Count down to Wrytirement

In five weeks and one day, it will be the last day of November and I will be exiting the workplace - FOREVER!!  At least the place where I work now; I might want to get a part-time job or do some temping after a few months of lounging around with NO SCHEDULE to follow.

It is the busiest time of the year at my current workplace and there is a huge project going on that requires zillions of meetings and communications. I can't wait to escape from the tyranny of so much trivia. It is all I can do to pretend like I care.  

Well, just wanted to check in and see if the old blog is still activated. Soon, I will have the time to write, but will have no subject matter.  

Isn't that just like the life of Wryly?

 

Mad for Plaid

So, it's been a few months since I last provided "content."  

This is what written material is called in my office. We don't write response letters to correspondence or update written information on our website; we provide "content." If it has reached our office, it was probably a buzzword so five years ago such that it's not considered a buzzword any more, if "buzzword" is even relevant. If this bit of content makes any sense.

I previously wrote about how happy I am with our new granite countertops and I'm still not beyond the honeymoon period with our shiny slabs of rock. They inspired me to update the kitchen and breakfast room! After doing some painting and decluttering to prepare for their installation, I found woven black and white buffalo plaid table runners that work great as new valances in the kitchen and breakfast room, and no sewing required. Attached them directly to the existing rods with Velcro adhesive strips to position, then secured them with a worm of craft glue.    

Further, I bought a pair of the matching placemats and made a pillow from them, minor sewing involved. I pinned some fake sunflowers to the pillow and tied their stems with a black and white bandana. Then, I artfully placed the pillow on the seat of a black ladder back chair that I bought at a flea market years ago, and put the chair outside on our tiny, but covered, front porch. A red, black and white bandana tied to one of the top posts with some blossoms and a few other stray blossoms wound around the spindly legs of the chair complete the look.  

It exists as a monument of proof that I want to fit into our neighborhood. Franker and I have a walking route that takes us by the other 104 houses in our subdivision and the vast majority have cute front porch staging and/or attractive plants and flowers for curb appeal. While we do have a few nice small trees and shrubs as part of our landscaping, a flowery wreath on the door has been my only front porch decoration. When a mother bird used it as a nest and I accidentally knocked her eggs to a terrible demise on the concrete floor, I'm still not over the trauma of her flying at my head, then clinging to the nearby gutter to squawk hysterically for several hours.

Anywho, for all of the cozy porch furniture in our subdivision, it is rare to find a neighbor actually hanging out on the porch. What does this say about our culture?  It seems we provide content on our porches, but not ourselves.

The fake sunflowers on the porch begat several fake sunflower arrangements to perk up the kitchen table and window sill. I know that fake flowers are pooh-poohed in the real design world, but I like them and I won't let them get dusty, faded, and inhabited by small spiders.

The biggest difference, though, is no more clutter on the kitchen island. I want to see the irregular rock patterns, not bottles of vitamins and prescriptions. So, I gathered all of Mr. W's meds in a basket and placed it in the nearby pantry. Yes, he grumbled a bit, but he is now trained to take his pills when needed and return the basket to the pantry shelf. When he leaves the opened mail scattered on the island, I scoop it up and put it in his mail holder on the wall of the basement stairwell.  (This has been a 30 year running battle.)  Miscellaneous and various items, such as golf tees, measuring devices, tool attachments, and little scraps of paper, are also gathered up and deposited in his mail holder. 

Mr. W is still working from home. It makes a big difference to me to see mostly-clear countertops when I stagger through the kitchen door after another miserable day of creating content at the office.

We have the usual fauna hanging out in our back yard. A doe waits for me to come through the patio door with treats every evening. I call her "Sweetie-pie" and sometimes her friend "Girlie" is with her. There are others that also visit, including two fawns. Toward the beginning of spring, I asked Mr. W if he would put a bird feeder in the tree closest to our kitchen window. At that time, there were no leaves on the tree and I could clearly see the bird couples that were flying in from Florida to consider our yard for a seasonal home. There were cardinals, woodpeckers, bluebirds, sparrows, and those cute little chippy birds, whatever they are called.  

Mr. W bought a special bird feeder that was supposed to prevent squirrels from raiding it. When birds landed on its "special bar" their featherweight would open a little gate so they would have access to the seed. If a fat squirrel climbed on it, the seed gate would not open. Apparently, the birds could not figure it out, because it did not become a popular eating spot, nor did our tree become a sought-after nesting place. 

Finally, after watching that thing dangle from the tree with no customers most of the spring, I asked Mr. W if he could buy a normal bird feeder, one that does not take a bird with a mechanical engineering degree to operate it. With the new one, I am seeing a lot more birds and no squirrels sitting on it yet. 

One might say it is a feeder with desirable content. 

Whoops, I did it again...

 Another chunk of months has gone by with no posting. Too busy to write? The pile of puzzles that I broke apart and reboxed last week tells me "no." 

I took last week off from the office because I have vacation days that must be used by the end of June. We had granite countertops installed in our kitchen on Tuesday, and I spent the rest of the week admiring them. It was a process that started about two months ago on the coldest Saturday of the winter when we went schlepping through a huge, freezing warehouse looking at slabs of stone-cold stone. 

Two bone-chilling selection appointments to finally tag a slab and its fraternal twin with our last name. Then, a technician came to our house and used a laser to measure every applicable point on the surfaces in our kitchen so the countertops would be cut to fit perfectly, even if there were lines that weren't straight. Now, that is useful technology!  

On Monday, a contractor came to remove the previous tops and add some reinforcement height to the bank of cabinets that are adjacent to the tile backsplash to avoid a gap in that area. On Tuesday, the weighty granite tops were delivered and installed in the morning, then a plumber installed a new sink, faucet, and soap dispenser in the afternoon. Everything and everybody functioned as scheduled, and the countertops look amazing! 

To prepare for all of this, I repainted some walls in the kitchen and mudroom. Climbing up and down a stepladder, pushing a paint roller, and waving a brush are pain-inducing activities at my age. Also, the top layer of drawers in the cabinets had to be removed and the next layer had to be covered for protection from sawdust, so I did all of that, along with cleaning out all of the stuff from under the sink.  

I took this opportunity to identify kitchen accessories that were unneeded, including many of the utensils in a tangle in that drawer. There were also bowls, baskets, and Tupperwear, oh my! 

These dispensable items, the reboxed puzzles, and an accumulating pile of miscellaneous stuff in Dan's former bedroom pointed to one thing: Subdivision Spring Garage Sale on Saturday.

That's the whoops I did again, although it was fine. No significant financial gain, just the joy of experiencing people paying me to carry away my junk. Oddly enough, my first sale was a set of retro Tupperwear bowls that I gave to my dear grandmother over 35 years ago and received back when she passed. The woman who was thrilled to find them was about my age (nearly ancient) so maybe they brought back fond memories for her. Or perhaps there is an underground market for retro Tupperwear of which I am unaware.

I closed the garage door mid-morning when I ran out of energy for retail sales. I boxed up the rest and Mr. W. took it directly to our favorite charity thrift shop.  All in all, we got rid of quite a bit of stuff and that is a good feeling.

What is not a good feeling is going back to the office tomorrow! I woke up this morning with "what am I going to wear to the office" anxiety. I have adapted well to my four-day workweek, except it is actually five days worth of work that I have to complete in four days, instead of an adjustment on the volume of work that I expected. I'm doing the best I can to keep up; overworking me will only send me out the door to full retirement faster. 

Wryly in Wrytirement by the next post? Who knows? 

My Strange Addiction

I had to sign in just to prove to myself that I still could. Can't really explain why I haven't posted in months. Just didn't feel like writing. So much time at home, no desire to write. I am messed up, for sure.  

 

Let's see....in these past four months: my father-in-law died from Covid; my mother-in-law was hospitalized with Covid then moved right into an assisted living facility; and my mom had Covid and came within a hair of being hospitalized for it. She dodged that, but recently took a round-trip ambulance ride to the ER because, as it turned out, she had a touch of pneumonia. Both my mom and mother-in-law have received their first dose of the vaccine. 

 

So far, Mr. W and I have evaded the virus. He qualifies for the vaccine, but has not been able to schedule an appointment. I don't qualify until the last tier, which is "all other residents of the state," so I know it's going to be quite a while before I can stick out my arm for the shots. Mr. W is still working at home and that is for an indefinite amount of time. I go to the office every weekday, except today I am off due to Presidents' Day. We are predicted to get eight inches of snow by tonight, so that's what I'll be fighting to get to the office tomorrow. 

Since their dads's death, Mr. W and his brother have been working through their parents' finances. Although FIL and MIL seemed to be doing fine in the later years, for the first ten years or so of our marriage, we were reminded/threatened numerous times by MIL that they were struggling. We really didn't know what their status was and it was an excellent surprise to find out that they are well-funded, beyond what MIL will ever need in her final years. Both our family and his brother's family will benefit from this. 

It was already on the table for me to retire this year and now it more than doable, but as much as I despise the office, it makes no sense to retire to sit and do nothing but wait for my shots. Thus, I have negotiated a four-day work week schedule that will start next month. I will not work on Fridays, or at least that is the deal. At this point, the office needs me more than I need it. It would be a big boatload of no fun for my boss to start from scratch with someone new. (When it came open six years ago, my position had no internal applicants, as it was well-known how difficult she is to work for.) 

So, in a nutshell, that's all that's new. Although they are bored with limited activities, Dan and Carlene are well. They have received both doses of the vaccine. Dan has to work tonight at 7:00 p.m. and I'm worried about his commute in this dreadful weather. As their house does not have a garage, he will have to start by removing six inches of snow from his car in the below-zero wind chill. There is no end to the worrying parent syndrome. 

Franker is doing fine. It has been too cold for the last couple of weeks to walk him, so he was treated to a M-W-F schedule of doggie daycare instead of T-Th. I would have liked to have taken him today--and he would have been overjoyed to go--but picking him up in this blasted snowstorm would have been dangerous. He is snoozing on his couch, the only one he is allowed to occupy, in the lower level family room.

I am occupying my lower-level home "office," which consists of my old computer perched on our former kitchen table which also functions as a staging area for my deer-feeding habit. The herd walked through our common ground about an hour ago, and although I suited and booted up to slug out there with some calories, they had already moved on. They will return later; they are accustomed to feeding time being around 6:00 p.m., when I get home from the office. 

Feeding the deer could be my strange addiction, but I don't perceive it to be as strange as my real one: jigsaw puzzles! There, it is out there, I wile away indoor hours working on puzzles. UHG. Since the first one I put together nearly a year ago, in the midst of the lockdown, I have become hopelessly hooked. It is so crazy and non-productive. I could be cleaning out closets or painting trim, but I sit scrutinizing an assortment of puzzle pieces, looking for the one with the dog's collar on it. What a geek. No wonder I don't write anymore.