Sucking the Marrow Out of Retirement (05/21/2026)

It has been more than a month since I have written here and updated the world on what I have been up to. I am not planning to stop or disappear from the written word or the world, but these past five to six weeks have been absolutely jam-packed with excitement or activity.

It all started out with the delivery of our new travel trailer or camper: an airstream (model, World Traveler). We got a Ford F-150 the week before, so we had something to tow the airstream with. I drove the airstream home with a friend and backed up into our driveway in the dark. It was all successful. But we had applied for a loan to pay for all this, and that was the stressful part; all the hoops we had to jump through. We can afford all these purchases, but a loan made sense from an investment strategy.

Our neighborhood had a community wide yard sale three days after parking the trailer in our driveway. On a whim, I put a for sale sign on our camper van, and to our surprise we got an offer on the van that we could not refuse. Next was getting the van ready, emptying it. But we also needed to outfit our new rig. On top of that, my wife took off for California to visit the family. Followed by an exciting board meeting at our UU church (of which I am the president) where we decided to follow our principle and spend around $80,000 to put solar on the roof of our church. That weekend we had our annual cluster meeting where all the local UU churches come together. This was followed by a trip to the airport to pick up my wife. Subsequently, we needed to get ready for our shake-down cruise, our first (weekend) camping trip with the new camper, to figure things out. Mixed in to all of this is managing the church contracts for solar and another meeting or two. And here they tell you that life gets slower when you retire.

The word life, reminds me of a YouTube clip I watched where someone old stated something like “I don’t know how much longer I have to live, but I want to make the best of it: I am going to make sure that I use and enjoy the remaining time to the best of my ability.” This reminds me of the words Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden: “Suck out all the marrow of life,” or “when I came to die, discover I had not lived.” I have noticed that you become more aware of your mortality when you grow older. “How much time do I have left” has been going through my head. It hasn’t stopped us from buying the camper; currently I am planning a three-to-four-week trip through the Canadian maritime. I hope to do this early in September. But first an off-grid trip to The Peaks of Otter campground on the Blue Ridge parkway to celebrate our 49th anniversary. Interesting fact, Thomas Jefferson thought that the Peaks of Otter were the tallest mountains in the entire USA.

So yes, life sometimes gets in the way of writing my blog posts, which are a form of diary for myself as well as an update to the rest of the world. I promise I will keep doing this as long as I can; but maybe not that frequent.

The airstream arrived in our driveway!  We are still debating where to place it.

Camping in Westmoreland State Park.  We decided to cook our first meal outside, which we will probably do with more.  It was just very pleasant to be there with the dogs.  Westmoreland is one of our favorite parks.  We have stayed here at least three other times in the cabins.  This is our first time camping. 

Our first meal in the new camper.  We cooked steak, fried potatoes with onions and peas.

Does the natural world communicate with us? (1/10/2026)

I have started to read a book by Robert Macfarlane entitled “Is a River Alive.” In the introduction he writes that his 9-year-old son asked him the title and premis of the book, and when he told him, his son said: “well, that is going to be a short book, of course it is.” Reading this I wondered whether nature or the natural environment is talking to us. I am a pantheist and would like to argue that even rocks, stones, and clouds are alive and communicate with us, even though they do not have DNA.

This idea reminds me of a post I wrote some time ago entitled: “Does the world love us.” These are interesting questions. I know that I love the world. I take a walk with my dogs in the woods behind our home almost every morning. I wrote about this in 2018 (The Old Man and the Woods), where I describe taking a walk with our previous dog Jake. To think I called myself old more than 7 years ago. I had just re-read Hemingway’s book “The Old Man and the Sea,” and felt inspired by it. I just used the title to spin off the title of my post.

I try to live in the moment whenever I am out in nature. I always look around, take it all in and try to learn. For example, I love large beech trees; I like their elephant skin like bark, and I love their root spread. During the past years I have tried to make an inventory of the large beech trees in the woods behind our home. I do this by getting off the trails and bushwacking. To date I have found 17 bigger trees. I have no idea how old they are, but I always wonder if they were planted by folks that lived back there before it was converted to park land, and unlike the pines, oaks and maples these beeches were never harvested.

One of the beeches I found the other day

I am in LOVE, whenever I am in nature. Even in times like the other morning when we ran into Blondie, the blond coyote and our two dogs go absolutely insane. But as the song goes “Love hurts,” and I often find it more entertaining that aggravating, even if their howls and barks are deafening and they are trying to pull your arm off (yes, we always walk them on the leash). Those coyotes are getting bolder. Early in the morning, around 2 am on January 1 and 3 they were in our neighborhood, just a few houses over. Their howling and japing woke our dogs, and our dogs woke us. It was crazy.

But back to our woods. Before the invasion of the English settlers, the woods behind our home were the home of the Kiskiack tribe, a group that was part of the Powhatan Confederacy. Kiskiack means wide land or broad place in their native language, and it also seems to be the name of the town they lived in, near the current Yorktown. From what I can determine, the woods must have been cleared in spots for agriculture using slash and burn. Corn was their main crop. The area was also used as hunting grounds.

The Brits eventually cleared large tracks for the cultivation of tobacco. Our woods were part of something that was called the Edgehill Plantation, although there was no actual plantation house. The area was straddled by two roads: Warwick to York and Hampton to York (later on Warwick was incorporated into the town of Newport News). During those times, our region was a very active participant in the Revolution and later the Civil War. I wrote a tongue in cheek post about it once <here>.

I do not exactly know what happened after the civil war. It was around the 1930s when our immediate area was taken over by the National Park Service and most likely the Newport News water works. Recently, we examined the tree rings of a large pine that had fallen across our trail, and someone cut the trunk to allow passage. Dating it by counting the tree rings showed us that it was approximately 80 years old. It appears that the tree probably germinated around the 1940s and was allowed to grow without much interference. This again dates to a time just after the annexation of the area by the Park Service. The tree was one of the bigger ones and is located in an area with some of the largest trees in the woods behind our home.

There is so much to explore and think about when I walk through nature, listening to nature talking to me and to each other.

The beeches so far

A good haul today, we found 3

Before I die and before I’m gone (1/4/2026)

How would I look back at my life, my accomplishments, regrets, failures, things or places I never did? I already have written about an eulogy as I described in part over in this blog post. But is that all? I have written about other things that are going on or have occurred in my life; however, I somehow feel more contemplative during the days with the least daylight in the year. Christmas and the new year are ideal times to reflect. Most of my regular readers know that I am not a guy for New Years resolutions. I discussed that in my recent blog post for my church and in this regular post here.

Do I feel my mortality? Maybe a little, I am getting older and I feel like I am getting slower. My joints hurt, I get mysterious muscle pains, I am looking forward to my mid-day naps, and I have become more cerebral and reflective. I am no longer that interested in the advances in biology but I have changed interests to history. I am still interested in science and I consider myself a naturalist who enjoys being out in nature and I hope to continue chronicling my forays into and opinions of the natural environment.

The truly most enjoyable things I have done in my life involved nature; those events stayed with me over the years. I have been above 14,000 feet three times in my life and those are among my favorites. The top of Mount Elgon (14,177 feet or 4321 meters), Grays Peak (14,276 feet or 4351 meters), and the north slopes of the Annapurna (we estimated to approximately 16,000 feet or 4800 meters). Our visit to Gros Morne National Park was another highlight. Finally, our hike on the Isle of Sky ranks up there as well.

My failures and most troublesome experiences include my job and stay in Uganda. I have had a difficult time holding on to jobs over the years. I am sure it was caused by my sometimes-abrasive behavior and my cynicism and sarcasm. Early on I had a difficult time compromising; but then I hate hypocrisy and that is how I perceived the world (and sometimes I still do). During my job in Nepal, I walked into my supervisor’s office and saw him bent over a chair with his pants down getting screwed in the rear by the assistant supervisor. That surely did not help, both were male and married to women. I lost my job fairly soon after that.

Anything I still want to do, experience or place I still would like to visit? I am 72 years old. How many more years do I have in me; how much longer will I live? Five, ten, fifteen, twenty years? I better hurry up. They call the 80s the slow go years (obviously even slower than right now), and the 90s the no go years. My wife thinks we will be strong and independent for a long time; seventies is the new sixties she keeps reminding me. There are places I would like to return to: Curacao, Newfoundland, Scottland, Uganda, Nepal, Japan, just to name a few. I would love to visit New Zeeland, the Easter Island, Chili, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Finland, the Faro Islands, Iceland, Alaska. Things to do? Take a Rhine cruise, eat in some high-end luxury restaurants, visit the Albuquerque balloon festival, go to the Munich October fest, take a stroll on the beach of Ipanema (I guess that I am still a dirty old man), visit Rome and Florence. I am sure there are a lot more things, but I better keep it realistic.

These are some of my thoughts about going into the new year. Politically, socially, and environmentally, 2026 is going to be an interesting, albeit very stressful year. Put on your seatbelts.

A picture from our hike on the Isle of Sky in 2011

Save the environment (05/18/2024)

We were informed in one of the recent issues of the Washington Post that the sea level is rising faster than predicted all along the Atlantic and Mexican Gulf coasts. There are regions where the level has gone up 6 or more inches, or for my metric fans, 15 cm. Amazing to think that this occurred during the past 15 years, or less than a generation.

You probably know (from reading some of my past writings) that I have been very concerned about our global environment and argued that we are stealing from the future of our next of kin. In my posts of the past 11 years, I have 5 posts with the key word environment, 52 with environmental, 5 with environmental justice, 60 with global warming, and 39 with climate change. Some of the posts will have multiple keywords, and there will be some overlap. For example, I am sure that I will be using all these keywords for this post. I probably have missed using these keywords in some of my posts. But so be it. I have now published 545 or more posts in this blog, since 2013. This means that more than 10% of my posts somehow deal with environmental issues including global warning, or at least use one of these keywords associated with them.

Why do I harp so much on this issue? I am 70 years old, and I have no idea how much longer I will live. I will be long dead, by the time the shit hits the fan, so to speak. Our financial advisor makes me live till 94 in her calculations. May I only be so lucky or maybe unlucky. It would be fine with me if I could live till that ripe-old age and maintain some mobility and not suffer much mental decline. It would be nice to see any potential future grandchildren. Living till 94 would make the oldest grandchild a maximum of 23 when I die. Boy my daughter better hurry up. No pressure though. I am a strong believer that families should have no more than two children and admire those who stay childless by choice. One of the causes of the environmental decline is the overpopulation of this earth or exceedance of the earth’s carrying capacity as first proposed by Malthus. Malthus determined that the earth could only handle a certain number of people. If he was correct, it means that we need to reduce the overall birthrate on earth. I wrote about this <here>. However, on the other hand, I also read that we need more young folks if I want to keep enjoying my social security. We are in a pickle, aren’t we?

So, what small things am I doing to protect the environment?

1. 1. We bought a hybrid vehicle. Our car does not have the best gas mileage, but it makes us feel good. Our other car has better highway mileage, and we can now be selective about which vehicle we use for a certain trip. Yes, we have the van, which is a gas guzzler, but I wonder what was better for the environment, flying across the country for two or driving? If you read this and know the answer, leave me a comment.
2. We pick up our dog poop when we take them for a walk. This helps in keeping the nutrients out of the Chesapeake Bay, and hopefully helps the environment.
3. In addition, we tend not to fertilize our yard, except my bonsai trees. However, that should not cause a lot of runoff. Fertilizers I have includes some powdered Miracle Growth for my trees and bonemeal. We use compost, both stuff we produce ourselves and some storebought compost. Pesticides and herbicides are not available at our home. I even chase off any lawn maintenance or bug control salesperson from our property.
4. Our yard has a lot of trees, and we call people that cut the trees in their yard: tree murderers. I call it tree genocide.
5. In retirement, I am starting to grow our own food again, and I have just seeded a pollinator garden.
6. We are slowly weaning ourselves from the use of plastics. The most recent thing we did was to trash our plastic cutting boards and some of the plastic storage containers.
7. I am involved in the environmental committee of our UU church, or what is called the “Green Sanctuary” committee. We donate a lot to environmental groups as well.
8. Lastly, and I am sure I can think of more items, we try to eat organic and semi-healthy. We are not vegetarians, but we are aware of the food additives and the danger of highly processed foods. When I have time, I try to bake our own bread, which has much less unpronounceable additive in it than storebought bread.

No, we are not perfect, but at least we try to leave something for future generations to enjoy. Where can we improve what we currently do to preserve the earth for future generations? Let me know!

This cartoon shows what I am afraid of (so I stole it).  Conservatives seem to harp about deficit and money but appear not to give a damn about the environment!

I am older than I have ever been (04/21/2024)

I am 70 years old, going on 71, the oldest I have ever been, at least when you do not believe in reincarnation. Otherwise in a previous life I could have been a turtle, elephant or some other creature that outlives humans. That is of course also assuming that these animals did not meet an untimely death as the result of poachers or worse some millionaire schmuck who killed me on safari.

Crap, I am not getting any younger, just older and older, but as the cliché goes, “it beats the alternative.” A lot of elderly like me joke about it, like “hey, I woke up this morning, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” or “I checked the obituaries this morning and I wasn't in it.” But seriously, I am at the point that the obituaries of celebrities are my favorite part in the newspaper. I want to see how old they were when they died and what the cause was of their demise.

Our church has what are called fellowship circles, where a group of six to eight folks get together and exchange their feeling over a specific topic. It is meant to be personal and a way of getting to know each other a bit better and create friendships. Since it is a Unitarian Church, the character of God is never brought up; we don’t pray or talk about religion, maybe with the exception of bashing it. Believers in God, Christ, Allah, Buddha, humanists and even atheists are all welcome in the Unitarian Church.

My circle is held in the afternoon and as a logical result it consists of retired folks, everyone is in their late sixties and seventies. The topic of the day this past week was spring and reawakening of nature after the winter torpor. Maybe not surprising, but when my wife asked me when I got home how the meeting was, my answer was that we discussed old age, mortality, and our anxiety about getting older. It was somewhat amazing how we got there, but it seems that I am not the only one struggling with the impending decline. Now here they say that human bonds, friendships and fellowship are the prerequisite to living longer. I hope that talking about death contributes to aging gracefully and gives us a few more extra quality years.

This week we also met a neighbor of ours at a party at one of our local breweries. We had not seen her in some time, and she let us know why. Her husband, a retired NASA scientist was diagnosed of coming down with Alzheimer. He is in his mid-70s and they have been at neurologists trying to find a way of slowing down the decline. Another (male) friend was there and he told me he has osteoporosis. He is 75 years-old, very skinny and a retired NASA scientist. I read somewhere that the 70-ies are supposed to be the “go-go” years, the 80-ies the “slow-go” years, while at your 90th birthday you enter the “no-go” decade. I better get going, I've got nine more years of fun ahead of me.

This old man and his wife!

We finally can pee inside again (03/06/2024)

The powder room is completed; well, almost.  But darn it is usable and looks great!  It has been a long process.  Briefly after the memorial service for my father-in-law in March last year (I spoke about his passing <here>) we noticed that whenever we flushed the toilet water would come out underneath the toilet, in between the base and the floor.  We stopped using the toilet; we have two others anyway and the trees out back as well.  We eventually bit the bullet and decided to have things fixed professionally. 

I more or less knew what the issue was.  When they built our home in 1970, the plumbers of the time cut one of the beams in order to install the toilet drain.  The floor was sinking right under the toilet.  I had previously installed a few cheap jacks under it; however, I needed to crawl to the jacks every year or so to crank them up a bit.  Our homes were built in a swamp and the jacks were slowly sinking into the soft soil.  I was resting them on a brick.

Once we retired on June 1 it was time to contact folks to work on the crawlspace and fix things for good.  I am getting too old to crawl into the crawl space and crank on three jacks.  We decided to go for broke: have things fixed by installing two steel beams under the floor.  These beams are supported by jack placed on concrete pads. After that we had the crawlspace insulated and a dehumidifier put in.  Oh yes, we also found out that the chimney was separating from the house and needed to be jacked back up against the house.  Fun, fun!

We got bids from two companies and finally work started in August (I briefly mentioned it <here>).  We left on our road trip four days after the work was completed.  The plan was to start when we got back.   The work in August had gutted the entire powder room and we decided to upgrade it.  We needed new floor tile and vanity.  I wanted to put in a rustic wood wall behind the toilet and vanity.  While shopping around for tile we saw this tile product that looked like wood and we were sold.  A few days before we had decided on a vanity and it all seemed to match.  We ordered the materials and it was a waiting game.

All the sudden it appeared that our stove was broken.  The glass in the oven had cracked and we needed to do something about that.  I detailed some of the issues with purchasing a new stove <here>.   If you are a regular reader, you have seen some of the crawl space/powder room discussions there as well, but I could finally make a real start at the renovations around the beginning of December.  This was after I returned from my strange trip to the bonsai show in North Carolina, which I also detailed in that post.

It took me two months to finish the project, but I am somewhat done.  We still need to decide about the toilet paper roll hanger, install a dimmer, and replace a cover to our light switch.  A few minor details and that's it.  However, we are happy and it looks great.

A quick shout out to all the suppliers etc.  Of course we frequented Lowes; the crawlspace work was done by American Foundation Solutions; the vanity was ordered a Ferguson; and the tile came through Morris Tile.  Oh yes we got a Bidet toilet seat and light fixture through Amazon.  We are happy with the result and the number of trips that I make to the trees in our back yard have diminished.

The finished product!

 

Happy 2024 (1/8/2024)

The first week of 2024 is already past us and I noticed I haven’t updated my blog in a month or so. I guess writing every other day during the month of September and now trying to develop a personal photo book on our travel (self-published and heavily critiqued by my wife) has exhausted my writing skills. However, I do owe you an update. Moreover, I tend to write a review of the past year and I have not done that yet. It is crazy how fast time goes.

It has been an eventful year, ranging from the death of my father-in-law in February, to our purchase of the camping van in April, to our retirement on June 1, our trip to the west coast in September, after all the foundation work in August. This was capped off by my solo-trip and camping in the Kannapolis area. Per my previous post, I visited the area to attend a bonsai show. The rest of the year was more or less on cruise control.

Getting older is interesting. I am increasingly becoming aware of my mortality. I mentioned before that I think that getting old sucks. The other day my wife and I could not figure out why the stove wasn’t working. We bought an induction stove and the frying pan we have regularly used on that stove wasn’t working any longer. After approximately 10 minutes of trying and diagnosing, I suddenly noticed that we were trying to turn on the wrong burner, which was why the stove was giving us an error message. We are getting dense! That entire day we joked with each other about our impending senility. Still, it bugged me.

It has been a decent year for us. Retirement is good. While it is a sign of getting older, it beats the alternative. I was made to feel really good during my “Jan’s big goodbye tour,” and that will always stay with me. The cards, hugs, compliments and even a lunch date with the staff of Virginia Beach all made me feel special and good. It seems that I did make an impact during my career. I hope that I can consider that my legacy; well together with maybe this blog (this blog turned 10 years old this past June) and what we can do for my daughter and the environment. Come to think of it, I need to look at my top 10 posts list and see how life has changed over the ten years. The top 10 list is posted on each page of my blog in a column on the right.

The number one cliché of retirement is that you will be busier than when you were employed. Darn it, they are correct, although we have finally settled into a routine. We go to bed around 11 to 11:30 and wake up between 7:30 and 8. It seems that after reading the newspaper, breakfast and walking the dogs we usually start our day around 11:30. At least our Fitbit shows that I have an average of 12,000 steps each day. In other words, we are no slouches; we are very physically active. September was the month with the fewest steps. That was because we sat in the van and drove back and forth across this great country.

My bonsai (my true hobby) survived my absence. I have a major spring replanting ahead of me, but we will cross that bridge when we get there. I have been doing some pruning and wiring these past few months in anticipation of this spring task. Only one tree died this year, and that was before we left. Plants looked healthy throughout the year. Based on some of the stuff I saw on Mirai (a learning platform I follow) I treated my plants with diatomaceous dust in spring, I fertilized too little perhaps, but treated all plants with bone meal right before we left on our trip in August. Mirai is finding that silica and calcium are two under-rated or under-used elements. Diatomaceous dust contains silica and also functions as an insecticide. Bone meal provides calcium. The plants reacted beautifully to the two treatments.

To conclude, I am looking forward to 2024 and really hope to continue my writing and thinking. I hope you all have a great, productive year.

My evergreen bonsais enjoying sunny, relatively warm weather (50 degrees). 

Getting old sucks! (12/7/2023)

Getting old sucks! It really does! The past weeks have been menacing, period. Here I thought that retirement was easy street but forget it. I feel more stressed now than when I was working. Let me explain.

For one, multitasking is getting more difficult to do. Then there is making decisions, it seems that all the decisions I have made lately are rash decisions that come back to bite me in the behind; in other words, I seem to make the wrong ones or maybe costly ones. I feel more stressed out, compared to when I was working, and of late more anxious. Having read that anxiety may be an early warning sign of a pending heart attack does not help., it heightens the anxious feeling. Having joints that hurt more and more is another of my symptoms of getting old. Finally, there are the peeing issues at night when my full bladder wakes me up or first thing in the morning. It seems that I need to take the dogs for a walk (after coffee, the newspaper and breakfast) before the dam breaks. I can come up with a few more reasons why getting old sucks, we’ll find out by the end of this post (if I don’t croak from that heart attack first).

The details please! Except for the urinating issue, I have been detailed enough on that subject in the previous paragraph.

What happened in the past few weeks? It is mostly a combination of things. The news on things like the war in Israel; the state of our climate; the rating that our current president is getting even though he and his government are doing good work; we can go on. Reading the obituaries of famous people like Sandra Day O’Connor, Mel Brooks, or even Kissinger doesn’t help. These all contribute to my state-of-mind. Guess I am feeling my mortality. On top of that everything seems to go wrong in our home.

I mentioned that we had work done on our crawl space. We needed to get this done after we discovered that our toilet leaked all over our floor when we flushed. We had known that this would most likely happen since the builders of our home had made a huge structural mistake (in 1970). As part of this work, we had the entire powder room taken out and decided that we were going to put it back together by ourselves. This was going to be our first item of business when we returned from our trip in October. Deciding what materials to use and how to install everything took us some time, but I decided to work on it maybe an hour or two each day. Then we were able to borrow a wood splitter from friends to finally split the huge amount of wood that had been in our back yard since March. In other words, another week or so of no bathroom work. I think there is a saying about hell being paved over with good intentions.

In the meantime, we decided to throw a dinner party for friends and finally to make good on an item we sold at our church auction, a pizza dinner for four. We need to heat our pizza stone to 500 degrees (F) to successfully bake pizza in our stove. Lo and behold, here we notice that the glass in the interior of our stove had burst. Quick order a new glass so that this (YouTube) do-it-your-self guy can replace it. Once I got what I thought was the correct glass, we had problems. First the door did not come off the way YouTube told me it should. I found a work around, but then the glass did not fit, and we cannot find a replacement. Time to buy a new stove and postpone the party until the stove was delivered.

We decided that we wanted an induction stove to replace our gas stove. We had read that gas stoves fume off gases that are bad for the lungs, especially lungs of asthmatics. Well Donna is asthmatic and after some research we decided to check out LG. We found a nice one on sale at Lowes, or so we thought. After some good research we went for it; however, these rookie non-gas/glass top cooks bought an electric stove instead of an induction stove. We found that out after the installers had put it in and we briefly turned it on. We asked the installers to wait for us to figure it out, but they took off with our old stove, never to be seen again. Here we had a new stove we did not want. The weekend before we had bought some new steel pots and gave away some of our favorite aluminum pots and pans; aluminum does not work on induction. We spent almost the entire rest of the day wanting to return our new stove and looking for a replacement. Naturally we had already canceled the pizza dinner. We were now envisioning having to postpone the new date that we had agreed on since we expected to have to wait for the next stove.

It gets worse and worse, don’t worry. For a new stove to fit, I had to widen the opening in the countertop by maybe a half inch. I bought a diamond blade for my circular saw and went to work. I installed a guide for my saw, but halfway through it slipped and now my cut wasn’t even. Panic and disgust not only from me but also from the wife (“look what you have done to the resale value of our home” … honestly, I thought we were going to live here for at least another 10 years and by then the new owners would want a new countertop). We can and will fix that with spacers in between the top and the new stove. However, another week of powder room fix up lost. We finally received our induction stove, and we are happy for now.

For months I had planned a trip to the Winter Silhouette (bonsai) Show in Kannapolis, NC. Should I stay or should I go? I had booked a campsite in the Salisbury area. By Friday noon I got the assurance that it was OK for me to go on my solo trip even though Lowes was picking up the stove that we did not use as a return. I had a great time at the show on Saturday and around 5 pm I went to look for my spot.

Next issue. The camping was closed, gated up and what looked like, no way to get in. I had told them in my reservation that I would be late, especially since the website said that the office would close at 5. What to do, but to find a motel room. Finally, after checking in and dinner during a call with my wife she encouraged me to check my voice mail (about the stove removal). I had turned my phone off during the show. Well, there was also a message from the camping giving me the secret number to one of the padlocks on the gate (the gold one). Damn or better fuck, here I wasted another chunk of money on something I did not have to. I had my eyes on a bonsai that was for sale at the show, but it cost as much as my room and that Thai dinner I had (I was planning to make macaroni and cheese from a pack that night).

I went camping the next night and it was nice and relaxing. It brought down the anxiety level, but I just cannot look back at these days wanting to complain about old age. I know this is a long post, but as my wife tells me, I need to take time to relax and take it the way it comes (and express myself … sorry Madona).

Our busted stove

Enlarging the slide-in opening

Relaxed after a night of camping, ready to take on the world again

Best if show bonsai (American hornbeam)

Another favorite, a bald cypress

Why am I here, revisited (6/20/2023)

This past week or so I had a relatively large number of hits on my blog. While this is of course very pleasing, I also wonder what folks are reading and one of the posts that received a lot of the attention was titled: “Why are you here? … On Training and Teaching (Part IIX).” The post was from July 2017.

The post starts out by describing my honest request for critique for a new course I started to teach, and ended in my musing on why I do what I do. I never received much of a review from my students, but that seems par for the course. I used to be an assistant manager and acting manager of a public radio station, and we always reminded ourselves that if we did not get anyone complaining, no one was listening. In other words, maybe my classes put them all to sleep.

In the same blog, I also introduced you all to my favorite saying that I like to pay back (or maybe award) the community willing to put up with me. I have always wanted to volunteer and contribute to the society or even the group (my work place) that I am involved with.

Rereading the blog made me think about my current stage in life, almost exactly six years later. I started my retirement life less than a month ago. Where am I now in this big picture of life? The republican elected officials in our county successfully got rid of me from the committees that I volunteered on and replaced me with their conservative cronies, so my payback stopped. I could of course join other not for profit groups or volunteer more for my church. But let’s take a step back.

I described in my 2017 post that a questionnaire that I answered which asked me what was important in my job? I could now twist that a little and ask what I would think would be important in my retirement life, or better the rest of my life, whatever there is left? Was it:

• Money
• Benefits
• Freedom
• Research
• Teaching, or
• Perceived contribution to society?

Yes, money is important; however, we get our social security, pension and whatever we eventually dare to pull out of our savings or investments. Am I going to try to make a few extra bucks? Yes. This week I am doing a little extra teaching for some beer money, and a friend has asked for my resume for some extra consulting work. A headhunter was looking to get me a fulltime job for double the salary that I had been making, but I am just not sure if I want to keep working in a stressful job. Altogether, while money helps, it does not seem to be the direct route to happiness or better contentment or fulfillment.

In a previous post I already complained about the tardiness in getting my medical insurance squared away. But yes, health insurance is very important especially when you get older. So, continued benefits are important, especially when you get older and your health might start failing. Thank goodness, I feel great.

Ah, freedom. I addressed some of that in my previous post. No more alarm clocks, and we now have a clock that tells us what day it is, not what time it is.

The next three points somehow blend together. I am no academic, and since I graduated with my doctorate at an advanced age, I was 37, I was never able to get an academic position. In other words, research is what I make it to be. Most of the stuff I look up is for personal interest (which you all should be familiar by now) or related to my work (teaching, past and future). I am also researching some future road trips. Some of the research has been successful, and I have been on the winning side of lawsuits as expert witness. Most of these wins were the result of my research and a very skilled lawyer. Obviously, those days are over, but I still research items for my writings and for some of the teaching that I will continue doing during retirement. I already had a teaching gig the first 15 days into my retirement.

This teaching (and this blog, I hope) assist me in what I perceive is and can be my contribution to society. Giving you all a look at the inner workings of my brain as well as maybe teach you a little, convey a little of what I learned over the years. Hopefully this can be my legacy to society at large. Something to be remembered by, like my past students who during my retirement tour told me that they always learned something from me and my lectures. I have no large sums of money to start endowments or foundations, so this will have to do!

Now you know, why I think I am here, in life and on this blog. Again, if you are a regular reader, by now you know me and my interests. If there is an item you like me to research, discuss; let me know in the comment section of my posts and I will entertain it. Otherwise, I will just keep writing and updating you a few times per month.

Our friend Mason took this photo of me as part of a birthday celebration for a friend and me last week.

Our new (retirement) clock

Free at last? (6/4/2023)

The first few days of retirement are completed. We both retired on Wednesday; I attended my wife’s retirement lunch on Tuesday and she came to mine on Wednesday. We were both introduced to colleagues and supervisors (at the last minute of our employment). The only thing we often could say was “I heard so much about you.” In one instance at my wife’s luncheon one of her colleagues whispered in my ear: “and it is all true.” This was when I said that to her boss.

I can only tell you that it is true what people tell you, retirement is not for the weary. Time to relax, hell no! I already had two inquiries about jobs and if I would be so nice to apply for them or at least send in my resume. These past two days were used to unpack what we brought home from the office and to organize our new lives at home. My wife already had lunch with a very good (retired) friend, who can’t wait for more companionship. I had dinner with her husband, also one of my best friends. Saturday and Sunday were not different, we were constantly on the go. No rest and relaxation here, yet.

Of course, in addition to all this, the past few days have been filled with discussions about our finances. Will we have enough money to maintain our now past lifestyle? On top of that it seems that my health insurance is screwed up. This ranges from Medicare part B to the supplemental part. It is a complete mess. Hopefully everything will work out; however, I better do not get sick in June. Folks at Social Security appear to be so inept, you tell them that you are retiring on June 1 and apply for Medicare at the same time and then did not put anything in the remarks section about wanting Medicare to start on June 1 which I assumed would be self-evident, but no! Moreover, there are no instructions that you had to fill out a starting date. Whomever entered the data did not bother to ask or question things. I learned assume consists of three words: ass, u and me. In other words, I should have known better, and it really made an ass out of me and guess what I think of you (u) right now, social safety net? Oh well, this will come to pass, if I get sick, I might need to start a go-fund-me page to pay for my medical bills this month.

A quick report on last week’s travel. My last trip for the state was to Abingdon. It was an emotional trip for me at times. I greatly enjoy the Southwest, or better the southwestern part of the state. While they are more conservative, I can somehow understand why and accept it. They feel left behind as I think I outline in a previous post. The two days teaching was good, I met with a lot of folks that I have taught over my 14-year career as an instructor for the state. Moreover, I got to eat and drink in places I visited before. It was a fun trip. All I can say is that I will return to the area, but now socially and to explore. This was not my last visit.

Since we are now the proud owners of a camping van (I mentioned this for the first time here), my wife and I are talking about maybe producing a more detailed travel blog, or maybe even starting a YouTube channel for me, where I can talk more about nature, bonsai, stormwater, and our travels. We will see what is going to happen in the future. Stay tuned folks, but as I promised, this blog will go on! By the way, our first trip was to Belle Isle State Park, a place we visited before for some day hikes. It was recommended to me by one of my students in Lynchburg as a great site to go camping, and I dare say it was great. The fun part there was that during our trip we ran into a past student of mine from Staunton (2-hour drive from Belle Isle). He works for VDOT (Virginia Department of Transportation) and was on visiting the area as well. Crazy when you know so many folks around the state. It somehow amazed my wife how well known I am. Retirement is a double edged sword; I have to behave myself. Well, not really.

Our setup at Belle Isle, we had fun.

My wife and Radar enjoying the outside and waiting for that beer.

On the Creeper Trail in Abingdon

A selfie in my last class in Abingdon

Death comes easy. (2/17/2023)

Boy, it has been almost more than a month since I posted something here on my blog. In my eyes I have a valid excuse for it, but then, don’t we all have that when we procrastinate? But I really do! In the intermediate time, my wife got COVID, and my 95-year-old father-in-law had an accident and passed away, died, kicked the proverbial bucket! Since my wife had COVID during the onset of the whole affair, I all the sudden was trusted into the middle of it all as the main care giver, which left me little time to attend to this blog.

OK, if this hasn’t left some of you gasping for air, let’s dive into the details and a little of my feelings. I’ll try not to make this a tearjerker or terribly sentimental, I promise, I just want to share some of my observations and feelings. I still feel that I have been burning the candle at both ends and somehow got through it without COVID. My wife and I received our booster around the same time. Moreover, we did not isolate after she felt sick and tested positive. My only explanation is that I was running on adrenaline and that this somehow protected me.

She came down with it on a Monday evening. I had to teach an online class on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. In addition to this I had to take care of a sick wife. My father-in-law was anxious that his daughter had COVID and although we tried to convince him it was not that bad; however, we could not visit him in the fear of infecting him. My wife had actually visited him the afternoon before she got sick. As a result, he had been isolated by his assisted living place as well in the fear that he was infected as well. He survived COVID earlier in 2022 so we hoped he still had enough antibodies. In addition, he had gotten a booster in November.

Things looked up on Thursday, but then Friday morning we got the word he was in the emergency room. He had fallen twice the night before. The wife was still in isolation, and it fell on me to find out what was going on. He was admitted to the hospital later that afternoon, which meant numerous hospital trips for me the next couple of days. On Tuesday they finally transported him to a rehabilitation unit 5 minutes from our home, which made it a bit easier on me. That Thursday my wife came out of isolation and was finally able to visit her father. He passed away the next Tuesday night (or maybe early Wednesday morning) around midnight. When he was in the hospital the doctor kept telling us he was 95 (almost 96) and that he was near death. Eventually it came out that he could no longer swallow and that he had two to three weeks to live. I am just happy that my wife, her brother, and our daughter got to see him while he was still alive in the rehabilitation/hospice unit.

All together, these were a rough combined two weeks. But as you can guess it is not over. Then comes cremation, memorial arrangements, lawyers, emptying apartments, you name it. It reminded me of 19 years ago when my mother died. I felt that I never had time to grieve until I got on the airplane to fly home. She died in the Netherlands, and I was there and watched her die. It was a sudden death; however, almost immediately I had to deal with a hysterical sister, the next day pick up my brother at the airport, make funeral arrangements, keep my brother and sister from killing each other, have a service, pack all her belongings, put her condo on the market and arrange the inheritance. Do this all, in one week. Having had no time to really grieve, I burst out in tears when the plane took off and cried or was hurting all the way home across the ocean, finally. As a result, I became alienated from both my sister and brother.

Death is interesting. You die and then it is over. When my father-in-law entered the rehab/hospice unit the doctor explained what was about to happen to him. The doctor told us that when he was about at the end of his story my father-in-law interrupted him and said, “and then I die.” He was an engineer and did not believe in anything after death. Neither do I, nor does my wife. It is wishful thinking that there is anything after death. Both my wife consider heaven here on earth and want to make it so.

My father believed in a strange form of reincarnation. Something like your spirit or soul returns to a great lake or a reservoir from which a minute amount comes to enter a new human (baby) to grow and develop. Once this conscious has grown and is fully developed and the host (person) dies it returns to the reservoir thus enriching the grand total making the overall grand mind richer in the log-term. It’s an interesting thought.

One final thought. Raquel Welch died this week at 82. Tim McCarver at 81. Whenever, I see those numbers I think “damn, 12 more years for me.” Thinking about it that way, it is not much fun. But then I could have a heart attack tomorrow. Mortality is not a prominent part of my thinking, but I am more aware of it now since I am getting older and closer to retirement <read here>. This afternoon, I saw two young chicks (sorry that sounds sexist, I know) smiling, walking their dogs. I could not help wondering if they are aware of their mortality and live in the moment. More and more, I am starting to appreciate everything I experience, life and nature around me. I hope you do too. Life is short and very precious.

I rarely post a picture of myself, but this is the most recent one of me with my father-in-law.  It was taken about three weeks before he died.  We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant.  You can see the edge of his margarita glass on the left side of the picture.  He enjoyed those.  On his death bed, while having hallucinations he kept hinting at drinking a beer or wanting to have a beer.  We should have smuggled one in!

Too Old to Rock 'n' Roll: Too Young to Die (4/1/2022)

I am starting to wonder if I am getting obsessed by getting old. Or maybe I am getting obsessed by changing. Who knows? In my latest post I lament about getting older and more sentimental and I even quote one of the blogs I wrote entitled “The old man and the woods” which is purely autobiographic. I write how “Old age is not for sissies” and about mortality. I am sure that I can probably find more when I start combing through my posts.

Am I really obsessed by it or just more aware of it? I really don’t know. For one, I know that I am getting slower. When I walk what I consider a decent pace, I get passed by folks and I rarely pass people. Yes, my knees are not in the best of shape, but that is probably also age related. I am faster than my brother-in-law who is a year older than I am, but he had a hip replacement. I am faster than my 95 year old father-in-law, surprise. We always joke that it is essential that you only need to be faster than the grim reaper, well I have this feeling our top speeds are slowly getting closer.

The other reason probably is that there isn’t a day that I am not reminded about retiring. We either talk about it at home (most of the time it is the topic de-jour), or someone asks me about it (when are you retiring, or aren’t you retired yet?) or tells me about their retirement. It is tough to think you are at the end of your career and feel you are slowly being sidelined, put on a dead-end track. While they tell you that they still value your contribution when you volunteer, they seem to pass you over when it comes to career choices.

Getting old comes with something else, something my wife pointed out, to my chagrin. She told me the other day that in addition to getting old: “You are no debonair!” Man that bugged the hell out of me! Not that desperately want to be super suave and well-groomed, but inside I sometimes feel like I am somewhat sophisticated, just a little bit. Can old men still be suave without looking creepy?

In the old days, I needed to be well dressed, groomed and wear formal clothes and a tie to work. This is not required working for the state; I have put in my dues, and the worst thing that could happen is that they could fire me for not following the dress-code, early retirement at 68!

Actually, my preference right now would be to retire and buy a piece of land of 10 to 20 acres. I would love to restore it to its pre-historic or pre-settlement condition. However, I would like to have an acre of two somewhere on that property to have a homestead. Of course there would be walking trails and the homestead would need to be as sustainable as possible, hopefully off the grid. I would not look like a debonair but more like a (old) rugged (unshaven) woodsman. I could even be a nudist on that property (weather permitting). I would still like to be able to care for my bonsai, have my wine cellar and a good beer collection.

A man can dream can’t he? But for one, the funds are lacking. What will come from all this? I have no idea, all I know is that I am getting a haircut tomorrow to look a little more civilized (debonair like?).

By the way, today’s writing kind of reminds me of the tune by Jethro Tull: Too Old to Rock ‘n’ Roll: Too Young to Die. Part of the Lyrics go like this:

The old Rocker wore his hair too long,

wore his trouser cuffs too tight.

Unfashionable to the end --- drank his ale too light.

Death's head belt buckle --- yesterday's dreams ---

the transport caf' prophet of doom.

Ringing no change in his double-sewn seams

in his post-war-babe gloom.

….

So the old Rocker gets out his bike

to make a ton before he takes his leave.

Up on the A1 by Scotch Corner

just like it used to be.

And as he flies --- tears in his eyes ---

his wind-whipped words echo the final take

and he hits the trunk road doing around 120

with no room left to brake.

And he was too old to Rock'n'Roll but he was too young to die.

No, you're never too old to Rock'n'Roll if you're too young to die.

Don’t worry, I am far from being depressed. I love life and still have fun. But a man can think sometimes: “am I too old to rock ‘n’ roll?” Nah! I am definitely too young to die!

Walking along the abandoned road in the woods behind our home. I do not need to be worried about being passed by other walkers.  Not many folks use these trails and here I am "forest bathing." These are my meditative walk with Jasper, my hound; taking up the sights, sounds and smells of nature that sustain me.  

Musings on getting old (10/30/2021)

One thing I am starting to realize more and more is that the saying: “Old age is not for the faint of heart” or maybe the way Betty Davis put it: “Old age ain’t for sissies” is real. So here I was checking out at the pharmacy after buying medicine for our 15-year-old dog Jake, who is still on his last legs, when I got the call that my 94-years-old father-in-law had fallen for the umpteenth time and was on his way to the emergency room. This was all after complaining a day earlier on our daily walk that my back, hip and knees hurt and that I am getting slower.

Oh well, who am I to complain. My wife comes back from the emergency room with the story that the doctor there tells my father-in-law, that since he is close to the end he might as well enjoy what is left instead of trying to prolong it as much as possible with drugs that have side effects that make life miserable. The nurse tells him he looks great, and when he says: “hell no” she tells him: “you don’t get to see what I get to see here in the emergency room.” My wife and I came to the conclusion that when you suffer you become selfish, and you have it worse than everyone else in this world; and yes, so do I.

I have written a few posts about getting old or getting older. But never about one of my major complaints with age: peeing! When I was young, we had peeing contests, who could pee the furthest. Now, especially in the morning, you wake up and lay in bed and boy you have to go and it comes slowly and not much. But at least it takes the pressure off the bladder, and then after walking around for five or ten minutes, all the sudden it hits again, and finally there is release or is it relief? I wonder what it will be like 10 or maybe 20 years from now.

My symbol of being able to pee a good distance!

But hopefully I will keep my mind, if not for me, at least for my wife. I think it would be the hardest for a spouse to watch their husband or wife lose their mind to Alzheimer or some other form of dementia. My father-in-law went through that, and it devastated him. It was his second wife, and they were married only seven years or so. She was obviously not my wife’s mother. In other words, while it was terrible watching her and my father-in-law go through it, it would have been worse if it was your own mother, and you would have known her all your life instead of only about ten years. I hope I never do this to my wife and daughter.

Wow, I better quit. The past post was about politics in our county, this one is introspective. What a difference a few days make. But it is important to think about: quality of life, enjoy it while you still can, enjoy others. Especially when you are young; however, even this old guy or my 94-year-old father-in-law can and should fight depression and enjoy life to the fullest. We only have one life to live and after that? Who knows.

Our County Politics (10/28/2021)

OK gang, if you do not like my politics, or when I write about my political, educational and sociological opinions, now is your time to close or skip this post, because I have something on my mind that I need to vent.

So here I go!

On Sunday, our local newspaper published an article on how our county was worried about its tax base. We are having a lot of lots and buildings in our county that are vacant. Previously, I read an article how a large grocery chain (Kroger) relocated with the promise that they would like to attract some good business into their old, vacated store. But no, a church renovated it; result being, they were nonprofit and tax exempt. In other words, a loss of tax revenue to our county. This has been an epidemic in our very conservative county; empty store fronts or invading churches. Our county officials are truly worried about it, and I can understand why, loss of voters, salary cuts?

Now it gets better. Like every good conservative county in Virginia, we need to be against what they call critical race theory, evolution, global warming, and all those other science things. Let’s not talk about vaccinations. So, the county officials are introducing an ordinance outlawing all this “crap” in order to dumb down our schools and ignore (whitewash) history, science and social justice and what really happened in our country’s past. Slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation, it never happened! The Civil War was either just a little disagreement among friends or aggression from the northern states. Who cares if half the county will be underwater 100 years from now? As long as we make money now and cut taxes (get votes); we will not be alive, and our greatgrandchildren be damned!

Now I am not necessarily anti-religious as most of you know, but I do trend liberal. But these short-sighted folks do not understand that the wealthiest counties and cities have the best, most well-rounded education systems in the world, have a gig-economy, can bike or walk to their grocery stores that have a great supply of foods, and have great non-chain funky restaurants and coffee shops. Limiting education causes wealthy educated folk to migrate out of these localities, only to be replaced by less educated poorer folks that commute to work and to these nice areas. Not that this is bad, we need them too. However, this generally will lead to lower property values, dollar general stores and Wallmarts, a lower tax base and a slow economic spiral downwards towards a new status quo.

No, I am not elitist, racist or whatever, far from it. We need a combination of people, everybody has value, whether you are an airplane pilot, a university professor, a teacher, or a garbage man. However, I am just living in a county where I am observing something disturbing: the complete contempt for a well-rounded education. Folks appear anti-education and want to tell educators what to teach their children. If so, why don’t they educate their children themselves, homeschool your kids damn it?

But again, education brings wealth. So does a livable community, including parks, greenspace, sidewalks, bike paths, funky restaurants and coffee shops as opposed to chains, and maybe even some limited public transportation. That will bring in the young, affluent, tax paying folks, the gig-economy that will pay the salary of the county supervisors. Something our board of supervisors apparently refuse to see and acknowledge.

Yes, it is nice to live here and wake up and find something like this guy in your back or front yard.  Or maybe not.  It is difficult to grow a nice yard without building a fence, and that is just a metaphor for what is happening in society including here in this county.  The conservatives trying to keep the liberals out.  

So how is your first pandemic going? (3/30/2020)

So how is your first pandemic going? At least for many of us it is, unless you are 102 years old and reading this darn blog, and if you do, you are out of your mind. I guess I am not counting HIV, SARS, Ebola and whatever else we had between 1918 and now. I am not telling you that those were not severe, but this one eats the cake. 

I have been social distancing for two weeks and a couple of days now. At least I get to see my wife at the end of the day. When I walk the dog, I get to see the regular folks walking down the street, and we greet each other from a distance. I also get to say hello to my coworkers every day during our check-in. This weekend we had a virtual dinner date with friends where we sat down on “WhatsApp” and had dinner together. Then we had a Zoom church service and a Zoom church meeting afterwards. While fun, rewarding and satisfying, nothing beats a one on one meeting with friends or colleagues. So, euphemistically, I will keep calling it house arrest. 

So how else do I cope with it all? I noticed that I am reading more. I am really enjoying a book entitled “The Invention of Nature, Alexander von Humboldt’s new world” by Andrea Wulf. I have increased my time on the social networks, watch more bonsai video podcasts and while in the beginning I did watch more news, that has diminished somewhat over time. I know the drill now, I know it will be a matter of time we are all going to get Covid-19, or the Corona virus. 

Why am I so certain about catching the darn virus? I think it is unavoidable. I just hope that I don’t catch it when the virus is at its peak, and I need to fight someone for a ventilator. I also hope that when I get it, they figured out what the medicine is to treat it, or maybe that they have developed a vaccine. Lastly, viruses that don’t mutate very fast, and this one does not seem to do that, are supposed to lose their potency or virulence after some time; that is after replicating in other people’s body over and over. In other words, the famous flattening of the curve. But enough of that. I want to report how my life in the pandemic is going. 

It was nice this week to be able to get out twice. I quickly ran out to mail two letters, get fertilizer for my bonsais and medicine for Jake the dog. It was nice to see people in real life, let me tell you. The second time was to take my father-in-law to the ophthalmologist. I stayed in the car but managed to sneak away to the Starbucks drive through for a cup of coffee. A real treat after two weeks without a Starbucks visit! It felt awkward to drive; the roads were relatively empty, except of course the drive-through at Starbucks. I think it took me 10 or 15 minutes to get through it. But it was worth it. 

Finally!  My first store bought Starbucks in a cardboard cup in two weeks!  I missed that face so much.

At home, life has changed; I have graduated from weekend cook to almost fulltime cook. I bake bread whenever I think it is needed. In the past it was mostly on Fridays. I am now the main dog walker and do not have any issue getting my daily 10,000 steps in. 

The latest bread I made: an 80% biga bread.  We are really enjoying this one.

While as a boy from the tropics I do like the heat, I don’t like it that it is getting warm that quickly, because it means that tick and mosquito season is almost here. It means that our back yard and the woods behind our home are going to be that haven for those pesky critters again. It means either pesticides on your body or no more walks in the woods until sometime in October. No we do not treat our yard, because we have bees. It means walking through the neighborhood with all its excitement as I mentioned in a previous blog post <here>. But truthfully walking in the neighborhood is fun. You learn a lot about talking with your neighbors; you need some social interaction. 

Probably the strangest thing is that I have taken up the routine of showering around 4 pm in the afternoon. It was something my mother used to do, and I am not sure if it is genetically ingrained or why it is. There are not many things that my mother did that I am particularly proud off and would like to mimic. However, it allows us to sleep a little later, get the coffee going and my wife of to work and get my day started. On top of that I always remember overhearing Jo-Jo, a female co-worker of mine in the 1990s telling Kathrine, another female co-worker how she would never allow a man sleep in her bed who had not showered before getting in bed. Moreover, if he blew his nose in the shower (without a tissue I assume), he would be kicked out of the house immediately; I am not sure if she even allowed him to put his clothes on. The idea of getting in bed clean always stood with me; I wonder if that is why my mother did it. But sorry, I do blow my nose in the shower; I know, this is too much information. 

I have cleared this nose in plenty of showers and sinks in my life and will continue doing so.

Oh well, just reaching out to all my readers about my (and your) fucking first pandemic experiences. Are we worried? Not for ourselves as much as for our 93-year-old father-in-law who is getting more and more depressed in self isolation. Hope you are all doing well medically, physically and mentally. Hope you all have enough toilet paper and have not yet killed a spouse, kid, pet or other loved one (canary?). Stay tuned and let me know how things are going with you.