Category Archives: daily life
Wednesday: My Tuesday
I’ll be so glad when I’m finished with physical therapy. I mean, the therapists there are great — really enthusiastic and nice — but keeping track of the appointments and working them around work has been a hassle. One day, I have a 9:45 appointment, the next day, it’s at 8:30. Occasionally I have a lunchtime appointment, or one at 11:30. It’s not as bad during the weeks when I work “normal” hours, but it makes for a really long day when I have to work until 7 or 8 in the evening.
Yesterday was especially long, as I had physical therapy in the morning. Though I was scheduled to work later, I went in to work around 10:30 — immediately following my appointment — so I was able to leave around 6:30. After going home to have a quick dinner, Mom and I drove out to the BFEC for an “Owls of Ohio” program. Following a brief lecture, most of the attendees set out for a night hike around the BFEC grounds and on the Kokosing Gap Trail. The lecturer played recordings of owl calls in the hopes of attracting real owls, and, indeed, we did finally manage to lure in a barred owl just at the end of our hike. It flew directly over our heads and hovered in the vicinity for maybe five minutes, echoing the recording with its own calls. We made it back to the car around 9:45, so, yes, it was a long day, but at least it ended on a fun note.
And now it’s Thursday: my Wednesday.
Starting Things
I am SO bad at starting projects. In college, it wasn’t unusual for me to arrive at class in the morning having just pulled an all-nighter in order to finish a paper just by the skin of my teeth. Amazingly, I usually received high marks on those papers, which really only served to reward a bad habit. I must have been doing something right, right? (How did I ever stay up so late? I can barely manage 11pm these days.)
Today, I know better; I realize that procrastination only serves to create a frazzled me and that, no matter how well-written my college writings might have been, they probably would have been better had I chosen not to cram their composition into the few hours before they were due. Yet, still, I procrastinate.
Maybe it’s that I just don’t know where to start. I was not quite five years old the last time I made a significant move (i.e., the entire household had to be moved), so, needless to say, my involvement in the process was negligible, and now I find myself at a loss as to where to begin packing. The fact of the matter is that an awful lot of what needs to be moved — books, recordings, kitchen things — are going to be in use until shortly before moving day. Well, I suppose the books (and there are a LOT of them) could be packed now, but I see little point in tripping over boxes of books for the next two months. Kitchen things will obviously be in use until we move, and naturally we need our furniture and clothes.
So I guess I’ll put off doing any serious packing for a few weeks. Procrastination might just serve me well, this time.
Being Frugal
Living where we’ve lived for the last few years has been a lesson in making the best of a not-entirely-ideal situation. The neighborhood leaves a great deal to be desired, and I’ve never felt entirely at home here. On the other hand, we’ve lived here relatively cheaply, which has given us a degree of financial freedom to do, by and large and within reason, what we like. We’ve taken a few nice vacations. We eat out when we want. We’ve kept ourselves technologically current.
In spite of this, I don’t really view myself as a materialistic person. I hate shopping for clothes and rarely do it; I wear my clothes until they start falling apart. My car is nine years old and I plan to drive it until it dies. I rarely feel that I need the latest thing — electronic gadgets being the occasional exception. In fact, when it comes to shopping, my only real vice over the years has been my obsession with hording books and music.
I have dozens and dozens of unread books sitting on my shelves: all books that I want and intend to read; I never buy something in which I’m not really interested. I own hundreds of recordings: mostly classical music, but some other genres, too. I have a growing stack of unopened New Yorkers sitting on the bottom shelf of my night stand. I intend to read all of these books, and to listen to all of these recordings, and I suppose buying this new house is the perfect opportunity. We’ll be pinching pennies for a few months (years?), but I have an enormous personal library at my fingertips, and I finally have the perfect opportunity to take advantage of it. No more new purchases for a while.
Although I have pre-ordered season 4 of Mad Men…
We usually leave town at least once every week — usually on the weekend — because, sometimes, I just need a change of scenery. I suppose staying in on weekends — at least a couple of times a month — would also be a good idea; it might even be enjoyable now that we’ll be living in an enjoyable home. There are several hiking trails just a few miles from us, so we can always take advantage of those when the weather is good. On a walk at the BFEC on Sunday, we saw quite a few branches still down after all the snow and ice storms we’ve had. The process of clearing the downed trees has only just begun.
Spring Forward
After a really beautiful, sunny, almost warm Saturday, Sunday has dawned grey and cold; winter still has some life left in it, but the forecast for the coming week does show improvement. I’ve never thought of myself as someone affected by SAD, but February and March haven’t been particularly kind to my mood. As winter drags on, it drags me down.
I’m still fretting about the new house. It’s too late to turn back now, but I’m still worried that we’ve overextended ourselves, that we’ll end up in the poorhouse over this deal. I’d feel much better about the whole thing if we could put more money down on the house — or at least as much as we had originally planned to put down — but the increased fees associated with making the purchase did away with that dream. I’m still holding out some hope that we’ll be able to scrape together a little more by the time we go to closing, but I’m not overly optimistic on that front. (Maybe I’ll feel less doom-ridden once the weather warms up and it stops raining every other day.) I’ll worry considerably less if our current home sells within a reasonable amount of time — although I haven’t quite decided what constitutes “reasonable.” We haven’t put it on the market yet, largely due to logistical concerns, and we know we’ll have to pay two mortgages for a few months, anyway.
I don’t have many plans for the day: some laundry, maybe, and perhaps I’ll find a little ambition and start organizing/cleaning out a closet or something. Just the abstract thought of packing is exhausting, daunting.
Don’t forget to set your clocks forward an hour!
Whirlwind
Life has been a real whirlwind since I turned 30. First I break my arm and end up with an unexpected month off from work, and, the next thing I know, we’re buying a house. We placed an offer less than a week after first seeing the house, and, today, we went to the bank to set up the particulars of the mortgage. The fees associated with making the purchase ran a little higher than I expected, and I went white as a sheet on seeing the figure that we would be expected to bring to closing.
We will probably put less down on the purchase than we had originally intended due to the increased fees (the loan officer said it was something about changes to Freddie Mac, which I didn’t quite grasp), which means our monthly payments will be a bit larger than I would have liked. We will also be carrying the mortgage on this house until it sells, so the situation isn’t entirely ideal. I would have prefered to have saved a bit longer before making a purchase, but the house seemed too good to pass up. I just need to let go and trust that it will all work out in the end. I’m a born worrier, though, so…. easier said than done. (Scientific tests have proven that I spend 86.8% of my day worrying.)
I really want new furniture for the living room, but that may have to wait a few months. We’ll have a housewarming party only after I have my new furniture. And that’s my final answer.
February Thunder
Back to work tomorrow. I’d thought that I would have returned to work after my appointment last Tuesday, but the doctor suggested waiting out the remainder of the last week. It was just as well, I guess, as the extra time allowed me to try to get some things in order. Some of my insurance statements are coming back with not-altogether encouraging results, so I guess I’m going to have to make a few calls this week. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I don’t get bad news, as the surgery was expensive – more than I would have thought.
We’re getting torrential rain with embedded thunderstorms tonight. At 11:30pm, it’s 50 degrees outside. Spring is on its way.
Getting back to normal
I caught myself holding the toothbrush with my left hand this morning; I even tried to start brushing left-handed, but things got a little too uncomfortable to continue with that. Even so, it’s a sign, I suppose, that my arm is healing and that life is slowly returning to normal. I haven’t driven a car since January 30, and I haven’t cooked anything (with the exception of cups of tea and coffee) since the 31st. I’m going to try cooking at least part of tonight’s dinner, though I will still need help with lifting heavy pots and pans as I can barely pick up a full glass of water with my left hand.
My follow-up appointment with the orthopedic surgeon is tomorrow (after a night of snow and ice — ugh), and I may be back to work on the 23rd. February has been a strange month; it has passed quickly, yet time also seems simultaneously to have stood still.
Georgie Winthrop
Indulging my taste for mid-century fiction, I recently purchased a copy of Sloan Wilson’s 1963 novel, Georgie Winthrop. Like his (probably better-known) contemporary John Cheever, Wilson was at his best chronicling the trials and tribulations of a certain class of post-war suburbanite. Most widely known today as the author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which could be viewed as a 1950s precursor to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Wilson also penned A Summer Place, which was turned into a film under the same title in 1959, as well as a number of other novels and one work of autobiographical non-fiction. Sloan Wilson has been a particular favorite of mine since I first read The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit several years ago, and I’m slowly working my way through all of his novels — one every couple of years. Georgie Winthrop was his first book since 1960′s A Sense of Values, and I’m looking forward to reading it.
I always enjoy finding artifacts of the previous owner(s) of used books that I purchase, and I found a cute bookplate in this copy of Georgie Winthrop. As far as I can tell, Betty and Edmund Shimberg are both still alive and well, still married, and both are psychologists practicing together in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. If you ever stumble on this post: Hi!
On Borders: Digging a Tunnel With A Teaspoon
I’m more than a little saddened by the news of Borders’ bankruptcy, and it’s not just because I’ve probably spent more money there in the past 15 years or so (I wasn’t able, single-handedly, to keep them afloat?) than I have in any other retail establishment with the probable exception of Giant Eagle. Oh, I know that Borders is really just another big box retailer, but I have some fond memories of the place.
Back in the mid ’90s, when a Borders opened in Christiana, Delaware (about an hour from where I lived at the time), we stopped in, frequently, once a week while on our way to or from northeastern New Jersey, or on our way home from my harpsichord teacher’s house just north of Wilmington. I could — and did — spend hours pouring over books (mostly historical tomes and biographies, though I did buy the occasional novel) and recordings (mostly classical, sometimes early jazz) for, in those days, Borders stocked even hard-to-find titles: a great convenience as far as I was concerned, as I rarely bought anything that would have been of interest to the average person. Even better, many of the staff people — especially those assigned to the music department — were actually very knowledgeable and seemed to care about the material they maintained. One got to know some of the staff people, and, once in a while, one of them might even point out a new arrival that would be of particular interest.
In 1998, while attending a week-long harpsichord masterclass led by Edward Parmentier at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I had the opportunity to spend some time in the original Borders store, which, though much larger than the Christiana store, still felt almost like an off-beat college-town bookstore, and, of course, this was how Borders got its start. It was heaven; you could, almost literally, find anything there, and we drove back to Maryland financially poorer but culturally richer for having made the trip.
I didn’t shop at Borders quite as much during my own college years, but rediscovered the store after I moved to central Ohio in 2005; Columbus, after all, has two! By this point, Borders had begun issuing email coupons and Borders Bucks and personal shopping days, and my good friend in North Carolina and I had many long-distance telephone conversations comparing our Borders purchases and bemoaning our lack of sales resistance. It was, and remains, one of the peculiar bonds of our friendship.
I hope that Borders will be able to reorganize and pull itself out of the hole that it’s in, but I know it won’t be easy — not in this economy, not with the growing threat of easily downloadable e-books. And if they do manage to emerge from Chapter 11, what comes next? E-books don’t require physical space in a store and fewer and fewer people are buying hard-copies of films and music. How does a bookstore reorganize and work around these facts, and, if they do reorganize, will Borders even be a bookstore as now we know it?
(For what it’s worth, I’ve only downloaded one e-book, and I found reading it to be a singularly flat experience. Call me old-fashioned, but I still love the feel of paper under my fingers, the smell of a new — or old — book: the whole tactile experience of reading and handling the book as a physical, tangible object. Unfortunately, it seems more and more apparent that preserving that experience for future generations will be, in the words of John Cheever, like digging a tunnel with a teaspoon.)
How I learned to stop squirming and love the sling
I’ve been through two slings since I broke my arm on the first of the month. The first was a horrible, hot, straight-jacket sort of thing that I wore in the days leading up to the surgery that pinned and plated my bone back together. As tight and uncomfortable and immobilizing as that sling was, I could nevertheless hear and feel loose and broken bones jumbling around inside my arm every time I shifted my position even a little.
After surgery, I was given another sling: one designed less for holding one together in a fixed position and more for supporting an arm not yet strong enough to support itself. This one has proven to be significantly more comfortable and much less irritating and obtrusive. It’s most bothersome at night; though I’m able to take it off for periods during the day, I’m still obliged to sleep with it on, and it’s not easy for me — a side sleeper — to adjust to sleeping on my back propped up by pillows arranged to ensure that my arm doesn’t go anywhere it shouldn’t while I’m asleep. Still, it’s an improvement on the old straight jacket, and it’s nice to have when I do need the extra support.
