Working Wednesday, April 27, 2021

~ Jenny

I ordered a whiteboard.

I’m so excited, I can’t stand it. I had several plans for how to mount one in my living-room-turned-office, but I finally just ordered a rolling one. Now I just have to keep working on the office so I can roll it in. (Well, I’ll have to put it together first, but you know what I mean.). And I’ll have a place to plot on again.

I have to go take another load of not-office-stuff out off the living room now BECAUSE I HAVE TO MAKE ROOM FOR A WHITEBOARD. Sorry. Very excited.

What did you work on this week?

88 thoughts on “Working Wednesday, April 27, 2021”

  1. I’m working on my first attempt at acrylic painting. Parts of it are going well – I did a pretty good braided river tonight – and parts aren’t. It’s supposed to be an abstract of a sunrise, with rivers of light, and I thought it’d be a nice easy subject to start with. Hah. I’m on try 3 of the basic design and I suspect it’ll take another few tries before I get something that works. But painting the river was satisfying.

  3. I took an online quilting class called “Wonky piecing”. It was pretty fun – and a nice virtual get together with fellow quilters. I made this guy

    https://www.instagram.com/p/COD7FlaHrW3/

    and I did a mirror image in the same colors. Now I just have to figure out what to do with them. They are wall hanging size, so a little big for a pillow. And I don’t know anyone with wall space or desire to have two matching cats on their walls. So, I think they need to be in a quilt somewhere. I just need to figure that out.

    2. That’s so cute!! Is the cat sewn on top of the background, or is everything a single layer?

  5. For some reason, I guess because the Jay one was a full length novel, I was expecting a full length novel with this one. I liked it, but it was so short.

  6. I’m proof-reading a book on Chatsworth, which is technically tricky (all the titles, works of art, Names of Frightfully Important Corridors, etc.), but does have some beautiful things, as well as loads that are totally OTT. I finally managed to get a PDF, in colour, last night, which is a big help – the print-out’s in black and white on very heavy A3 paper, so isn’t easy to work with.

    I’ve just ordered fibre optic broadband so files like this are more practical to transfer; it’s now only £2 a month more, and will be especially helpful when I finally replace my iMac, given all the software I’ll need to download. (Hoping to put this off at least another six months; but at least the new M chip machines have launched.)

    I’ve sown my second batch of seeds, and am making plans for the gardens; plus my space in the greenhouse my friend Pam inherited with her new allotment. Also still digging out compost, mulching, and making new beds.

    And in the next few days I’ve got a check-up with my dentist in Shrewsbury, a haircut (oh, to have my hair out of my eyes), and my second jab, on Monday. It’s all go.

    1. Just realized the new iMacs have a distracting shiny white frame. Which means I’m probably going to go for last year’s model instead. Which means I’m probably going to have to buy one by the end of this year, before the stock runs out. I’m telling myself this is more sensible than waiting until my ten-year-old machine suddenly dies on me. If only buying a new machine didn’t mean having to start paying monthly rent for Adobe software.

      I was already less than keen on the new design (would have to buy the silver one, since the others would screw up colour correcting my photographs). But a white frame! They’ve lost their design eye.

      1. Totally agreed. There is speculation that next year will be the “pro” release, because nobody can believe the frame for that exact reason.

        1. Sounds as if they may be going for 32in for that, which is bigger than I want. I reckoned I could downsize from 27in to 24in, although the bigger screen is handy for editing, when I need to have a couple of windows onto the file I’m editing (one to run searches), plus a style sheet, and often another file for reference. And a couple of floating dictionaries.

          And of course it’s also handy for digital imaging. But 32ins is too wide to work when you’re sitting in front of it.

          1. PS. They don’t seem to realize that a lot of their customers who aren’t high-end ‘pros’ use their machines for colour-critical work.

  7. I rearranged my bedroom to finally! unblock the cooling/heating vent. That meant 3 heavy dressers had to be bullied, so I was sore, despite taking out a drawer to lighten 2 of the dressers.
    The room is not visually as pleasing–still thinking on that. Also working on freelance items due next week and thinking of applying for another freelance job.

  8. I wrote a concept for a category romance story thinking ‘how hard can it be?’ – And, lo and behold, it was much harder than I thought. Got a fairly good feedback, though, only minor changes required. But the editor seems to like head-hopping – I’m going to have to deal with that.

  9. I’m training for my temp job as a census enumerator which is pretty intense. There’s 8 hours of zoom training plus training on our own and off line learning, all of which we get paid for so I took this week off from the day job. My area is nearer my home town so about a 1.5 hour highway drive each way and almost all of my allocated areas are rural so it’s lots of time for audiobooks while I drive down country roads.

    Today I’m having a meeting with my day job supervisor about a different position I could move to, then it’s a trip to the dentist an hour away for a cleaning, home for more training/studying and then another Zoom meeting at 6:30! This morning I was super productive and put away 3 days of clean dishes and 2 loads of laundry. Paul is working 2 extra nights because of a COVID technicality.

    My orthopedic consult went well, I didn’t have to punch the doctor in the nose for being a jerk. He told me some really interesting things about my injuries, is sending me to physio (add that to the list of things I have to do after census day but before we have to follow up with people who don’t fill it out, Canadians fill out your census please) and will give me an injection of fluid replacer if physio doesn’t work and then cortisone if needed as a last resort.

    The days are just packed.

    1. It’s just occurred to me: we’ve just had a census, and I think they’ve always been on the 01 year of each decade. Is the Canadian one the same because you were originally in line with Britain?

      1. Oh, on the other hand, that wouldn’t explain the US census; we didn’t start them until way after America had split.

        2. Wasn’t the Domesday Book a census? Was it the first one? Oh wait, Joseph and Mary traveled to Bethlehem to pay taxes so there must have been some kind of census involved with that (I think). Does anyone know if there were earlier censuses or was this another one of those Roman administrative innovations?

          1. OED says the current sense dates from the mid C18; earlier versions were about taxation, especially poll taxes.

          2. I finally looked it up. “The first known census was taken by the Babylonians in 3800 B.C.E., nearly 6000 years ago. Records suggest that it was taken every six or seven years and counted the number of people and livestock, as well as quantities of butter, honey, milk, wool and vegetables.

            One of the earliest documented censuses was taken in 500-499 B.C.E. by the Persian Empire’s military for issuing land grants, and taxation purposes.[1]”

            “The world’s oldest extant census data comes from China during the Ha n Dynasty. Taken in the fall of 2 C.E., it is considered by scholars to be quite accurate. At that time there were 59.6 million living in Han China, the world’s largest population.[2] The second oldest preserved census is also from the Han, dating back to 140 C.E., when only a bit more than 48 million people were recorded. ” This came from the New World Encyclopedia.

        3. The US census began in 1790 (US Constitution requirement ratified in 1789) and has always been decennial years. It (and subsequent censuses through 1840) only name the head of the household with other members merely numbers, and there are whole articles on how to identify individual families given this paucity of data. In 1850 and later, all individuals are named and you can generally find the family if they were living where you think they were!

          Canada has had various partial censuses beginning in 1825, with the first full census in 1871 following the Constitution Act of 1867. I love Canadian census records except for 1901, when the enumerator somehow skipped my great-great-grandmother’s house; she was an Irish Potato Famine immigrant to Canada and had died before the 1911 census, so her descendants will never know her exact birthdate, for instance.

          The UK’s first modern census was in 1801 and it was, of course, designed to determine how many men could be fielded to the Napoleonic Wars. The first really usable UK census is the 1841. It will identify the family members and their birthplaces by parish — very helpful!

          Not sure about the 2021 Scotland census.

          The first rather thorough English census is better known as the DOMESDAY BOOK, 1086, designed to be used to assist in tax assessments.

  10. Best wishes from a US census enumerator!
    We had four hours of in-person, masked, distanced, training and then a lot of online stuff which was really helpful, practicing with the software in advance.

    1. (Then there were the conference calls with twenty people or more who never all knew how to mute their phones.)

      1. A young cousin was taken on for census work about two years ago. I had dinner with his mother at the time, and she told me that she’d always WONDERED what the ideal job was for someone whose main expertise seemed to be gaming — and it turned out that the gaming, requiring an ability to master a set of complex arbitrary rules, is Really Good Experience for enumerators. [I asked her to pass on the information that genealogists will be using this data, in a fairly raw form, forever, so to keep that in mind. This was before Tяump started trying to manipulate it . . . . ]

  11. I find if I dive right in to a project I get better results than if I plan it. For two weeks I’ve told myself that would start purging the clutter and start small by going after the catchalls first. Nope! They only refill themselves. Then yesterday I looked at the dvd collection and pulled them all off the shelves, divided and separated them between adult and children, keeping the adult (I’m not giving away Moonstruck or The Martian). The grandchildren are far beyond the Barbie and Disney shows. I can’t remember the last time our grandson watched Pirates of the Caribbean or Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even Legos movies have taken a hit. Their older teenagers so that explains it. Also threw out a wicker picnic basket only to retrieve it and put craft supplies like ribbon and floral bits in it. Folded away the card table used for puzzles (can always put it back up again). It feels good to accomplish that much.

  12. I hit a critical tipping point of my space being messy. It’s not a disaster, but my brain just went into anxious overdrive, so I fluttered around doing some small things during break. Dishes are soaking, will wash at lunch. Started a load washing the dogs toys, which hopefully shouldn’t cause the washer to kick out of being level (or something). Moved more things to the disaster bedroom….

    I am in sore need of dropping decluttered things to Thrift shops, but I dont want to do Goodwill, since I’ve come to realize a lot is still not recycled/used.

    I’ve got FIVE bags of clothing or recycled fabric to offload from me and various family members. 5-6 boxes of movies and books, and like 3 small boxes of just junk.

    I work 8-5 M-F and that basically means all the drop offs I found are only open during my work hours.

    I might try and use a vacation day to offload it all in the upcoming weeks. But its frustrating to use a vacation day for errands or appts. SIGH. First world problems.

    I’m disappointed in myself. I’ve done extremely well not bringing things in, then I got some stuff for a new hobby, yarn (WHICH I DID NOT REALLY NEED), and plant stuff. I feel positively flooded with stuff again, and it makes me want to cry… sigh.

    So…. maybe in May I’ll be able to declutter more…

    1. Hope you don’t mind the suggestion, but what worked for me when nothing else did was to commit to getting rid of one thing a day. That doesn’t help with the inability to drop things off, but it sounds like you’ve got more to do. If so, one thing a day — trash, recylcing, or a bag/box set aside to go with the drop-offs — adds up, especially since at least in the beginning, it’s easy to find one thing, and you’ll probably do several. The thing is, no averaging — if you get rid of five things in one day, you don’t get to skip the next four days. It takes a while to be noticeable, but at the end of a month, you’ll have decluttered 30+ things, and after six months, it’s about 200 things!

      You can also add the rule that for each new thing you bring one thing home, you have to get rid of two things within twenty-four hours. That balances out the new v clutter a bit and acknowledges that we all need (even if only emotionally) some new stuff. But don’t beat yourself up over the new things, or you’ll only resist the decluttering more.

      I still have to repeat the process occasionally as things do pile up again. But for me, at least, doing it slowly and almost imperceptibly initially made a permanent improvement. I know some people prefer to do it in large bursts, so if that’s you, then just ignore the above.

      1. Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve tried that in the past, and also tried large bursts, it just needs to keep happening haha

        I think I might need to do a bigger purge, but the effort is overwhelming. I get burnt out on making decisions, then guilt over clutter and what I’d like to get rid of. I do really well reviewing things, letting them sit in my brain for a while subconsciously deciding to purge or not, and then going through a baby spree of getting rid of things.

        I love the one in/out rule, too. That usually makes me feel much better on new purchases.

        I think my biggest issue is getting rid of the things slated to leave. I used to just Goodwill dump, but now that feels not great. I will have to try and draw up a list of where to donate things and when so I can make a plan of action. I hate the thought of things just being trashed.

        I am also trying to adopt a concrete motivation (like moving to Portugal, ha!), buuut mostly it’s just the general urge to declutter.

        One hobby is literally reading about minimalism and decluttering, so the urge is ever present heehee

        1. Where I live there are drop boxes for all kinds of charities. One of them is for a Downs syndrome support group (whose name I helpfully cannot remember) and my friend whose daughter is a Downs person thinks highly of them. Another is for a local clothing closet. There are others. (I discovered, when I dropped off some stuff for a co-worker, that for some you can even get a receipt by taking a picture of a QR code and going to their website.)

          1. Depending on where you live, there might be a drop off spot at your transfer station / dump. Towns vary.

            Where we live now, we have both a “put and take table” and, for clothes, DVDs, whatever there is a “mall” (a small shed). That’s a popular place for finding fabric and toys. They are just opening up again after COVID.

            Does Goodwill dispose of items they can’t sell?

          2. My understanding is Goodwills throws away a ton of stuff. Especially textiles. I was looking up various charities, too. Like a homeless one, or for biz casual for career needs. It’s a bear trying to actually find fabric recycling. 🙁 and a lot of what I have, clothing and otherwise, isn’t high end, which increases increases odds of being pitched.

            I’ll keep looking! I like the idea of those charity drop boxes, too. Media goes to the library after trying to resell a couple places. It’s the random crap or not high end clothing that I’m struggling with.

            Perseverance is key!

    2. If you can drop off packages at the post office or arrange for a pickup, it’s worth checking out Thredup. It’s a huge online thrift shop. You can print out a shipping label and send your things in, and then either get credit if those things sell, or (I think) just outright donate your things. Most of the things on there are not fancy labels, just a range of commonly-found ones (note: they don’t do men’s clothes, just womens’, kids’, shoes, and accessories). But it’s made it very easy to donate clothes.

      Best of luck to you, whatever ends up working best for you – decluttering is so deeply exhausting and yet so eventually rewarding. It can just feel like it’s taken a looooong time to get to the rewarding part.

  13. At my paying job, I’m preparing for monthly reports. At home, I’m working on the diet. Atkins is the same as any other diet. “Eat this. Don’t eat that. Measure, measure, measure.” I have two digital scales and a 100 gram and 500 gram weight to check their calibration – they’re good.

    Week 2 is too soon to plateau, but I’ve been around 283.x for three days. That’s still around 15 pounds lost, but I have much higher (lower?) goals and a freezer full of Atkins meals, a refrigerator full of steaks. Mmmmm, steaks.

    1. If your food intake is okay, the only other part you can control is exercise. Try taking an extra walk or 2 this week and see if that helps you get unstuck. It is, however, not unusual to stick on a number for a while and then have a whole week’s progress show up at once. That’s why they generally tell you to only weigh yourself once a week. I’ve never had the self-discipline to do that, but have learned not to take short term plateaus and variations as final. If you get the same reading 2 or 3 days running, THEN you can believe it. The main thing is to not use this glitch as an excuse to give up on your diet. Get out in the air and away from your kitchen and it will be easier to not obsess over the daily weigh-in. Also, if you haven’t been getting enough sleep, that will also impede weight loss. So try taking a nap, a walk and playing with the grandkids before you start worrying about the scale.

      1. These things I know. Only the Thursday weight counts, because that’s the official weigh-in day. Naps, check. Good night’s sleep, check. Exercise… I’ll check on that. 🙂

        Thursday, April 15: 295.2. Thursday, April 22: 285.6 (nearly 10 pounds). Thursday, April 29: dunno yet, but I’ve been hovering at 283.x, which will still be a loss, so yay!

        I just like a good whine with my beef.

        1. You never lose as much as you did the first week on any diet. As long as you are still inching down, it is a victory. So hang in there, Gary. You have an international rooting section here at Argh.

  14. I’m mostly wrestling with my WIP. The ending is fighting me. And beating me. And I’ve sworn I won’t read the new Murderbot until I finish the WIP. And it’s killing me seeing all the comments on the spoiler thread, where all the cool kids have already read it!

  15. I am planning a party for December. It is almost 100 people and I have never planned a party this big, not even my wedding, and my wedding was “Oh my goodness, I have 6 weeks to get this done. I will take the first available option” I’m panicking and it is only April.

    Of course the grand question is whether the plague will have diminished and will it be a good idea to have a large party in December.

    1. We can help.

      What’s your budget?
      What place, date and time (several of each, ideally) are you choosing between?
      Who are the guests?
      What are you feeding them? Cocktails? Dinner? Brunch?
      What’s the entertainment? Chat? Music? Games? Gifts?
      Who’s cleaning up? (youngsters earning spending money here?)

  16. I’m still very confused on this whole musical thing, and they have announced that they are ready to record it all in two weeks….which HELL NO, I WILL NOT BE. I’m so confused by all of the recordings they are producing, which ones we are supposed to use and for what, and they have been all “I can’t teach you, you gotta figure it out on your own at home.” We’re not done doing all numbers and we’ve gone over most of them maybe one or two times apiece, and we’re going to have this FINALIZED?!

    Really, I can’t figure out if I have to nitpick the hell out of this (which is what you’d think from all the versions of recordings and blah blah “harmony” or whatever) or if I can just, like, sing things in the middle range and be fine, which they seem fine with whenever I actually do sing on Zoom.

  17. I’ve started spring cleaning in earnest, and made a good dent after work last night. Also set up the fan in my bedroom–much needed already as the room is upstairs and faces full west. Snow has almost melted from the back yard. It should be gone by the weekend, and I swept the back deck and front porch last night. I can’t wait to get to the windows–they’re filthy after all the wind storms during the winter!

  18. I found out that my niece who has been training to be a 911 dispatcher was fired just before the end of her probation. Now that she is no longer working nights, I will be able to speak with her more often, which is a real treat for me, but I didn’t want to put any pressure on her to tell me all the gory details if she wasn’t ready to do so. I called her yesterday and about 1/3 of the way through the call she volunteered the information. They didn’t give her a severance package, but her health insurance premiums are covered for the next 12 months. That will help take the strain off of job hunting as will the fact that she didn’t move into a more expensive apartment when she started the better paying job. She also seemed to have a pretty clear view of what her marketable skills are .
    We both have trouble with time management concerning longer term ongoing projects and are planning to follow Jane’s advice about breaking the day up into 2 4 hour segments in an effort to combat the drop off in concentration that we are both fighting.

    Thank you, Jane! Your advice is battling procrastination in 2 different states and we are grateful to you for sharing your experience.

    1. Is there another Jane here? Because that doesn’t sound like me. (If something I said was the springboard, that’s great!)

        1. Well, it’s usually split between two sittings – it’s rare I can do 4 hours at a stretch. I aim for 3 in the morning and 1 late afternoon/early evening, but the splits vary. It’s more that I can’t manage more than 4 hours’ editing or proof-reading a day except in short bursts. It’s quite concentrated work.

          So don’t overdo it at one sitting if you want to keep it up long-term!

  19. Today is my office clean up, sort, boxes for the shredding, move the books on floor to other room. Of course, the other room will have a huge clean up next month. So many books. So many children’s DVDs, etc. too.

  20. Mostly doing a little cleaning and a lot of legal and techical reading in preperation for today’s board meeting. We’ve been meeting once a week to get up to speed on some things. I’m hoping we go back to our regular schedule of every 3-4 weeks.

    And I’ve got to order the new Murderbot (not one of the cool kids). Good thing I’m good with delayed gratification and have no problem with ‘spoiler alerts’.

    1. I normally have no problem with spoilers, but this time I’m staying away from the Murderbot thread for the same reason I don’t read excerpts from books not yet published. I wouldn’t be able to stand not having it in my hands! Still first on the reserve list, but it hasn’t shipped yet.

      1. Spoiler alerts – that’s why in most cases I like to read the end of the story first. Just today I read in the entertainment section episode six of In the Line of Duty from Season six and I haven’t even seen Season five yet. It is on hold at the library for me. I don’t know how I got hooked on that show. Maybe because every time I turn around another crooked cop appears. Of course that unfortunately happens in real life (mimicking reel life), too.

        1. Oh, I really like Line of Duty. The first season was so, so, so good (as I remember, at least; I haven’t rewatched, but it made me a fan for life).

  21. My birthday was yesterday. Both my daughter and my cousin phoned to sing to me. I baked a chocolate cake; I didn’t have time to make frosting, so I spread tart jam between the layers and sifted confectioner’s sugar on top. My friend came over and we toured my gardens while my husband made oysters rockefeller and grilled lamb chops. Lovely celebration. Makes up being locked down for my birthday last year.

    Today is Working Wednesday for me because we didn’t go to bed until nearly 2 AM. Today I’ve been working at staying awake and coherent!

    1. Happy Birthday! Your party sounds like it was a great excuse for a slow day today.

  22. I’m scrambling to complete assorted deadlines for end-of-year stuff for ladies’ organizations. The advantage is that I can do most of it online. However, I can’t find the pack of ROTC medals I need for end-of-school-year presentations.

  23. Last night, I set my kitchen on fire.

    I didn’t mean to, but I was cleaning off shelves and stacked some stuff on the stove–I haven’t used the burners or the oven in a couple of days because of cleaning out my freezer and microwaving everything–and the only thing I can think of is that the stuff fell over and hit a burner knob and turned it on. I was watching the 5th episode of Brokenwood, and I thought, “I smell smoke,” but I don’t have much of a sense of smell and there was a fire on the show, but finally I thought, “Okay, go check,” and opened the bedroom door, and the place was so dark with black smoke I thought the electricity had gone out. Then I saw the flames. Lots of flames. So I ran toward the stove and grabbed the first of three fire extinguishers there (because I’m paranoid) and put it out. Then I opened the front and back doors and went outside because I couldn’t breathe (asthma plus thick black smoke is not good. I sat on the bench outside and watched the smoke pour out of my front door as if it were a chimney. Then I went back and pulled everything off the top of the stove into a waste basket and carried that outside to make sure the fire was out there. Yep, no smoke or smolder. Then I sat there and breathed again. Then I went back in and hit the stove with the second fire extinguisher just to make sure. And then everything around it. Then I went outside to breathe again. Then I looked at my house and realized that even though the only real damage was destroying the stove, which was lousy anyway, the smoke put soot everywhere, especially on the cobwebs. The place looked haunted. Plus, it smelled of smoke. So my work for the next week or seven is going to be throwing out a ton of stuff that smells of smoke or is stained with soot and probably painting walls and definitely pulling down black cobwebs that make this look like Elvira Queen of the Dead’s flophouse.

    Not going to be doing a lot of writing including blog posts aside from the basics. Oh, and my laptop is still repeating letters, so I’ll be cleaning that. And then there’s the laundry. One damn thing after another.

    1. Well, thank God for fire extinguishers! So glad you’re ok and the damage was contained!!

    2. So many sympathies. I need a fire extinguisher. A cat who yells at me when there is smoke is not enough. I also don’t have much of a sense of smell so he has actually been helpful at times.

      I am so glad you caught it and are ok. Maybe it can be grist for your mill. You know, later, when you’ve cleaned and replaced and painted. . . Did I mention sympathy? I wish you could harness the energies and good wishes of all the people here. I bet it would look like a Disney movie cleaning and clearing up.

    4. So glad you caught it when you did. I had a house fire thirty years ago, and I remember the best thing we found for cleaning off the film of smoke was laundry washing powder. Worked far better than washing-up liquid.

    6. That is WAY too much excitement! So glad the rest of the house (to say nothing of the pets and you) come through okay.

    7. Yikes! How lucky that you were awake and have fire extinguishers. So glad you are all right and the damage wasn’t worse.

      I just realized that I sent our extinguisher off with my daughter when she moved out. Time to place an order.

    8. Thank goodness you did catch it. My last kitchen fire was a butterball turkey on Thanksgiving, when they were a New Thing. It produced much more butter than the pan was prepared to cope with, and the pan overflowed. I threw most of a cardboard package of Morton’s salt on it, and that put the fire out, and then we rehomed the turkey to an empty pan, made sure we’d cleaned all the grease from the oven, and . . . put the bird back in to finish cooking. It was Thanksgiving and the grocery markets were all closed for the holiday. This is not really accepted safety practice — you’re supposed to do a complete serious oven clean, which is more of an overnight project with Chemicals than the quick-but-thorough version we did — but we finished the meal. The turkey was not burnt enough to taste smoke, as I recall.

  24. Oh. You are so lucky. What a dreadful thing to happen, but I’m glad you found it when you did and that you are safe.

  25. That sucks. I am so sorry and if I did not live thousands of miles away I would offer to help clean. Keep all the stuff you are throwing out until after you call your insurance agent. Smoke damage is damage. I once had an outside hose bib freeze and break. The water pipe ran under my hardwood dining room floor. The resulting flooding ruined the floor. The insurance not only paid for everything (after the deductible), they paid the cost of several of my craft projects that were sitting on the floor and ruined (I was doing water colors back then), but they hired the contractor who did the clean up and the work.

  26. Visit to loan officer, very exciting. Only he thinks we’ll not be able to borrow as much as we’d thought. Apparently 30-40% down payment doesn’t balance being closeish to official retirement age. Not that he would. He’ll work till he literally cannot. Which would cover a 20-30 year mortgage easy; given his parents, still alive and still learning new skills.
    Smaller or further out. Or maybe a different bank. I can hope, at least until next week when we try a less well known bank.

    And packing. I’m starting with books. If I do them last when I’d rather toss things than even look at one more box I tend to regret the severity of the culling.

    1. First try a different bank. I don’t know how my loan officer (who is older than I am) got me a thirty year mortgage when I was 66, but my family has banked there for the 116 years since the bank was founded in this small town. Low interest rate, too.

      1. My grandfather got a GI loan when he was in his eighties, which I thought was absolutely nuts of someone.

        He was planning to wait until he was about 95, when the youngest would likely be leaving the nest, and then go to live in a pioneer cabin . . . . He just reckoned that if he made himself do things, age wouldn’t catch up to him. [His father lived to 104 with all his wits about him, and that was Grandfather’s plan, too.]

  27. A rolling white board, now that is going to be fabulous. You’ll get all sorts of great things accomplished. Me? Well, let’s just say it’s been a good week, so far. An input-output kind of mindset is getting me on the road to where I’m going.

  29. Thank you, everybody, for the sympathy. Krissie chimed in, too; she always talks me through crises. And Bob said, “Do you still have a roof?” focusing on the Big Picture. The roof is fine, the kitchen ceiling is not the same color it once was. So good to have a support group (g).

  30. I’m glad you’re okay! As Jessie said, don’t toss anything until you’ve talked to your insurance company.

    I have spent the past week getting all my utilities and insurance arranged for the new apartment and finalising things with the lawyers. I also started packing (8 cartons of books and counting) and booked a moving company for next Saturday. Only ten more days!

  31. We had a mostly-smoke fire in our back house a couple of years ago, so I feel your pain. Insurance should send out assessors as well as mitigators – ours packed up *everything* from the space and took it to a facility where it was all cleaned while the repair work was done on the physical space.

    Thank goodness for fire extinguishers!

  32. By the way, when I moved here I bought a stove with an induction hob, really for safety reasons. I used to scare myself every so often by finding I’d left a ring on by mistake, after taking the pan off. An induction hob won’t heat up unless there’s a magnetic pan on it. I could still have a disaster if I left a pan to boil dry, of course, but I feel it cuts down my opportunities for making mistakes.

    1. My favorite kitchen appliance of the Newest variety was something originally described as the sexiest cooktop ever. The whole top is one induction unit, and it just heats up under whatever magnetic pan you put on it.

      NOTE: I think I’ve found the current iteration: Gaggenau CX 491 36-inch induction cooktop.

      All good romance writers Really Deserve a sexy cooktop. Also sexy ovens, refrigerators, and possibly sinks . . . .

  33. Read the Good Book Thursday post, saw “fire to my kitchen” and whipped over to Wednesday to see if the story was here and yes it was.

    I’m sorry about the stove and the follow-on cleanup but so very glad you are OK. Heck of a way to declutter.

  34. I’m late to the definitely-not-a-party but wanted to say yikes and sympathy about your fire too. I’m glad you caught it in time and you’re okay! We had a fire a couple of decades ago and it was terrifying and a lot of cleanup. Good luck with it all.

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