January Journal

Frigid January now, and with the indispensable help and mentoring of my brother Jim, he and I are fulfilling a promise I made ages ago that I would remodel the kitchen. We put down thick plywood to reinforce a floor that had developed soft spots; we will retile the floor once we get the new cabinets and counter top in, which is the most arduous, exacting and time-consuming part of the project. My brothers are all handy, while I was the bookworm of the family, a real idiot savant, who inherited my father’s humor and appetite and not much else. My carpentry skills can best be described by two basic rules:
(1) If you give me a big enough hammer, I’ll make it fit…and
(2) If it’s not square, flush, level or plumb, just cock your head a little to one side and it will look fine.

And my work does look fine… in the dark! My wife has taken to naming our rooms after her brother-in-laws. John’s Room is the john; he remodeled our bath. The kitchen will henceforth be the James Room. Joe, we are holding the living room open for you. Just joking, Bro.

“You are just going to sit around with nothing to do and get bored to death,” my wife had predicted when I first retired. (I suspect she had a secret agenda of having me find another job to fill my time.) Truth is even January is fairly busy. I need to begin some form of indoor exercise to work off the weight I gained from the holiday calorie-dense food. Get out the dumbbells and stationary bike. While I’m using the bike, I want to learn by heart the lyrics to songs on the boom-box. I’d like to get good enough to sing at the nursing homes in the not too distant future. With my spouse’s encouragement, I have obliged myself to learn some cooking. I hope to get a small book on frugal living published by the end of the month. (Was that a plug?) I want to get my taxes at least figured roughly and try to find a few more deductions. Government paperwork seems to crawl out of the woodwork. I have to take my time to fill it out to keep the bureaucrats employed. I simply must keep up on my blogging. Enough already…you get the idea that my time is filled even if the water pipes don’t burst.

As the Good Book says (somewhere)… there is a season for everything. I want to enjoy each season in turn. I hope I can find time for reading (so much to learn, so little time), perusing seed catalogs and planning my summer garden. Some days, I get so busy that I miss one of my naps!