Ah, gentle reader. I have mentioned that when my contracts get thin, I have extra time, and I often squander it (that post was a full-time position ago). I left that aforementioned full-time position sixteen months ago, and I’ve been cruising on a couple of contracts–one that I’ve worked on intermittently since that post in 2020 and one that engages me half time for six or seven week stretches. Well, the first has gone into remission for a bit, and the other went down to ten hours a week max billed for a role that really requires closer to the 20. So I have sent some finalish bills, and in the interim in this year and almost a half…..
I guess I have squandered a lot of time, again.
I guess I have been doing something–developing and releasing a number of apps which have sold in the double digits now (combined). But over the winter, I fell into the doomscrolling again–I would hit the job boards, read some blogs, and then after lunch I would refresh certain selected things and launch a game of Civ in the background.
So it occurred to me in the middle of the night one day last week that I could have learned to play guitar by now. As you might remember, gentle reader, I bought a guitar some years ago and took some lessons, but in those busier times, I didn’t have a lot of time to practice. So it sits in the corner of the office, gathering dust with a bass guitar I bought some years later some years ago now. If I had spent an hour or even a half hour on weekdays plucking at them, I probably could have learned to play something by now.
So as the spring begins, I’m resolved to tackle some things. I’ve started cleaning out the garage a bit. I’ve added some projects to Goal-Task-Chore, the app I developed for just such a purpose. And look at this:
My brother gave me that coffee table and end chairs in 1999 because I was into wood refinishing. Which means about that time I refinished something or other and wanted to do others–including a desk whose hardware I removed but never got to refinishing but instead have used as a desk in my office in all of the homes I’ve lived in since then without the hardware attached (and, as a matter of fact, I found one of the pieces of metal trim on the floor of the garage before my workbench when I was cleaning up over the weekend–no idea where the rest of it is). When I received this living room furniture, which he got tired of moving while he was in the Marine Corps, I broke it into individual pieces so I could stain them individually. And I broke one of the pieces when knocking the pieces with a rubber mallet.
And, gentle reader, I then moved those pieces from Sycamore Hills to Casinoport to Old Trees to Nogglestead, and they were on the bottom shelf of one of the plastic shelving units in the garage for fifteen years until last year when I started cleaning the garage and determined I would refinish them finally. Ah! But they remained unassembled and unrefinished because I could not find two of the cross-braces.
However, I found them as part of this weekend’s cleaning, and I glued the broken piece since I’m suddenly gluing a lot of furniture (and have many furniture/bar clamps all of a sudden). Today, I put them together for the first time in thirty years, and this weekend I shall begin stripping and sanding them, and….
Well, I’m not sure what I’ll do with them when I’m done. I’d thought about actually putting them in the living room, but now that I see them again, the end tables might be a little short. But, we will see.
And when they’re done or drying, maybe I’ll pick up the guitar.
My beautiful wife had submitted, almost off-handedly, a talk for the cybersecurity day in St. Louis’s Tech Week, and it was accepted. So we decided to make a little trip of it–instead of driving up early on the day of the conference, we went up the night before and stayed two nights. We ended up stationed about two blocks from where I worked when I was an executive at a marketing agency, so I spent a little time while she was in a woman’s event in the early evening walking around, trying to remember where things were. Was it this corner where Carlos with the grill sold me lunch (two brats, plain)? Is this coffee shop where the Starbucks used to be, our daily destination for work breaks? And so on. A lot has changed in the 20 years since I left that office. I walked back to the women’s tech event to escort my wife back to our hotel (“Did you walk with me just for safety?” she asked on the drive back home. Yes.)
So, gentle reader, I am the sort of person who puts dryer sheets in with his laundry, especially during the winter months. And I have vacillated between the warehouse club’s house brand and Bounce name-brand dryer sheets for years. Depending upon how miserly I was feeling, mostly. But the last time I was in the market, I decided to go with Bounce because even though we run the laundry all day here, by the time we got to the bottom of a box of sheets, particularly the two-pack bundles we got, the sheets had lost most of their scent. So I went with the Bounce, and….
