hrj

Ticked off two more things on the retirement checklist this morning: getting copies of the two paystubs that I was still missing, and getting my official "retirement gift" from the attaboy catalog. As usual, the catalog offerings were mostly either "already have one" or "no use for this" but in the end I settled on a wet/dry shop vac. You know, in the event that I ever get back to doing carpentry projects or whatnot. After you pick your primary gift, they roll you over into the gift card section, where you pick gift cards until you run out of remaining balance. So I currently have $250 worth of gift cards for Black Angus Steakhouse that I will be looking for a special occasion to use.

Most of the IRA activity is complete -- I have confirmation and documents for one of the annuities and for the managed fund (the "pretend this doesn't exist for now" fund). I should get the confirmation and paperwork for the other annuity shortly. I've updated my budget projections spreadsheet and concluded that the annuities are probably over-deducting for taxes, but I think I'll let it ride for now. This year is going to be completely weird for income taxes and I'd rather get a refund than have to pay. Next year I can fine tune things, and the year after that I should be able to predict fairly precisely.

Oh, and still waiting on Social Security to come through. I think on Friday I'll do another round of sitting on the phone to check in. (I check the website almost every day, on the chance that an approval will show up there before I get it in the mail.)

In the mean time, I'm continuing with an overstuffed calendar. Mon/Tues in Stockton to run medical errands for my dad. This morning recording an interview for the podcast, then working with the electrician who will be re-doing my electrical panel. In a couple hours I'll do a guest appearance by zoom for a college class that read one of my books. Tomorrow the electrician starts and completes the panel work, mostly while I'm out of the house for a combined bike ride and routine medical check-up. (I figure since they sent me a pre-work questionnaire about my exercise, I'll properly impress them if I show up in my bike togs all sweaty.) Online Wiscon is this weekend, then Monday the HVAC folks come to do my annual maintenance. And then I have nothing extra scheduled for a week and a half before the Nebula conference (which I'm attending virtually). June is pretty empty at this point, but the way things have been going, who knows?

I had a long list of things on the to-do list for this weekend. And I did accomplish a trip to Regan Nursery where I bought a yellow tree-rose (carefully situated to continue the symmetry of the existing three) and a White Pearmain apple tree (which will live in a pot until I decide where it goes). But a vast amount of today's planned activities got tossed out in favor of making a push to complete the revisions and fill-ins for Daughter of Mystery I now have an actual, complete, realio-trulio, readable draft to send off to my beta-readers. All names and vocabulary are in place. All literary quotations and ritual texts have been composed. All time-line rearrangements have been smoothed out and continuity-checked. I've even made sure to plant a few more items that tie in to Book 2.

Current word-count is 132K which is up 5K from the raw first draft -- most of which is accounted for by completing the "promissory" items. It undoubtedly needs some trimming, but I'll leave that for the next round. Wow. I started working on this story in November 2007. I don't intend for Book 2 to take that much time ... but then, I'm using the same setting, many of the same characters, and already have a fairly rich layering of plots and sub-plots going on. (And having already started on Book 2 gives me something to occupy myself while waiting for the next steps for Book 1.) I kind of feel like a real live author at the moment.

And, hey, there's still time to get the curtains sewn.

So let's see what I've accomplished this weekend:

* Mowed the lawn (I seem to be able to get by with about once a month. I feel a bit weird mowing and edging the parking strip, which is nothing but weeds, but it's sort of on the "broken window" principle. I.e., keep it the nicest looking weeds I can, for now, and people will at least know I care about appearances.) Also finished mapping the current contents of the front yard. (The back yard will only take one more session, since there aren't that many plants there, even though the spaces is larger.)

* Organized the housecleaning supplies and installed a rack for the brooms and mops and whatnot. (Originally I had visions of an actual broom closet somewhere, somehow, but at the moment I'm settling for a rack attached to the end of the stash shelves, which is right next to the door to the garage, plus a cheap plastic bin for the supplies.)

* Installed a bolt-style lock on the garage door. (This is a sort of belt-and-suspenders thing for some peace of mind. Mostly for when I go away for the weekend.)

* Picked up supplies for the class I'm teaching next weekend for Erinwood A&S. (I'm play-testing a "heat management for open fire cooking" class for people who are interested in participating in "cooks play-dates" but are hesitant about their fire management skills.)

* Re-organized the book boxes in the garage. There were about four purposes here. 1) Pull out the boxes with music books and cookbooks and shelve them. 2) Pull out the boxes with the women's history/gender studies books to start tracking down images for my collegium class. 3) Re-organize the non-book boxes (old paperwork, journal offprints, in-process research, etc.) to make it easier to get at thing's I'm likely to need (like teaching supplies). 4) Map out the location of all the boxes so that it will be less work if I need to pull something to get a particular book or set of books out before the library gets set up. The other incidental benefit of this project is that I removed enough boxes to give me one box-width more of free space in the garage.

* Put away the box of misc. art supplies and the office supplies that live in the secretary desk.

* Did the preliminary sort through the 2 boxes of cassette tapes. Since I don't directly list to cassettes any more, my rule of thumb is that I'm only going to keep things that either have archival value (e.g., tapes that have me or my material on them) or ones that I'd be willing to go to the trouble of ripping if I can't find the album on CD. Since most of my folk music on cassette was originally dumped from CDs, the vast majority of what I may be getting rid of is filk and filk-oid music. I promised cryptocosm he gets first dibs on anything I'm discarding, after which I'll pursue other options.

* Very minor accomplishments: did laundry, cleared off stuff accumulated on dining room table (which I really really intend not to be a dumping ground), got more or less caught up on sleep. Still to do: data entry for various of the above (yard map, book box map, recent purchases to catalog), catch up on electronic correspondence.

Once again, I used the presence of installing the bathroom cabinet on the to-do list as a wedge to get a lot of other stuff done. (At least, that's how I justify it to myself.)

Bike tire is patched -- I bribed myself by picking up a bike repair stand (the kind that holds your bike up in midair) which makes the whole process much simpler. With luck, it will mean I'm less likely to consider a flat to be a "wait till the weekend" project in the future. Because for some reason, flats seem more likely to happen at the beginning of the week than the end. Curiously enough, of the two sharp objects I found embedded in the tire, it was the plant thorn that lined up with the leak rather than the metal wire. Memo to self: must go online and order a couple spare tubes in the peculiar size that the Brompton takes. Also, more thorn-proof tires.

Garage shelves are earthquake-braced -- This project was made logistically more interesting by the fact that the concrete sill for the outer garage wall means the shelving is not flush against the wall. On the other hand, since the wallboard in the garage has only been painted, and not texturized, it's a lot easier to find the underlying studs. (Where was it that I recently saw a comment that stud-finders universally indicate that the interior structure of walls is constantly and randomly shifting?)

About half the front yard flower beds are detail-mapped and cataloged -- This is for a definition of "cataloged" that includes entries of "shrub -- species?????" Because the front property line (along the street) and the righthand property line (facing from the street) form something quite reasonably close to a right angle, with the house walls functionally parallel to those lines, I've decided to keep track of my mapping with an x,y coordinate system starting from the front right corner (but with positive x-coordinates rather than the negative ones that a truly fanatic and ocd mathematician would require). Cumulative error and the catenary drape of the 24-foot tape measure ensure that the coordinates will not be entirely correct, but it should be close enough for tracking and planning purposes. The map would be more elegant if I were doing it in metric rather than inches, but you work with the tape measure you have.

Gym bag has been modified for easier biking -- Proving that the best way to achieve a target is not to announce it in advance, for the first time since moving into the new house, I made it to the gym 5 out of 5 days last week and did a full elliptical routine every day, not just the shorter weights routine. I cobbled some clips and rings together from assorted hardware in order to be able to attach my gym bag to the outside of the Brompton front bike bag (so that I can also carry a lunchbag and maybe some grocery shopping at the same time). I'm also seriously considering trying a lunchtime workout rather than before or after work (except for Tuesdays, which are reserved for lunch with thread_walker).

I'm starting to seriously reconsider my plans to locate my home computer center in the closet of the library room. I have yet to actually use the computer in that location -- even to the point of bringing the sheet-scanner out into the living room for processing receipts and bills. It still makes sense to use that location for office supplies storage (filing cabinets, paper supplies, software binders and manuals, rarely-used peripherals) and for the location of the wireless router/backup drive. But I'm starting to think that the "great room" is a better place for the immediate user interface (external monitor, printer/scanners). This shall require more experimentation.

Last week I thought that we'd seen the end of summer, especially Thursday evening when it was both cold and windy. But then the weekend was back to hot (just in time for all those work projects) -- hot enough that the Saturday evening concert in the park was balmy enough to enjoy without a jacket. I'm still enjoying the novelty of living in a place where 10 minutes biking gets me to the city center for cultural events ... and I feel perfectly comfortable biking home afterward fairly late at night.

I've successfully created a new desk environment for computing: nice large external monitor; new, smaller desk with better ergonomics and lots of organizational space for peripherals and accessories; usual sifting and discarding of obsolete software packages, documentation, etc. It is not yet the Platonic Ideal of a computing environment, but since I don't quite know what that would look like (and would probably have to build it from scratch) this is only to be expected. Went ahead and upgraded to Snow Leopard while I was at it (largely to take advantage of a multi-touch mouse I fell in love with while at the Apple store to pick up a second video adapter).

Next up is to install the secretary desk into its home location (still under negotiation) and reorganize the art supplies with respect to it. At the end of this process, I'll have two pieces of furniture to get rid of: the old (big, clunky, non-ergo) computer desk and this odd cabinet I've been using for art supplies (3 drawers and a glass-fronted shelving area). I'll probably list them on Freecycle right before next weekend so others are welcome to post inquiries prior to that. I'll also be listing various pieces of archaic hardware that nobody's yet shown interest in (external CD-burner, external "Super disk" drive)

Accomplished this weekend:

* car got serviced
* bike got dropped off for tune-up
* taxes got done and e-filed
* first half of minor tent repairs accomplished
* processed veggie box into: 2 servings asparagus & green garlic soup, 2 servings broccoli soup, 2 servings mashed carrots, 4 servings carrot & fennel slaw (caught up except for a butternut squash and a bag of potatoes)
* one green-can full of the annual Major Weeding (many cans to go)

I'm not feeling entirely ready for a camping event next weekend, but I guess that's the point of having the gear permanently organized. I don't actually have to be ready, I just need to follow the packing list.

I have the best friends in the whole world. Just saying. They've helped me assemble a great refreshments spread for the memorial tomorrow. I have the photo-collage prepared. I have the music set up on my iPhone (and have acquired mini speakers to use with it that have quite adequate sound). I've delivered the text for the "memorial minute". The service runs itself, for all practical purposes. I still have no idea how many people are going to show up, but that was never in my control. All I have to do tomorrow is is an airport pick-up in the morning, pack the food and other paraphernalia (including passengers), get to the site in time to get the food organized before the service, figure out when the most appropriate time for the music is (I was originally thinking as people arrived, but now I'm thinking as background during the socializing afterwards). Pack up and deal with any leftovers. Deliver people back to my place. Do an airport drop-off Sunday morning. Then pack for Maine. At some point after that I may think about Christmas shopping. Or not. We'll see.

And that tickle in my throat better be the after-effects of presenting a training lecture this afternoon. Or else.

The nice thing about personal to-do lists is that one is not in the least obligated to accomplish them. I slept in to the decadent hour of 8am then went off for an extended semi-recreational shopping trip. Picked up some new DVDs, some shoes of the same style that I've previous bought about 6 pair (I have a solidly "guy" attitude towards shoes -- when you find something that works, keep buying it until they stop making it, then grumble a lot), a new teacup in my china pattern, thread and buttons for the fix-it work on the 1910s outfit, more than I intended in the way of organizational gadgets at The Container Store (that place is dangerous!), and some assorted mini-gourmet food items at Cost Plus to restock the car-camping-kitchen. Enjoyed a leisurely dinner of lamb rib-roast with sauted onions, mushrooms, and artichoke hearts, with mini cheesy biscuits on the side. Then did all the machine sewing for the fix-it items (tucks on the skirt, new tucked placket for the blouse front) and carefully removed the clamp-on snaps that I'd put on as a quick-and-dirty substitute for making button holes. Fortunately, the little prongs that fasten the halves of the snaps together had only pushed the threads aside and after being removed you couldn't even tell they'd been there. It was a vast waste of the snaps (which can't be re-attached to something else once the prongs have been bent) but they were way too heavy for the batiste, and besides which I'd put them wrong way round on the cuffs. So now I'll actually make buttonholes and add buttons, as well as adding hooks-and-eyes on the skirt waistband (rather than depending on safety pins). There: now you know all my dirty secrets about my one-night sewing project.

The only remaining must-do is my writing for the night, and so to bed.

Having predicted that I'd get distracted from my productive goals, I succeeded in faking myself out and accomplished much. Let's see: I did excavate the dining room table (including doing the monthly accounts and filing). I did take four boxes of books to Moe's for trade-in (this is the picked-over remnants of my massive book purge of a couple years ago). Of which they were interested in one box. So the remainder I have gritted my teeth and tossed in recycling. (Mostly very old paperbacks of questionable physical integrity. But still ... they're books!) Having also taken a few accumulated items to the thrift store, my stair landing is now completely clear. (Which was a pre-requisite for being able to move the computer desk upstairs.) I've made a large batch of pea soup and another of cauliflower soup, which has fortified me for the gloriously gray autumn day. And now I'm going to be a Good Girl and spend the remainder of the evening doing housecleaning (rather than getting started on the desk move, which had no hope of being finished today).

The next target for "items identified for removal that have been sitting in a box too long" is the result of purging my kitchen equipment of stuff I never use. I keep meaning to have some sort of cooking party to entice people over to pick things over, but have no idea where I could fit it in to the calendar. Another target is removing the two remaining obsoleted bookcases, one of which is promised to the youngest brother (to match the other three he already took). The remaining one is available: 2 ft wide, 6 ft tall, particleboard painted pale seafoam green.