’. (One of them, I really wanted to try and get done by the end of 2005; that didn’t quite work out, and I’ve meant to get around to it eventually ever since.) My absolute minimum? five stories, six if I enter this year’s Summer of Giles and have to come up with something original for that (and I probably will). It really would be nice, though, if I could finally manage to average out to the one-story-per-month — twelve in a year’s time — that has been my ambition for longer than I can remember.

I could do that easily, by the way. Even if I set a 1,000-word minimum, it would be no problem at all for me to bang out a 1,000-word story per month. Problem is, I want to write the stories I want to write, and they keep being longer than will neatly fit a predetermined timeframe. Still doable with the right amount of self-discipline, but then that’s always been a weak area for me.

We’ll see. I’ve made a decent start, and I have some ideas, and this is working out to be a pretty good year, and we’ll see.

Cold. Not especially extreme in straight terms of temperature, but a sharp drop from the prevailing weather for the past few months. (Actual snow today, though not enough to layer anything.) I spent as much time indoors as possible; it just gets down into my bones, and I’m not always cold but I never get completely warm.

Retinologist appointment today, cardiac on Monday. I’m having to keep an actual calendar of my various appointments these days, though it’ll slow down (I hope) after the latest batch.

Susan wants to go on a cruise once her department at the University has its spring break. We’re thinking Caribbean, since there’s no telling how long it will be before we can expect various countries to relax their Covid rules to the point where we can approach our longer-term plan of moving overseas.

Given what was the most recent excitement in my life, I can do without excitement. Doesn’t mean I have overmuch enthusiasm for boredom, though.

And the days go by.

So, in my last non-fic posting for 2021, I mentioned the heart attack. ( Personal stuff, potentially very boring )

A couple of weeks ago, I said I’d touch on some of the things that had been happening in my long cycle of LJ inactivity. Here goes, then.

I had surgeries for cataracts, starting six weeks ago. Results are mixed. My vision with glasses is better now (the cataracts had been having a cumulative effect before I even knew they were there); however, my vision without glasses used to be just right for reading, and no longer is. Improvement overall, but I’m aware that my body is gradually losing its former capabilities.

Along with which, I got some pain (in my back) which became so severe that my wife Susan called an ambulance for me (and I didn’t argue). Turned out, even with no chest pain component whatsoever, it was a heart attack, and I had a couple of stents placed the following day. Back to normal almost immediately, and I can actually exercise now whereas it wasn’t really feasible before. On the other hand, my daily meds have doubled (and I’ll probably be on blood thinners and blood pressure reducers for the rest of my life).

Because of those things and other considerations, I’m considering retirement a couple of years ahead of the original plan. Part of that is that I thought my max-max for Social Security (deferring retirement till a later point) would be substantially larger than the standard max, but the difference isn’t actually that great. Part of it is that my work — which is the easiest job I’ve ever had in my life, and the best-paying outside a combat zone — is increasingly un-pleasing to me. And part is just that I don’t feel like waiting any longer. I’m ready to start trying out relaxation and travel as a lifestyle, and my wife, too, would like to get started before she’s too old to be able to really enjoy these things. Haven’t actually started the process yet, but getting ready to.

Today Susan and I set up an investment account using the proceeds from the sale of our home. With that and other things, retirement shouldn’t be much of a problem; I’m very cautious about such matters, however, so I’ll try to shore it up with some other arrangements before we commit completely. A further step, all the same.

As I had previously indicated would probably be the case, last year’s round of the Circle of Friends Remix (cof_remix) was, in fact, the last. From the very beginning, three of us — me, sroni, and eilandesq — participated in every round; last year, I was the only one remaining. Nothing lasts forever, and this one lasted ten years, but it had reached the point where the satisfaction wasn’t commensurate with the effort required.

(As an aside to that, does anybody know if eilandesq — M. Scott Eiland — is doing okay? As far as I can tell, he’s gone radio silent.)

Finally, my granddaughter — in China — is now a member of the Young Pioneers. Think a combination of Boy/Girl Scouts and a very toned-down version of the Red Guards. It’s apparently a routine thing, in that every member of her class went in at the same time; and, as a Catholic and an official American citizen, she’s already ineligible for the Communist Party (for which having been a Young Pioneer is a prerequisite). Still, that’s a step further into something that makes me uneasy as an American. I approve of patriotism; I approve of self-discipline and learning to work with others; I do NOT approve of the Chinese Communist Party, and would prefer to see my blood kin more distant from it. So, yeah, not all of life is completely to my satisfaction.

I’ll get to work on that.

So, yes, a few things have happened recently.

I go through these phases, where there’s enough news that I wait for a time when I can sit down and sum it all up, and then other things happen and add to the total so that it would take even more to catch up and so I wait yet awhile longer … In this case, there was a little extra that stretched the matter out longer still than that, which means that — except for the single Mother’s Day entry — I haven’t posted in six solid months.

The thing that added a couple of months to the tally: my laptop suddenly needed repair. And then the thing that needed repair turned out to require further repair, and the first replacement part was defective so they had to send off for another one. Then there were difficulties getting the data from the old motherboard to the new one: that wound up being insoluble, but I’d done a decent recent file backup, only it’s going to take some time to replace some of the programs I left behind … Anyhow, I’ve been limping along on a Chromebook for all that time, which did NOT help.

The things that I needed time to sum up:

Well, first, I moved to a different position in my company, which came with a raise. In fact, I was lucky enough to skip straight from Level 1 to Level 3, which compensated perfectly for the 2½ years I’d spent not advancing at all. And I’m still working from home (in fact, the company is going to sell the new center they built for us, because the work-from-home thing turned out to be not just sufficient but actually preferable, both for the company and for those of us doing the work). So I’m dealing with a better class of people, and doing work that I like more, and I’m on an odd but quite agreeable new schedule: three days on (ten-hour days), two days off, one day on, one day off, then start again. With, as I said, more money, which is always welcome.

Just about the time I finished training up for the new position, my wife Susan got a sudden urge to jump ahead on what we’ve been wanting for years now: get the house ready to show, in the hope that we could make a sale by the end of the year. We got the last of the refurbishing done (there were still things that needed correction, but by that point our contractor had got sick of us and we were even more disenchanted with him, so we decided “good enough” was good enough) and set up some time to consult with a realtor. Then Susan decided our odds would be better if we could clear the house and show it unoccupied, so every spare moment was spent giving things away, throwing things away, or sticking them into storage to be brought back later. Because — still pushing for more — Susan wanted us to move out completely for a month, take that month to show the house while we weren’t around (nor our possessions) to get in the way, then move back in while we did showings on a more relaxed schedule.

I went along with this because, however inconvenient, it was still easier than arguing, and we moved into an extended-stay hotel for that month. If I’d had the nerve to offer my opinion, however, it would have been, Seriously, you’re not about to sell a house out in the country in just a month.

If I’d said that, I would have been right. Because we didn’t sell it in a month; it took two days. Which meant we had a month to get ALL of our remaining possessions out of the house. There wasn’t enough time to sort through it all, so we simply packed it all up, which resulted in us having to rent a second storage unit (we’ve trimmed through enough by now to get it all consolidated into just one). Then we had to wait another month for an apartment to be prepared at the complex we wanted to occupy in town. Then make the move in a single day.

Observations from all that:

Susan and I spent two months living together in a single room. Not only did we not murder each other, it wasn’t even particularly stressful. That, I think, bodes well for our future.

We’re living in town again for the first time in eleven years … and, as it happens, back in the city where we lived before we bought that house.

I noted, with some wonder, that our most recent residence was the longest I’d lived in a single place in my entire life, and — thinking about it — Susan realized that was true of her as well.

Meanwhile, Susan’s dog turns out to have diabetes, so needs shots twice a day.

And, finally, the little project I alluded to months ago: my hair IS long enough now to wear in a ponytail; in fact, it’s long enough that I have to tie it back to keep it out of my way. I figure the novelty will wear off soon enough and I’ll go back to short hair (really short, I’ve been known to buzz my head entirely just to not have to deal with hair), but for now it’s still kind of funny for me.

So that’s me, that’s where I am (where we are). Anything more than that will be more, and I’ll address it as it comes up.

This year, unexpectedly, I got notice that my workplace would be totally closed down on Thanksgiving Day. I happily informed Susan, because the segment of her family with whom we usually have Thanksgiving dinner had already arranged one for this year, and I had already known I wouldn’t be able to make it, and now I could —

— Nope. Because of their work schedule, they’d set it up for the Friday after Thanksgiving, so I’m still out. So Susan arranged dinner reservations in another venue just for the two of us.

****

I have noted a welcome absence of political posts among the people in my friends’ list on LJ while the current mess works its way through to whatever conclusion it will reach. For this, I would like to express my appreciation of those who have thus abstained. The present situation is unwelcome enough — and stressful enough — that I have no desire to argue politics, and now I don’t have to clench my teeth and ignore anyone else’s opinions. Usually I’m not averse to making my feelings on such matters known, but right now I’m much happier not having to deal with it at all. So, again, thanks.

***

After issues with our contractor that I mentioned in previous posts, we’ve got past the major roadblocks and are now in the final stretch. There will still be some issues that have to be addressed … but those are minor, and easily addressed (or ignored for a while, if necessary), and this current project — reflooring the remaining part of our house — will be the last of the major projects.

(Which is good, because — as she’s on a teaching schedule — Susan will at the end of the month receive her last paycheck till the end of January. We’re okay to get through two months of mortgage-payments-on-40%-income, as even in semi-retirement she earns more than I do, but we won’t have a lot to spare in the meantime, and I’ve learned that some emergency or other is always waiting to pop up at an inopportune moment.)

She wanted to have our house on the market two months ago. Now, maybe it can go up in the middle of December, which is far from what would have been the best time. On the other hand, that will give us plenty of time to prepare for Spring showings … and, probably, for her to decide that we can go ahead and get a new shower put in after all.

***

Even with what may be the proper paperwork, I still haven’t got around to trying to get my military pension set up. I’ve been working my way around to it for the past seven years, there just didn’t seem to be any urgency. I should probably get on that.

***

With the current covidiocy (I’ve seen it referred to as Covid-1984) my preferred hair-cutting place has been unavailable for months now. With that kind of head start — blunted by the fact that I got impatient a few months back and buzzed my entire scalp with home clippers — I’m considering letting it grow out till I can put it in a ponytail. Not because I think it would be stylish, I’ve always thought ponytails on men look stupid (and ponytails with gray hair strike me as frankly pathetic), but just because it’s something I’ve never done before.

Oh, yeah, I’m a rebel.

***

Seems like last week it was summer. At this rate, next week will be 2021. Such is my life.

I felt off-balance all day. But no, not really a matter of balance: I literally felt like one leg was shorter than the other, whenever I stood up from my desk for a break. I wondered if I was sitting in a funny way that left the leg partially numb, and adjusted my seat cushion to alleviate that without any result. I wondered if there was some obscure neurological phenomenon that could account for it …

No. I was wearing two different shoes. Both were black fuzzy-lined house shoes, but they were different black fuzzy-lined house shoes, and one had a different thickness to the sole.

Good news, I have no sudden new mysterious neurological deficits.

On the other hand, I’m clearly at least a little bit of a dumb-ass.

So, since the last time we tuned in:

Susan has been hit with … not exactly Facebook jail, but lately she hasn’t been able to post anything there (and no explanation given). My initial thought was that someone at Facebook (or someone complaining to Facebook) had decided that her political beliefs were ‘problematic’. Reading up on it, that seems less likely, in that she hasn’t been blocked from Facebook, she just can’t post there. (I haven’t checked yet to see if she’s still allowed to comment on other people’s posts. That might narrow down the possibilities of what’s causing that.)

Me, I deal with Facebook by posting there maybe four, maybe five times a year. I pay some attention to what people I know are sending up, but mainly I just ignore it.

***

Last week my younger brother sent me a text: Call me as soon as you can. Bad news. I didn’t get the text till after midnight — and, frankly, I wasn’t looking to embrace bad news that late — so I didn’t call till the next day. At which point I didn’t get an answer. Took a shot at calling our youngest brother, but he’d got the same text and likewise been unable to reach our middle sibling. On my last try, I got through …

An elderly relative in another state had died. Frankly, I didn’t even know who my brother was talking about, I never kept up with that side of the family. I’d been thinking in terms of a cancer diagnosis, something with his wife or his daughter or one of his grandkids. This was a welcome relief (if not exactly good news), and he’s aware now that he needs to provide a bit more preliminary information in such messages. Yes, I called the last brother to let him know as soon as I had the low-down.

***

The home repairs continue, but for some reason they seem to have slowed down (as in, it’s been weeks since we’ve seen appreciable progress on the last couple of jobs). I want to talk about it with our handyman, but he never seems to be here unless I’m occupied with work, and I want to approach the matter tactfully so he doesn’t get annoyed and leave all these jobs unfinished. He’s done good work up to now, but the time scale is becoming increasingly troublesome. We still hope to get the house finished and on the market before too far into the autumn months, and that window is dwindling fast.

***

For the last several years, Susan and I have been on a fortunate pay schedule: each of us got paid every two weeks, but those weeks overlapped, so that every week there was something coming in for one of us or the other. Her most recent pay change has moved us away from that felicitous arrangement: now the state (she’s working for the nearest university) has decided to pay twice a month, probably the 1st and 15th of each month. Minor adjustment, but still an adjustment, and I did kind of like things the way they were. Too bad the decision wasn’t up to me.

***

During part of the house remodeling, things got moved while rooms were being worked on. I just located our bathroom scales the other day … and discovered that I had put on an extra five pounds in the interim (this after I found I was already five pounds over my previous maximum). Personal caloric-intake-and-exercise discipline to begin tomorrow in response.

***

I can’t believe tomorrow is September.

Susan was talking with her closest cousin the other day. She (Susan) is currently enthusiastic about Revolutionary War history, and in response her cousin said, “Oh, so-and-so (some relative) followed out some old records, and just found out that one of our ancestors was with Francis Marion during that war.” Susan freaked … and the funny part was, the cousin had never even heard of the Swamp Fox. Susan wants to document enough genealogy that our granddaughter can have an official status as a Daughter of the American Revolution. (Of course, there’s considerable chance that she’s already a daughter of a different revolution, on her maternal side …)

***

A couple of days ago, I went into the office to clear out my desk. I left it nearly five months ago, and only went back once (and even then I didn’t go there; I’d taken my monitor and keyboard home with me, and didn’t want to carry it back only to have to turn it around and carry it all out again, so I used the equipment at someone else’s empty desk). I was at the new center less than a year; a few more months, and I’ll have been away from it for longer than I spent AT it. Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’.

***

We had to close off our home’s pet door because raccoons kept coming in to eat the cat food. I actually caught the cat watching them one day; he was, like, “Whatever, dude. They always bring me more anyway.”

***

Work on our house continues, but slowly. Our contractor/handyman squashed a finger and then that turned into an infection, for which he’s receiving treatment but it affects the pace. The central heat has been repaired and a new A/C system installed; the deck is finished (except for a few places where some painting still needs to be done); the jets in the Jacuzzi tub have been brought back into operation; the spare bedroom is finished (including new ceiling in one spot, new flooring, and new paint on the walls); the main bedroom has been refloored; there’s a new lavatory in the main bathroom; new light fixtures have been installed in the entry hall, kitchen, ‘office’, and spare bedroom. All that’s left is the renovation of the spare bathroom, and new flooring in all the areas of the house that don’t have it yet.

Susan wanted to be done by now and have the house on the market. I figure it’ll be sometime into autumn before we can do that. All the same, the process is … er, processing. Neither of us has given up on the dream of moving overseas (I’m fixed on Malaysia, Susan keeps looking at other places), and I’m thinking it will probably be doable by summer 2021. If we manage it faster, well, that wouldn’t be bad, either.

***

For the Snowflake Challenge in 2016 (link here), I listed out a dozen stories that I was going to try to write that year, averaging one per month. One of the twelve turned out to be undoable — it was going to be “this year’s RemixRedux story”, only RemixRedux wound up not taking place that year— but I’ve done enough other remix stories in the meantime that I consider that particular obligation to have been fulfilled elsewhere. Looking back over my record, I can see that it took me four years to turn out the next dozen stories … and, of the ones I’ve produced, five of the ones I specifically promised haven’t yet been done.

I’m still on it. I didn’t give up, I just postponed.

***

All the Everclear is gone now. I am so far resisting the temptation to replace it. No guarantees, though.

***

Sweden — by specifically NOT doing the things we’ve been doing — has reached the level of coronavirus recovery that the U.S. claims to want. Has anyone considered the possibility of attempting to achieve the same result by following the same process? Nah, that’s crazy talk.

***

2020 has been … intense. And we’re not even through the two-thirds mark yet. Maybe that’s why the Everclear ‘evaporated’ as quickly as it did.

Every now and then, just for the hell of it, I try something new, something that hasn’t been part of my normal routine. Usually, but not always, that’s foodstuffs. As an example, the first time I discovered yogurt, I felt something new had been added to my life … but it didn’t stay, I’m okay with yogurt but I don’t actually like it. On the other hand, when I essayed the same experiment with smoked oysters, that lasted long enough that my kids still remember it as an occasional ‘special’ treat. (It had to remain occasional because their mother was so revolted by them, she couldn’t even come into a room where a tin of our ‘treat’ had been opened.)

That’s sort of the point. Even if it winds up not agreeing with me, a chance to break new ground offers the possibility of expanding my parameters. That’s why I took a shot at podfic some years back, as part of one of the Fandom Snowflake Challenges … and, again, found it wasn’t for me, I get impatient trying to listen to fic when reading is so much faster.

Just the last couple of months or so, however, I’ve managed to get in three new ones.

The first was Vegemite. I’d heard about it, even mentioned it in a story (“Best Foot Forward”), and finally I was interested enough to try it, even though I had to order it via a 3rd-party vendor listed through Amazon. Results so far have been mixed. I like the flavor, I like the richness. Unfortunately, I appear to be one of those people who can’t get past the bitterness. I looked up recipes, I checked the ‘right’ ways to eat Vegemite, and that bitter aftertaste is always there for me. (Shame. The rest of it really intrigues me. I might find a way to keep trying till I get used to it, but I’m through half a jar and it still keeps being bitter.)

The second was Everclear. That was an impulse: I spotted it on the shelf at a stop-and-go in North Dakota when Susan and I were on a recent trip, and I’d seen mention of it (usually in parodies or mordant humor) and decided to find out what it was like …

Oh. My. God.

I’d heard about it, but hadn’t read up on it. I didn’t know it’s listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the strongest alcohol in the world. (It’s chemically impossible for an ethanol to have more than 191 proof; Everclear is 190.) I didn’t know it was nearly two and a half times times as strong as the vodka that is my standard staple, or four and a half times as strong as the coconut rum that is my favorite. I didn’t know it can get you drunk faster than your body can detect the buzz, or that it’s nearly impossible to drink it straight because it’s absorbed into the mucous membranes of your mouth and throat almost faster than you can finish swallowing it. I didn’t know it tasted so fricken awful.

So now I’m mixing it half-and-half with something that has some taste, then mixing that with diet cola (yes, I’m a heathen, and happy with it). If I ever buy Everclear again, it will be purely for the purpose of making other drinks stronger, because that’s all it’s really good for.

The third was “Gone with the Wind”. Saw the movie decades ago, never even thought to read the book (though in the rest of my life I do a lot more reading than viewing). Last week, though, I saw an article by someone describing her love-hate relationship with the book — with the upshot being that, however her opinion might change, she kept going back to it — and now I’ve checked it out of the library to see how I feel about it personally.

(This kind of thing doesn’t always work out. I read “Lord of the Rings” the first time in high school, and was enthralled. Read it again years later, rediscovered the remembered wonder. Took it with me to keep me occupied during my deployment to Afghanistan … and I was bored by it. What changed in the meantime? I couldn’t even hazard a guess.)

There’s always something. These are the somethings I’ve most recently addressed.

Good news but not great: good, after years of pursuing it in a desultory fashion (I just wasn’t in any kind of hurry), I finally got a letter acknowledging that I had 20 good years of military service and was entitled to apply for retirement pay; not great, because I still have to put in the application, and basically I’ll need to find someone to walk me through the process because there’s a lot of crap needed and I don’t actually know how to begin. Still, the first hurdle is past.

In coronavirus news (yes, there’s always something), there was a waiver allowing retired VA nurses to come back in and help out until the immediate crisis was past. Susan gave it thought and exploration before deciding that with her age and fundamental health, getting back out there was more likely to result in her being a drain on the system than in her being able to make a substantial contribution. She checked it out, though, and it really was a coin-toss for a while there as to whether she’d stay home or jump back into clinical service.

In her current work-from-home setup, she’s run into a vexing obstacle. The class grading system operates almost exclusively through a program called Blackboard, which she has a great deal of trouble getting to connect, stay connected, and accept her inputs. Some of the messages she’s received indicate a possibility that our current internet simply is an older setup than the system requires, so we may have to get a new home router (single large expense) or even upgrade our current service (continuing smaller expense).

In China, my granddaughter is clearly using more English during our periodic Skype calls; in the past, it was more a matter of occasional phrases when prompted, then she’d go back to Chinese and have our son translate for her. Our hope, of course, is that eventually they’ll be living in America — she is, after all, legally an American citizen, along with her father — so being able to communicate might prove useful.

***

The funny thing is, during the time Susan was in California, I spent most of my time at home anyway. It’s amazing how quickly that became boring under the new Social Isolation regime.

Ever notice how, when other people describe the dreams they had, it’s never really that interesting? And yet our own dreams are intensely interesting to us. Probably because the dream-mind bypasses the judgment filters of our conscious mind, and hits us at an emotional level.

Last night I dreamed I was spending time with the first girl I ever dated (I won’t even say how many years ago, because just thinking about it makes me feel ancient). In the dream, she’d spent most of her life as a nun but just recently left the cloistered life behind, and she and I were suddenly getting along really well (whereas in real life she lost interest in me very quickly and never regained it). However, I also had to deal with the awareness — which kept resurfacing, even in the dream — that I did have a wife in the background that was going to pose a problem for any gauzy fantasies …

Boring, right? But it sure kept hold of me while it was going on.

***

My work week starts on Saturday, so now I’m a week and a half into my work-from-home stint. It’s better than the first time I did that, for three reasons. First, our central air is working properly again, so I’m more comfortable in the room I use as an office; second, the overhead light got repaired, so I don’t have to use a pole lamp in the corner for illumination; third, remembering the previous stint, I made sure to bring the large computer monitor and keyboard this time, which makes everything a lot easier.

I hadn’t really recognized at first how lucky Susan and I were, until the shutdown became more widespread: we’re able to work from home, so the change has affected us very little. In fact, contrasted to those who’ve had to dip into savings or even face genuine hardship, we’re actually saving money, because 1) less spent on gas, 2) more time spent cooking at home.

I don’t in any way feel that we’re undeserving, but I am aware that we’re not necessarily more deserving than so many who don’t share our fortunate positioning.

***

Out of nowhere — no stress, no injury, nothing to trigger it — my right knee got stiff. Then it got more stiff. Then there started being actual pain in there. Just over three days, it got so bad I could barely hobble. This afternoon, I got a couple of naproxen from Susan, hoping that the anti-inflammatory effects would help …

It was a friggin’ miracle. Within two hours, I was almost back to normal.

It’s been easy to take my good health for granted. No fun to be reminded just how fragile that can be, or how quickly it can change for no visible reason. Still, for now I can go back to rejoicing in ease of physical motion.

***

I caught Blow the Man Down in streaming video over the weekend. Weird little movie, quite nicely done. What felt strangest, though, was seeing Annette O’Toole with gray hair and wrinkles. Time flies, and poops on us on the way over.

***

No idea what’s coming next in my life. Let’s watch and find out.

On All My Motions

“All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.” – C.S. Lewis

Entries tagged with home_stuff

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