Happy Snowy Saturday! We've had a bit of a dump of snow over the past couple of days. Nothing excessive for here but I will need to pull out the snowblower after I'm done here before I go "in to town".
My vacation starts today - I'm really looking forward to it. I'll still be somewhat working but without the pressures of getting schedules out on time nor any expectation of having to respond to messages. Given that my backup is the company president who has been doing this role for over 30 years before he handed it to me, there's no concern of things going sideways. He has a bit more casual way of dealing with things than I do - the comfort of a long association. I did have a call with him yesterday to do the hand-off. There's a few things popping up this coming week - two loads of raw materials, one to be packaged right off the truck and the other to go into one of the tanks. There was a major order that blind-sided me on Friday that he's going to have to wiggle in. Some decisions I could have made that would have tied his hands early next week I chose to leave off.
When I "get back", I expect that my role will more than double and I've been working on learning about that and will probably make time while "off" to study up. I also have at least 4 virtual meetings to attend. I could have bowed out of them but they are critical initial meetings on another project that if I missed then I would be waaay behind. Since I deal with bad metaphors I joked that I would like to stay in the loop so that I could get back in the saddle easily without first having to find the horse.
I went in to the plant on Wednesday evening after hours to go over some paperwork and get some documents I needed. As I like to do, I had a chat with my daughter on the drive. She's doing decently ok. They are settling into Seattle and civilian life. They aren't very happy with their apartment as they have noisy neighbours and the landlord isn't prompt about fixing things. They are looking into buying a house perhaps closer to where her husband works. Prices are scary high at least from my point of view. My daughter is a housewife and a darned good one but to afford a house she may have to go back to work outside the home. She's facing a few barriers to that, one being that none of the online applications seem to understand that Canadians exist. Also the skills that her resume show are all retail skills. She is also a person with decent office skills and is super organized as a Navy wife needs to be. I was surprised when she said that in Seattle there's no indication of any sort of lockdown like we have here with all the shops open and people transacting business as normal. She also has some pain issues that slow her down - sciatica - which she thinks I have as well so doesn't want a job that requires her to stand on a hard concrete floor all day.
One the Friday night happy hour with a batch of former colleagues, the topic of house prices came up and it seems to be a universal thing that they are jumping up quite a lot in recent times. I'd hate to use the word "bubble" but they certainly seem frothy. I did notice that when I got my tax bill from the Township recently that my property taxes have gone down yet again - perhaps due to an increase in the assessment base with a lot of people moving into the area from more urban centres. Personally, I finally decided to not wait on renewing my mortgage and have now locked it in for another 5 years at less than 3%. I'm making a higher than required payment as well so hopefully will make a lot of progress on the equity over that time. When it next comes up I'll be 62 and perhaps it would be time re-evaluate where and how I live although I see no reason to move. I had been holding off renewing my mortgage to avoid any penalties if I could work some sort of deal about the burned house next door but there's no sign of anything happening with it and so it will probably sit as an abandoned shell until spring. A portion of the roof and some of the back windows are out so it's open to the elements and there's undoubtedly a variety of wildlife living in there now.
I was on the happy hour call for much longer than usual in part because I had no worries about getting up early today. And also because when everyone else signed off it was just the host and I on the call. She's a nice person who I have been sweet on for quite some time and really like as a friend. We chatted until about 11 about this, that and the other thing. When we worked together we used to go out for walks together at lunch. She's also my girl guide cookie supplier so keeping on her good side is important Doubtful that anything romantic would ever happen. She's in her mid-40s, never married, lives with her parents. I have no clue if she's actually could be interested in a middle-aged chubby white guy who lives in the middle of no-where. She embraces her black island roots, lives a conservative urban life going to church regularly, volunteers for a variety of causes, but also enjoys to travel and a variety of music. She comes off as a "lot" younger than her actual age but then again I'm a horrible judge of women's ages and usually place them a lot younger than they actually are. We've always been friendly even before bomb-day and I recall her getting mad at me post bomb-day and telling me very firmly that she was nowhere near as young as I thought she was. Because we worked together that to me precluded any sort of entanglement but a guy can think "what if" even if he has no intention on following through. She has been and always will be a good friend.
No news from or about S or her son. I've disconnected from seeing them on social media so their names don't even cross my field of vision. A letter came in the mail for S - I messaged her a picture of the envelope and put it out in the front porch with her stuff. She saw the message but gave no indication of when or if she'll pick it up. Something to do with her mother's pension from what I can tell. I'm presuming that she's changed her address on most things to her Dad's house where (again presuming) she's move in to.
I've been having some fun playing with my new camera setup and the Raspberry Pi that drives the web server that it's connected to. Since it's exposed to the internet I have the tools in place to monitor it in case it goes rogue as I'm sure that those little gizmos are common hacker targets for putting together robot armies. I've learned a fair bit too and now have things set up to capture time-lapse videos automatically of each day. I'm archiving some images too and will also assemble monthly and yearly time-lapse too. Something I did years ago when I had a different camera in place. It's interesting chasing down "how to" things for the device. So much of it posted by people who are passing themselves off as experts but clearly don't understand the fundamentals. Like I see in forums, both here and elsewhere questions are "answered" as: - why would you want to do that - that's stupid - I read something once that you need to try - you're wrong, do it this way, this is the only way to do it - here's the absolute definite answer for a completely different question and scenario - I tried to do that years ago and it never worked - here is a lot of text that I copy and pasted from the manual without ever trying to see if it works - like and upvote!
Buried in that are the actual answers but they need to be sifted out. And sometimes the answer is "you can't get there from here". When doing the time-lapse video setup I had to solve a variety of problems. Each of them was an incremental step that led me down a different path to solve a particular problem - some of which required me to go back to the start and begin again. It's been fun.
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Fairly busy but quiet day today. I need to get some groceries and my roses. Today will be mostly laundry and cleaning. I've gotten the trash out of the bedrooms including a large amount of bunny poop so the smell in the house is greatly reduced. I'm going to wash my blankets to get some of the smell out of there - it got "everywhere". I have a clothes line in my laundry room since hanging outside isn't really an option. I'm also going to pick up some snacks and spend time sitting on my tuchas watching the snow.
Tea pot is empty - adventure awaits!
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
My son called me late yesterday evening. He'd locked himself out of his apartment. He'd first tried to call his landlord who it turns out doesn't live close by. So I drove the hour over with his spare key and let him in in exchange for a visit with "the girls". They are doing well and both came over to see "grandpa" and get belly rubs. They are both back up to the weight they were at before too which is good.
The pictures and other things I'd given my son for Christmas were out and being used which was nice to see and he's interested in the two extra chairs I got with my $25 table. I suggested that he was more than welcome to do laundry here and that I would also feed him. It costs him about $10 to do laundry - no indication if he's meeting eligible women there or not
The musing is - why didn't he call his mother? In some ways I would presume that she would be more available to him than I am. I'm usually in bed by the time he called but was up watching TV which is highly unusual for me even on a Saturday evening.
There's not a lot of his mother visible at his apartment - he certainly wouldn't have had a chance to stage anything because I'm sure the last thing on his mind when he was heading out to do laundry was that I would be visiting.
I'd also thought that he might have gone over there today for SuperBowl as his mother is a bit of a sports fan and I believe that OM certainly is. But nope - staying home and inviting a single buddy over from work who he has regular contact with anyway.
Oh well - at least he has one parent he relies on. Even though it's literally none of my business, I can't help but wonder what sort of relationship the kids have with their mother. And if she realizes how much damage she caused by her selfishness. As one of Terry Pratchett's characters opines - "Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things."
Need to decide if I'm going to make another pot of tea .... ahhh - the stress of a solo vacation ...
I did get the old living room rug out, mopped the floor and got the new rug in. I have some moving carts I built a bunch of years ago so not much heavy lifting. My shoulder and knee are still give me a bit of grief. It feels weird to know that I have 2 weeks to get the stuff done I want to rather than having to shove it all into a single day.
Today is going to be some scrubbing, more laundry and getting the rug into the dining room. I can put the buffet and hutch on my moving dollies. Going to be nice to have that job stamped "done". Perhaps a walk around the village and a soak in the tub today too. The plan right now is duck stew for dinner and I have "fresh" rolls from frozen dough baking right now. And yes - he's still single too
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
Don’t waste too much energy trying to guess about your son and your ex. Maybe he hasn’t given her a key because he’s afraid she’ll drop in unannounced. Maybe she wasnt home. Who knows. The good thing is he knows he can count on you.
Please don’t hurt yourself moving furniture. For future reference, there are these furniture sliders (little plastic frisbee things) that you put under the feet of the furniture and they slide super easy across the floor. I highly recommend them. There are hard ones for carpeted floors and felt surfaced ones for hardwood floors. They make it super easy.
You are the Most available person to everyone. That’s why he called you to help out. You never say no to anyone and are always helping someone else out. That’s an easy question to answer as to why he chose to call his dad for help. You say no to absolutely no one! So of course you would be there to help out your son
Please don’t hurt yourself moving furniture. For future reference, there are these furniture sliders (little plastic frisbee things) that you put under the feet of the furniture and they slide super easy across the floor. I highly recommend them. There are hard ones for carpeted floors and felt surfaced ones for hardwood floors. They make it super easy.
Got the new rugs in place. I ended up video chatting my daughter who chastised me for the exact same thing. I needed her advice on where to place the furniture - she has great taste and a feel for how things flow. We chose to not put things back where they were and I think the room will "work" better for it.
Years (and years) ago during an office move I saw these little flat fabric covered carts with casters under them that the movers used to haul things in and out of the building. They had a little rope on them to pull them along. So I built a couple. They don't get used often but they are the exact right thing to move furniture or piles of boxes. I put one under each end of the heavier pieces and just wheeled it in and out as necessary. Still pretty whupped though as there was a lot of heaving around still.
When I built my sloop I ended up getting some of the very heavy duty casters that are used for industrial equipment that I used to make a cradle for the boat so that I could move it around as necessary to work on it. After the sloop was done I took those and built a heavy-duty frame out of 2X4s - I think it's been used maybe 3 or 4 times but boy oh boy was it the right thing to use for those jobs. It could probably hold close to a tonne. The little ones are fine for up to about 300lbs.
One advantage of having spent most of my career in industrial environments is that the "right" way to lift things is pretty heavily ingrained and I have a tendency to sit and stare at a problem for a while - perhaps genetic. I remember when I was helping one of my brothers drywall a ceiling in the house he was renovating. None of the sheets went up without us first sitting and staring at it for quite a while, both agreeing on exactly how it would be lifted and placed. Then we'd sit and admire our work for a while before putting up the next sheet.
I feel good knowing that the rugs are on top of clean floors and that time was taken to "do it right". I have the folding table in the dining room where even with a table cloth it looks kind of weird. Probably pick up a new table and chairs in the next few months. It will do for Easter though which is the next big "family" dinner which will be just my son and I.
Going to have a nice long soak in the tub shortly while the duck stew bubbles away. I put carrots in it and they always take quite a while to get to where I like them. It's been a while since I've made a stew but followed my mother's consistently excellent recipe. Look in the fridge for what needs to be eaten up and throw it in. So the shallots from the Robbie Burns' Day's whiskey sauce are in there too. One of the advantages of being a bachelor is that I don't have to worry about satisfying anyone else's palate.
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
A cautionary tale for you. A good friend of my best friend died about three years ago. He was moving a heavy bookshelf by himself up (or down) a flight of stairs. No one was in the house at the time. He was in his early 70’s but healthy. His ex wife came home (it was her house) and found him dead from a fall on the stairs.
add some epsom salts to the tub, if you have them. does ikea ship to you? you can get some reasonably priced furniture there.
The last of the epsom salts that my daughter gave me for Christmas (I have a big jug of my own still), cider vinegar and a lavender bath bomb were all used. I had a nice soak for the better part of an hour. I smelled purty.
I have some Ikea furniture and it's decent stuff. My bedroom dressers - 75% empty now are from Ikea. The truth is that I need very little and am willing to lurk and wait for what I want. The only two things on my list are a new dining room table / suite and new office desk. The dining room I'm flexible on but there's a particular style of antique desk that I'm looking for. It's a typists desk where the centre has a lift-out section for the typewriter. I should be able to use that with my laptop having most of it out of sight with just the monitor on the desk that I might set up to scroll through a photo album perhaps.
I'd like to "re-imagine" the house and how it gets used. I struggle with that though because I've lived here for pretty much my entire adult life with it set up more or less the way that it is. There are some constraints as well - the kitchen isn't reasonably movable. Given the poor, tired bones of the house, shifting walls is out as well. The master suite - if i make the assumption that I will continue to be single - could be very re-imagined, putting my office into there perhaps with a small kitchenette. The living room as well - it rarely gets used by me although more now than when S and her crew made such a disaster of it. It was hard for me to relax there when I had to move piles of things to just find my chair.
For now, getting the house into a state where I can make some active decisions around decorating is where I am. I have to find my courage and get that wallpaper in the stairwell down and the plaster repaired. Plaster repairs in the two empty bedrooms are also needed - much easier now that the rooms are empty. But I'm stuck - I don't know how I want to decorate. Just painting the walls a neutral beige seems like a waste of time and effort. If my daughter were closer by she could certainly guide me but she's not.
There are financial constraints as well of course. My priority at present is building up a financial cushion and planning for retirement. In 3 years and 1 month when I turn 60 I will be out from making spousal support payments and car payments around then too.
Originally Posted by kml
A cautionary tale for you. A good friend of my best friend died about three years ago. He was moving a heavy bookshelf by himself up (or down) a flight of stairs. No one was in the house at the time. He was in his early 70’s but healthy. His ex wife came home (it was her house) and found him dead from a fall on the stairs.
Certainly on my mind regularly. You probably remember my fears after moving heavy items and having chest pains. Just because that diagnosis turned out to be stress, my cardiologist is positive that I'll eventually be seeing him for a bypass.
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I was reading some fiction last night and even though the context in the story is completely different, I couldn't help but think of my ex-wife and some of the other run-aways we've had
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Polly turned over, and tried to make herself comfortable.
It's all lies, she thought muzzily. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there. Even I'm a lie. But I'm getting away with it.
This sort of thinking works - until it doesn't. Just like anyone who has bad things happen to them, I feel sorry for my ex and the fact that she lost so much. I have few regrets for my own part in that. I protected her for probably far far too long and while I may have been petty about some of the comments I made later, they were never made to specifically hurt or damage her. There is no way to put the genie back in the bottle, even after all the wishes are made.
Quiet day today. Playing with my web camera, digging through the logs to clean out some of the noise caused by spiders. I checked the production plan (yes - he "is" on vacation) and my backup did the plan a bit differently than I would have but it still makes sense. I'm grateful that things are well under control - I take it personally when others can't pick up and keep things running when I'm not available. Not that I don't think that I don't have a unique contribution to make, but rather that as part of a "team" others should be able to take over and keep things running because the communication of what needs to be done has been complete and clear enough.
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
Your daughter could still advise you on paint colors from afar, couldn't she? I highly recommending painting large swatches on poster board that you can move around in different rooms and different light conditions before committing to a color.
I'm not sure why you'd want to turn your master suite into an office with a kitchenette? Isn't one kitchen enough for a single man? I'd keep the master suite and make it as comfortable and inviting as you can - if you build it, they will come.
There must be plenty of other good space for office space. And a dorm-sized minifridge or electric teakettle.
Take your time to find the right dining table. Antiques have gone way down in price, you may be able to find a nice one that is going to go with your house and last a long time. My mom had an antique oak table that she bought in the 1970's I think. It could seat 4, or if you pulled the leaves out (an ingenious design where you pulled the table apart and the leaves kinda pop up - very easy) it seats 6. I still have it and it is still our main daily dining table. I do have another dining table in the formal living area - one of those trendy bar-height tables that my ex conned me into trading our old dining table for. Don't buy one. My short mom could never sit comfortably at it. Plus it's crappy cheap veneer. Do the sustainable thing and wait for a nice solid wood table.
Time to wrap up this thread. Nice to go out on a boring note. There's been far far too much - at least in my opinion - drama going on in my life lately. I'm enjoying the relative peace.
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
Doubtful that anything romantic would ever happen. She's in her mid-40s, never married, lives with her parents. I have no clue if she's actually could be interested in a middle-aged chubby white guy who lives in the middle of no-where. She embraces her black island roots, lives a conservative urban life going to church regularly, volunteers for a variety of causes, but also enjoys to travel and a variety of music. She comes off as a "lot" younger than her actual age but then again I'm a horrible judge of women's ages and usually place them a lot younger than they actually are. We've always been friendly even before bomb-day and I recall her getting mad at me post bomb-day and telling me very firmly that she was nowhere near as young as I thought she was. Because we worked together that to me precluded any sort of entanglement but a guy can think "what if" even if he has no intention on following through. She has been and always will be a good friend.