Wryly Wreally Wrytired

So here I am--it is me--really retired. I just permanently linked out of linked in. Good-bye cruel working world!!

Fortunately, I remembered the password to my account or I might have lived into perpetuity on that site. Once the novelty of it wore off back in '09, I maintained it only through alerts to my personal email account. 

Will it send an alert to my contacts that I have checked out? Unsure of that, however, totally sure that no one will miss me. 

I will admit to having a hard time letting go of the office or, more accurately, letting go of the perceived need of the office for me. With my last official day being identified as December 23rd, I went into a frenzy around December 10th, clearing my office for my wryplacement and updating a binder of information about the job. There were several 4:00 a.m. mornings when I sat at this very keyboard and compulsively typed out instructions for how to do this, that, and many other things. What a geek.

My wryplacement started on December 16th and I trained half-days with her until December 22nd. On December 23rd, I was prepared to wrap it up, but there was a power outage that forced closure of the building and the 23rd was tacked on to the Christmas vacation that was to start on the 24th and end on January 4th. This twist turned out to be very good for me as my emotions were wound a bit tight regarding my "last day," with which I had a joy/dread relationship. 

I coolly returned on Friday, January 7th to finish up a few items with my wryplacement and to turn in my prison pass and purchase card, which was more of a symbolic gesture considering my access to the building and to company credit card purchases could have been cut off without relinquishing plastic cards.  

It is odd to think that my office email account is directing senders to a new person. I received and sent so many email messages, it was like a living organism that challenged and reflected my knowledge and personality. (No, I have not been drinking.) Isn't that deep?

Now what?

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.

So Pedestrian

While I was walking Frankie this morning, I told myself I would write something in my blog today. So, now that I've met that minimum requirement, the rest of this is just fluff. 

It has been a nice couple of weeks to be a pedestrian with the cooler fall temperatures. The nemesis at this time of the year is the shortening supply of daylight. I walk Franker every morning and three or four evenings a week. I barely get home by six o'clock and now I practically have to be on the pavement by then to be back home by dark. Frank has a light on his collar that I switch on for the last block. In another week or so, it will be the last two or three blocks, then it will be daylight savings time and it will be pitch black by 5:30 p.m. with no walk. As if I don't already feel like I spend most of my time getting ready to go to the office, driving to the office, being in the office, and driving home. The lack of daylight for the brief waking hours that I'm at home will make it seem as it that schedule is more brutal. 

We are still in mayhem overdrive with the new boss, especially when a big issue came up that was totally mishandled and caused a lot of trouble. It was not his fault; he took bad advice from some of our other leadership. So, who mops up after a fiasco other than the little people who had nothing to do with the bad decisions. Just one more reason that offices suck. 

A couple of weeks ago, I had a garage sale. I was thinking of doing one this fall anyway, then a real estate agent in our subdivision organized one such that about 15% of the homeowners participated, which was a big traffic draw. I had so much stuff, mostly odds and ends of home decor, leftover wedding decor, and small pieces of furniture that I upcycled. (Some might say "ruined.") My boss knows that I collect (some may say "hoard") the large brown bags with handles that often contain her lunch when it is delivered. She was handing me one such bag when I commented, "these will really be perfect for my garage sale." Within 30 seconds, she was on-board with the garage sale and was all excited about her stuff that I would sell after she brought it to me. There was a witness to how I never asked her to participate, donate, attend, or play any part in it. The witness agreed that I had not invited, suggested, offered, or played any part in her assumptive clump-on to my garage sale. So, there I was, the nice, head-scratching schmuck, ferrying shipments of her crap to my house to price and display with my own. What is wrong with my life? 

Because it was a mostly outdoor, open-air setting and I wore a mask as did nearly every customer, I was not worried about Covid-19 exposure. The weather was cool and mostly cloudy. We had a lot of traffic and did just over $500 in sales, which was pretty good considering that we didn't have large items to sell. If it wouldn't have started raining at about 11:30 a.m., we would have done at least another $100. All of the remaining items (let's just say it was a trailer load) were immediately taken to a charity thrift shop. About half of what was left was mine and the rest was my boss's. After Mr. Wryly's cut (although I made the big sale of his items), I split the proceeds with Boss. I tried to keep track of what was being sold, but there were times that it was just too busy. 

That evening, when I was good and wiped out from getting up at 5:00 a.m. and standing on cold concrete for six hours earlier that day, we had dinner with Dan, Carlene, her parents, and her aunt in an actual restaurant. It was only the second time I've been in a restaurant since February. It was good; the tables were more than socially distanced and we were in a nook of the room that seemed private. We celebrated Dan's birthday. Hard to believe I have a 27-year-old son who has been married for over a year. 

So, anyway, back to my pedestrian lifestyle. Not only has the fall season brought the cooler temperatures and beautiful leaf colors, it has brought out the Halloween and fall harvest decorating. We have some amazing displays in our subdivision. My favorite non-lit display includes a skeleton scarecrow playing a banjo for a group of ghosts gathered around skeleton flamingos. If you look closely enough, you can also see skeletons sitting in chairs inside the windows of the house. My favorite lit display includes giant spiders crawling on the outside walls of a white two-story, one side lit in purple and the front of the house in eerie green. Soon, the lit display will be all that I will see, driving to the office in the morning and driving home. Boo! Hoo! Hoo!

What are my thoughts?

That is the pc phrase used in the office so that someone can impose their "thoughts" on you and pretend that they want to hear yours.

Believe me, when it comes to responding to that question at the office, you wouldn't want to hear my real thoughts.

So, I haven't posted in a while and blogger is all different. My thoughts about that? You don't want to know that either. Just a note to say that Franker is a new dog. He didn't have any bad behaviors that a little electro-shock therapy and a dog trainer couldn't fix. He is earning his keep as a beloved pal and pet. Most surprising is that Mr. W. really likes him, too. I was not prepared for that, but it does make the home life a lot less stressful. I think they have bonded over being together all day during the week, except for the five hours on Tuesday and Thursday that Franker goes to doggie day care. Mr. W. does drop-off and pick-up. He says he likes getting out of the house for any reason. He is likely to be working at home at least through the end of the year and probably longer. He is so lucky!!

I have to drag myself to the office every day. Because of Covid, we have to enter through a particular door that is located under a covered walkway in a courtyard. It is totally like the entry to a prison. There is a check-in desk where we have to submit a form to document that we are not experiencing symptoms that day and to write down our temperature. The guard at the desk will take your temperature, but I take mine at home. If my temperature is high, then I'm not making the effort to go to the office to be sent home. Stupid!

Soon, it will be dark in the morning and dark at night when I drive there and back. Like having no life at all during the week. Oh woe is me.

My office is a zoo because we have a new ultimate boss to whom my boss reports. We had a big event to welcome him last week and it was so much work to put that together. Now we have to figure out how he wants the office to run; his new fiefdom is like three or four times the size of his last one. We are going to have to provide him a lot more details about appointments and meetings to help him learn the players and the issues. It is going to make everything a lot more complicated.

Anyway, those are my thoughts for now. I hope I can sleep tonight but I usually can't on Sunday nights. And I think that really sucks.