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Just some jottings to clean up later on a rainy day when there is nothing pressing to do on the shop/studio and we are not traveling.
For the last two days of March and the first 24 days of April, Paul worked at the CCRL shutdown in Regina like last year. Juanita worked as a volunteer at the MCC Thrift Mission in Regina.
It is easy to drift from day to day in retirement. Work provides traction. You have to be somewhere eveery morning and somebody has expectations of what you should be doing. Work also supplies much more money than one is used to see coming in. Money that tends to get saved. It is hard to spend much money if working every day.
Eat, work, sleep, repeat. And after that work period of paid work, return to property and work even harder, but only six days a week. I think I need to rethink this "retirement" model. It seems that when I "worked" for a living I got more days off. ;-)
Yesterday (April 27th) I went out to the property and started where I left off last fall. Dragged the ladders out and leaned them against the building. Dragged a scaffold platform out and placed it on a pair of sawhorses and put on the tool belt I had been using on the last work-on-the-building day last fall. First snag. It had all the tools but the belt portion seems to have remarkably shrunk to even shorter than it started last spring. Throughout the summer I had to make it shorter, but the beastly thing has a mind of its own and now had to be extended even more than it started at last year. Throughout the summer as the building progressed it needed shortening to accommodate the thinner me.
Or perhaps the tight tool belt was the result of all that Mexican border food in the Rio Grande Valley last winter and not the belt shrinking at all! That is probably more consistent with most of the pants that fit last fall being too snug and those despicable numbers on the digital scale that I have been trying to ignore.
The structured pace of a union job with regular coffee (and snack) breaks and all the tempting tribute foods brought in by those on sub haven't helped either. I am considerably less bulky than when I retired, but the bulk wants to come back on the minute I let my guard down and eat more than I burn. Time to burn more and eat less. Back up and down that ladder!
Oh well, back to the day's work. After between fifty and a hundred times up and down the ladder the soffit and fascia were complete. I put away the tools and abandoned everything else where it lay and headed into town about half an hour late for supper, bringing those items from the trailer that Juanita had asked for and trying to remember what I meant to bring. Half way back, as my back tightened up, I remembered. After supper I drove back and took the first two Aspirin PM's with two more to follow. Let's see - fifty times at least twelve feet equals 600 plus feet of ladder climbing - more than a sixty story building. Glad I stayed long enough to put on the last couple of pieces of metal. I feel fine today in a stiff sort of way, but glad that not much ladder climbing is involved.
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