Early February thoughts...

It's February, and I already feel the year slipping away.   

Okay...  maybe it's a little early to start lamenting the year going by too fast, but I do often feel a sense of desperation for how time seems to disappear faster each year.  Does anyone else out there reading this relate?

Something I've been doing for a few years now is recording life in journals/planners of a sort - something I create as I go. I tend to peter out by summer (which is a great disappointment when I look back at my journals), but each year I stick with it a little longer.  Fortunately, I record stuff on my phone's calendar, so at least I can look back for the dates that important-to-me things happened.  Being more of an optimist than not, every January I start a journal like this, and hope it will have staying power.  One of these years, maybe...

Before starting to fill my February calendar, I thought I'd take a moment to enjoy a clean calendar page.  Clean slates, fresh starts, opportunities are what I see above.  I tend to have little set in stone when turning over a new calendar page, but it doesn't take long before the days fill up and all those opportunities either start being realized, or they fade into the airy cloud of good intentions.

While we've turned chilly again, and snow is in the forecast, it was unseasonably warm the first three days of February.  Sunday was in the 50's and Monday was 68°F!  In the sunroom on Groundhog Day, I enjoyed how glorious were the colors I was crocheting with, as I sat like a cat bathed in sunlight, basking in its warmth. 

While true spring is a month and a half away on the calendar, and probably longer than that in temperatures, it was spring in my heart for a few days.  All stresses melted away, as thoughts of what I might plant in the garden tickled my imagination.

While the month started out very nicely here, and in spite of crooning over how great the warmth felt, I am not ready for the busyness of spring.  I have more cocooning to do.  More cooking of hearty meals.  More getting things in order, and house cleaning before we start traipsing in dirt and dust from outside all over again.

And breaking into all these pleasant things is the knowledge that there are many still suffering from hurricane damage in the southeast, and fire damage in California, and all kinds of pestilence and harms around the globe.  I sometimes struggle when life is going well for me, knowing it is hard for others.  Do you this too?  It seems a form of survivor's guilt.  Not productive except that it prompts me to pray and help when and how I can.  

How is it in your corner of the world?  Are you filled with the hope of coming spring, or struggling through the dreary cold of winter?  Or somewhere in between?  Every February I seem to find myself somewhere in between - this year glad for merely chilly temps instead of the bitter cold we had a few weeks ago; not wanting spring to come too early, but also eager to see things growing again.

As long as the earth endures, 

seedtime and harvest, 

cold and heat, 

summer and winter, 

day and night will never cease.

Genesis 8:22 (NASB)

Spare time...

There are seasons in life when spare time is easy to distinguish from, well...  committed time.  No matter where we are on the spectrum of having commitments, it's likely many of us would say we don't have enough spare time.  The funny thing I've come to realize is we can have both too much spare time, and feel like we have too little at the same time.  Transitions in life can cause one to think more deeply about time.

Regret for wasting time...

Maybe next time...

There's plenty of time for...

Time is going too fast...

Realizing it's too late to do some things...

As I've gotten older, it has become less true that time is money, but rather... time is opportunity.

While I didn't retire from a full-time job as I grew into senior citizen status, I did retire from my previous full-time and part-time responsibilities.  The first was retirement from being a homeschooling mom - and the myriad jobs that title was spread thinly across.  That retirement came in 2014 when our youngest son graduated from high school.   What I felt at that time was both glorious freedom to do what I wanted with my time, mixed with a fair amount of angst over not having any clear purpose to my days.  Fortunately, I have always been a maker, a DIYer of sorts, a person who's rarely bored.  Not never bored, but I can easily find things of interest to fill my time.  

I had been coasting in that space for a couple of years when I was asked if I'd be interested in working as a part-time caregiver for an elderly lady with dementia.  I substituted for a couple of weeks when the full-time caregiver went on vacation and I discovered I enjoyed this type of work.  At least, I enjoyed this type of work with this particularly lady.  That two weeks turned into me becoming a permanent sub, which turned out to provide a pretty perfect amount of work for me each week.  It was deeply satisfying work.

That job ended abruptly when COVID struck, and the work of the elderly lady's husband came to an end.  And then in a fairly short amount time, this dear lady's dementia and frailness required that she have more full time care than could be offered at home.

Suddenly, in early 2020 I was swimming in a sea of time again.  In the early weeks of COVID, I crocheted and cross stitched to my heart's content, but that was short-lived.  Without recounting my personal 2020, '21, '22 and '23, let's just say that the many and varied twists and turns of life dictated what needing doing, and I found myself over and over again very thankful to be "retired" and have plenty of "spare" time.  Of course, in reality, my spare time simply shrank to accommodate commitments I had no choice over.  

That is the way life goes sometimes.  And for the moment, life appears to have opened up more time for me again.  And yet, as 2024 has now moved into February, I'm already lamenting that the year is going too fast.   Even though I have plenty of time, there isn't enough.   I am finding this to be one of the painful paradoxes that accompanies growing older. 

With this new year, I'm in transition again.  I'm feeling stronger from all that last year held.  I feel mostly positive, and I'm ready to do things - like planning a garden.   

On this sunny day, the garden (way back there) looks almost as eager to be planted as I feel to start turning the soil again.

But it is still winter, and, fortunately, I have inside projects to choose from.  Some are house projects (like painting a wall here or there, or maybe even a linen closet, or sewing some curtains, or finally putting something on the walls after living here for over two years now.  And, of course, there are always craft projects calling.  And there's downsizing our "stuff" that needs to continue.  Speaking of which, I need to bring some better order to this office I'm sitting in...

Life just broke into my writing here.  A few minutes ago, a friend called to see if I have just a cup or so of milk she can use for making mashed potatoes.  Guests are coming and I'm significantly closer than the grocery store.  Such a quaint thing that doesn't happen much anymore.  I happily invited her to stop by, enjoyed a short chat, and then she was off - toting a 3/4's empty gallon of milk from the fridge.  Good feels all around.

I need to finish this up.  We are soon heading out to dinner and a concert with friends tonight.  While it will be cold and dark when we get back home, it will be pleasant to make the half hour drive in what remains of the warm sunshine.

I hope you have a beautiful week ahead.  And I hope you find you have plenty of time to do some things you truly want to do! 

Beautiful music enjoyed by all. 

Super Power or Super Simple? Is there a difference?

Today, Mrs. T from Across My Kitchen Table wrote a fun post about her "super power" - which was a response to a week-old Wednesday Hodgepodge question originally posted by Joyce at From This Side of the Pond.  I encourage you to read Mrs. T's post.  It made me smile and will probably make you smile too.  

The writing prompt was:   ...when was the last time you felt like Superman? What's your superpower? Explain."

~~~~~

Okay, I confess...  I don't have any super powers, but yesterday I had a highly successful moment that made me feel so completely satisfied, I decided to share it after reading Mrs. T's post.

We've had a lamp in our living room with a semi-broken switch on it for I don't even know how long.  We've never bothered to fix it because it works some of the time.  Often enough that it keeps us hoping the next time we need it, it will come on.

Well, yesterday evening - just as the news started, and after hubs had gotten the lamp turned on - I asked if he could turn it off because the reflection of the light really messed with my ability to see the debonair David Muir on the ABC World News Tonight (6:30 every weeknight in case you have no idea who I'm talking about).  

Anyway...  hubs looked at me disbelievingly and said, "Do you know how hard that lamp is to turn on?"  

To which I replied, "Tell you what, if you turn it off, I'll switch that lamp with the matching lamp by my chair after the news is over."  

He turned off the lamp.

Thirty-some minutes later I was true to my word.  I gave him my working lamp and schlepped the semi-broken lamp over to the chair I normally sit in.  

Realizing I would soon find the lamp frustrating, I  decided to fiddle around with the bulb socket, hoping it was a simple thing like bending a metal piece inside to make better contact with the bulb. 

No such luck.

So I asked Hub if we had any extra sockets out in the garage.

What?  You don't have extra lamp sockets laying around?  Hub's dad was an electrical engineer and I figured at some point Hub had brought home some old sockets, along with the old switches, outlets and various other electrical tidbits he'd found when going through his father's workshop after his passing - so it was a reasonable question.  

Hub went out to the garage and triumphantly appeared a couple of minutes later with a plastic box holding a variety of old sockets.   Old sockets because electrical engineer father-in-law never got rid of anything if it could possibly be used again - even if the last time it had been used was 1950.  FWIW, there were several old sockets in old, but never-been-opened packaging.  Great!  One of those, even if it was old, should work!

I knew replacing the socket wasn't a difficult thing to do (because it seemed to me that I'd done this at least one other time in my life), but try as hard as I could, I could not separate the base of the socket from the socket itself.  So I did what any red blooded can-do person does these days and I googled it.  The answer was to press where it says "Press Here".  😕

Incredulous that we had missed that, I tried pressing and pulling, but it wouldn't separate.  Thinking I must not have the hand strength, Hub tried and it still wouldn't separate.  There was only one thing left to do, and that was to replace the whole thing (base and socket).  

I shuffled through the plastic box of old lamp sockets and found one that was the least worst match for our silver-colored (probably brushed nickel) lamp.

And in about 5 minutes I had that socket changed, and the lamp put back together.  And we now have two (well, actually four) perfectly good lamps in our living room!   And truth be told, I much prefer this old fashioned and simple push on/push off switch to the 3-way turn-knob switch that it replaced.

Husband looked at me rather admiringly...  And I knew what he was thinking (because he's said it many times")  "You're the mechanic in the family."

Which isn't saying a lot, but it's true.

And now, I'm feeling pumped to find some old lamps to rewire and re-outfit with working switches. I'm a fan of old lamps.  Maybe someday I'll take pictures of the ones we have  Actually, I think we only have three old (and by old, I mean older than me) lamps in the house, and one (non-working one) in the garage.   I think that's soon to change now, though.

Did I say I'm a fan of old lamps?

Old lamps will be the subject of a future post, I'm thinking...

So what's your super power?

Random Moments

My boys sometimes tell me I'm random.

Thinking that is not quite a compliment, I try to deny it. Though I've had to admit that sometimes my thoughts do come out in a rather random fashion. Somehow with my girlfriends the free-flowing conversations don't sound so random. With my boys, they evidently do.

Personally....I prefer to think of my occasionally saying random things as "seizing the moment".

Like this morning when my teen walked by on his way to the bathroom to take his shower. His hair was all mussy and his eyes were only half opened. I said good morning. He said good morning back. I decided to seize the moment and said, "I love you."

He looked at me funny and said, "Mom, you are so random."

I said, "No I'm not." Denying it (like I always do).

He didn't buy it. He insisted I was random (like he always does).

I said, "Well okay....but telling someone you love them is supposed to be random."

He smiled and said, "Okay. Love you too, Mom."

Seize the day! One random moment at a time.

And they think I'm random....

~~~~~