Stories of my life 3 (moving) (2/19/2025)

I have lived in my current home for almost 25 years now. Since I am almost 72, that means that I have lived here 34.7% of my life. Before moving to our current domicile, I moved approximately eleven times before getting married. That does not include four longer vacation stays (more than a month) in the Netherlands. Once out of college I served in the Dutch army at three different locations during the 16 months that I served. Moving while in the Army was easy, just a large duffle bag. We got married while serving on the last military base and that allowed me to move into civilian housing. We rented a vacation home on a Dutch camping nearby, where we lived for the first few months. First, we rented a camper from a minister but left after a few weeks when he tried to get into my young bride’s pants. Not very surprising from a religious leader trying take advantage of a young girl. A young (she just turned 22) somewhat vulnerable lady in a foreign country who doesn't speak the language, trying to fuck her. Then to think that he was married and had two young daughters. We moved into a ramshackle cabin on the same camping after that and we lived there for two months.

After leaving the service we lived in at least 13 more locations, not counting brief stints of a few weeks with both sets of parents. Twenty-eight moves or new homes in the first fourty-seven years of my life. On average , I moved from one place to another every 1.67 year or every one year and eight months. During that time I lived in nine countries (that count includes two islands in the Caribbean) on five continents (placing the two islands as Central or South America). Phew, I am tired of thinking about all that travel and moving. But on the other side, I miss it at times.

During the past thirty years I had careers that required a lot of traveling. First as a consultant I traveled for the various projects I was assigned to. I traveled to Los Angeles and a week later I was in New Hampshire or up state Pennsylvania. Then it was Louisiana or Michigan; you get the idea. When I took a job as an instructor for the state of Virginia, I was required to travel overnight at least two weeks per month, albeit in State. I liked the pleasure of solo traveling, be it by car or by air. While traveling with colleagues is fun, I somehow liked to be alone, for meals or just in my motel room. I assume that is a true sign of being an introvert, although my wife think that my claim of being an introvert is pure bull shit. However, my career forced me to be out in public and act extroverted. Marketing is the game as a consultant; although I was never good at it or comfortable with it.

And now I am retired. Do I miss the traveling? Yes and no.

Since retirement I have been across the country three times; really from the east coast to the west coast. I have written about these trips <here>, <here> and <here>. We camped at least three times around our state and stayed in a cabin at a state park. I should not forget our camping trip to the eastern shore of Maryland. Finally, another solo trip this year to Missoula, MT where I explored Walden and Desert Solitaire with a group of like-minded folks as part of the “Listening to America” organization.

Today I got the news that a friend of mine passed away last night; I am going to miss you, Roy! At least Roy led a good life (although you might say he was not kind to his own health). During retirement he and his wife travelled to South Africa, Egypt and to Petra in Jordan, just to name a few places. Other retired friends are currently in the Galapagos Islands; another good friend spent ten days in Marocco straight after retiring this year, and finally some very good friends just returned from a trip down under (New Zeeland and Australia), they were in Finland last year. I told my wife today that we better do some traveling before it is too late. Although we have seen a lot of this world and tell people things like “been there, done that, loved it, and got the t-shirt,” there are still places I would like to explore or even revisit.

Here I am in the woods behind the house I now have lives almost 25 years.  I love to walk and explore these woods, I forest bath as much as I can.  After 25 years I am starting to feel restless and start thinking of moving closer to our daughter. 

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!

 

Life goes on (1/13/2024)

It has been a while and is time to give you all an update. Retirement is still going smoothly, but I am a busy beaver, that is for sure. So, let’s have a little bit of an update. What has been going on since the beginning of January (yes, I promise that I will write more frequently).

For one, my church (the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Peninsula or UUFP) has decided that we need to move in order to grow more (have more members). During the past years we have had discussions about growth and is so how to do that. It was decided that we needed to move to larger facilities since the decision was made that we wanted to increase our membership, and we could not do that at our current location. After an exhaustive search for over two years, we found a place. When I toured the place, it was obvious that there were flooding issues at the church. Guess what, the church has a stormwater expert, me. And that is where the bulk of my time went.

What was wrong? Somehow, it became evident that there were and probably still are engineers who still think that water can be made to flow uphill. It seems that the church expanded in the past and as a result created an alleyway or what we call a breezeway. Whatever the name is, this breezeway is located between two huge expanses of roofs which all drain into a gutter system that does not work. In other words, the breezeway floods. The problem is that this breezeway has no outlet or what is thought to be the outlet is higher in elevation than the breezeway itself. In other words, water must flow up hill to get out of the area. Well, good luck.

Here I came into the picture. I analyzed the problem, spent some time in the alleyway and the entire property during rainstorms, developed a conceptual idea on how to solve the issue, get an idea of how much a solution would cost, so we can use that in the negotiations with the seller, and finally present my findings to the church members. Maybe soon I will detail what my ideas are in this blog.

In addition to all this, I am working on the tiling of our powder room. It is almost done; I still need to do some grouting. Don’t worry, pictures will follow of my masterpiece. On top of all this, we are having work done on the gazebo. It desperately was in need of a gutter system as well, and this was done this past week. But I had to take the string lights off, put them back on and buy a rainbarrel.

I present a class at the end of February, and I need to finalize that course. In other words, it looks like retirement is busier than employed life.

Yes, we take it easy as well. We settled into a schedule of going to bed around 11:30 and waking at 7:45. No, we do not set an alarm. Coffee, breakfast and dog walking takes us to 11:30 and then life starts in earnest.

I have started an excel spreadsheet where I track all our expenses and income. Our financial advisor told us that in addition to our retirement check we needed a set amount of money from our savings to keep the standard of living we had before retirement. This amount would keep our nest egg intact, based on some assumptions. However, we have no idea what we were spending our money on and how much. In addition, we don’t even know if the assumptions are correct. As you can see retired life is exciting, but I would not want to miss it one bit.

This is a photograph of the breezeway.  The staining on the concrete shows the lowest point in the system.  The sandbags indicated to us that there were flooding issues.

Work in progress at home.

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

From high on top of my perch (12/10/2010)

From high up my perch, there is the Amazon Prime guy, again. No, not for us. For the folks across the street. Not that we do not spend our money there. Heck, we are bleeding Amazon money, but not today. My wife even yelled to me, up the stairs: “Was that for us?” Actually, Alexa would tell us. “Alexa what are my notifications?”

However, I did not want to talk about Alexa or Amazon. I wanted to talk about my roost upstairs, overlooking the road in front of us. At times it is distracting as well as entertaining sitting here looking out of my window.

You get to see a baby blue unmarked construction vehicle with a ladder on the roof, and there goes the Prime vehicle, on its way back out of the neighborhood. People going to work, coming home. You see the regulars, walking their dogs: Bill walking Sophie; the woman walking Chaco; the guys from around the corner walking their what looks like a scotty but much larger; the big guy who collects military vehicles but actually is somewhat meek with his dog; the older lady who first walks her dog and then you see her speed walking by. You have your regular runners, the women with strollers, the groups of women trying to exercise and lose weight (I think). There is a (I think retired) couple who walk by every afternoon hand-in-hand, she is about 2 or 3 inches taller than he is. I also see people walk about 10 homes and walk back and I think: “is that all.”

You have a few individuals, but I suspect they have some social anxiety. Not bad, but it took a long time for them to even acknowledge me when I was outside and met them on my (or our walk). Especially one gal, she walks straight like an arrow, her arms cocked and really out to get some exercise. She is fun; you can sometime catch her and her husband shooting bow and arrow in their back yard. The other day I watched them throwing knives and axes.

Then there are cyclists. In the morning, there are often two cyclists on recumbent bikes. These two do not live in the neighborhood, but it is safe to bike here. I know they do not live here because they are members of the yacht club we belong to, and I know where they live. While typing this I have already seen two others bike by. The fun part is the kids from two houses down. They love to bike. But, the minute I step out off the front door, they race home, throw their bikes on the front lawn and run in the house. My wife and I are known as extremely liberal and these kids’ parents are T-party conservatives (Q-anon?). I wonder if the kids were told to watch out for us because we eat kids? I always smile at them and wave. You get the picture.

Finally, you have my favorite: Felicity. Felicity is pregnant; she walks her Great Dane: Bruce, who is a friend of our dog. When Bruce escapes from his home or yard, he comes to visit us, to play with Jasper out dog. Felicity has four kids already and you know she is coming by when you see some of her sons on a little bike coming by. They herald her and Bruce. Felicity and gang will sometimes stop over to talk and play in our yard, which is a welcome distraction from teleworking and looking at a computer screen. No cannibalistic fear here! Oh well, just some musing while looking out of the window. But now I have to go downstairs; the mail lady just delivered a (Christmas?) package.

There goes Felicity and Bruce.  I was prepared and knew they were coming by because there were little boys on small bike that  came by heralding her imminent appearance.  (photo was taken on November 16 when I still have leaves on the trees, now a month later it is all bare).

Home baker (3/15/2015)

I’m a baker of bread.

Our whole wheat bread

Well you say that’s different, here the nomad talks about baking bread, and not his usual travel, observations of nature or even politics.  In addition doesn't the nomad have enough hobbies?  If you are a regular reader, you know I sail, bike, take photos, read, garden, love to cook, wood work (not lately), grow bonsai (although they have been neglected lately), and love my beers and wines.  In addition, I love to do a Sudoku so now and then as way of relaxing.  On top of that I have a full time job.  If I am not teaching he has a two and a half the three hour commute each day (an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half each way).  I might have mentioned that I love to lay brick and my wife and I have built all kinds of (good looking) structures in the yard (a shed and a wood shed).  I am getting tired from typing all this down for my blog (oops another hobby).  I guess this probably makes me mediocre in everything I do, or maybe not.

Why would a person do all this?  I really don’t know.  My mother always told me I know a little about a lot of things or as they say in the English language, that I was a Jack of All Trades but a Master of None.  Maybe it is escapism, attention deficit disorder, I don’t know; I think ADD was invented after I graduated from college.  I started to look up on Google the term "Jack of All Trades" and interestingly Wikipedia describes it as follows:

“Jack of all trades, Master of none” is a figure of speech used in reference to a person that is competent with many skills but is not outstanding in any particular one."

In his blog, David Mansaray laments that being competent inherently means that you have a certain level of mastery, so in a way the term is a contradiction in itself.  Yes, the blog by Mansaray is more than 4 years old I think, but it is still valid.  Sometimes I hear the words "Renaissance Person" which Wikipedia defines as:

"a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas"

Two fascinating concepts.

Oh well leave it to my mother to tell me which of the two I am.  But then I really do not think there is much difference between the two.  However, like Mansaray I strongly believe that it is important to be multifarious and I am not sure if society encourages this enough.  It seems we are more interested in specialists than in generalists.  I have this thirst to learn things, and I when I stop doing that, I'll stop living.  I still believe that my hands should be able to do what my eyes can see (maybe with the exception of buttoning the cover to the comforter in our bed).

Back to my bread making habit.  I really miss the European breads and the only bread that we find palatable at our house is one that we buy at Costco.  Lately we are seeing that even those loaves are slowly going down hill and that they have an overdose of salt in them.  This prompted me to revive one of the things I did when I was unemployed six years ago, and that is baking bread.  (Here is a previous post on bread baking).  It really is not that difficult, and I have started making a whole wheat bread that is healthy and has really none of the bad things in it like corn syrup, azodicarbonamide, and L-Cysteine.  These chemicals do not belong in bread!  Moreover, my bread has no white flower in it, albeit a little malt which I bought at a shop for beer brewers.

In addition to the brown bread, I make a (Dutch) currant bread, which is such a success that I currently get orders (from my father-in-law).

The results of a Saturday of baking

The nice thing about baking is that it is meditative, it taste good, it is healthy and you have plenty of time between the rising and baking to pursue your other interests and hobbies.  Even when traveling it is good to be home, stay active and have good bread.