Idle essays

Earlier this month Donna Freedman published a winsomely rueful meditation on the way she’s changed over time. Case in point: in her reaction to small mistakes that cost her money.

That each of us is a different person at 40 from the one we were at 18 is a commonplace. It’s a given that we’re going to change. The question is, how much and in what direction?

Recently The New York Times published a report on a study showing that most of us are aware of how much we’ve changed from a “younger me,” but that we tend not to recognize that the “future me” will change just as  much or more from our present incarnation. Researchers dubbed this the “end of history illusion.”

It’s an  interesting idea — that we think the wonderfulness that is us right now represents the height of our personal evolution and so think we’re unlikely to change much more.

I wonder if that’s so. Or if it is true, by knowing this quirk exists, can we overcome it and anticipate or control the changes coming to us?

Recently I’ve become aware of a number of fairly abrupt changes in my own thinking and attitudes.

Number one change:

Yes, I’m afraid it’s true:
I’m no longer “funny” about money.

Not only have I lost the obsession about money, I hardly even give a damn.

Whence this bizarre new attitude? No idea.

It may have something to do with the decision to quit teaching and the realization that even if The Copyeditor’s Desk never earns another penny, there’s enough in savings to support me and pay my share of the Downtown House. It wouldn’t be ideal, but it wouldn’t do much harm, either.

Or it may reflect the fact that the business actually is meeting its revenue goal, at least for the moment: this month I billed twice the 2013 monthly goal.

The January AMEX billing cycle ended yesterday. Because I put all my discretionary spending on the card, that means the December/January discretionary budget cycle just closed, too. I figured I was going to have to borrow from savings to pay the bill, because I spent myself stupid this month: a pair of hiking boots, a new All-Clad stockpot, a couple hundred bucks on gardening supplies and plants, a dentist’s bill, three lunches out, even a dinner out (!), a new pair of Costco jeans, a prescription not covered by the Medicare Part D rip-off…holy mackerel! Expected to be about $300 to $400 in the hole.

But no! At the end of the day, I’d run the AMEX budget just $91 into the red. Because the checking account has $300 left over from last month, I won’t even have to take money out of Diddle-It-Away Savings to cover these indulgences.

That’s nice, but it doesn’t explain why I wasn’t worried. Other way around, actually: because I’ve quit worrying about money, I spent money on things that the Old Me probably wouldn’t have.

Another big change that’s occurred recently is that I am sick and tired of sitting in front of computers all day. Really. The realization that oiling the furniture and kitchen cabinets felt better than parking myself at a desk amounted to a revelation. I don’t wanna do this anymore! I want to go outside and play.

That’s not very practical, of course…I still do have to earn at least part of a living. However, the housekeeping task-a-day scheme represents a manifestation of that impulse. It gives me a reason to get off my duff and move around for an hour or so, even if it’s only around the house.

Not only does it provide an excuse to move about, it’s actually working to keep the house clean. With the house no longer looking like a dank cave (who knew light would come in windows if you clean them?), I find I want to be in other parts of the house. The bright, clean kitchen now invites me to cook better and more elaborate dishes, and to eat better. The uncluttered, undusty living and family rooms want me to sit out there and not hole up in the office.

Now that I’m not teaching and so not filling the hours with a stress-inducing activity, I’m sleeping better. Like amazingly better: seven or eight hours a night, without a little help from my friends! Maybe not coincidentally, I’m also drinking less.

The question is, can we anticipate or direct these changes in outlook or character?

To do so, we’ll have to shuck off the illusion that we’ve achieved the peak of our glory as of today. Dan P. McAdams, a Northwestern University psychologist, speculates that the end-of-history effect reflects “a failure in personal imagination.” To get past it, then, we would need to jump-start our imagination.

That would require first thinking about how personality traits shift with age. One thing is for sure: our quirks get more exaggerated as we grow older. A little stubborn at 20, were you? By 60 you may be downright pig-headed. Our opinions may become set in stone. Or they may flip completely — in my 20s I was a Goldwater Girl and so staunch an anti-Communist that I used to read John Birch Society publications. Today I vote for the likes of Barack Obama, regard my state’s right-wing legislature and its appointees as a kookocracy, and spend a fair amount of my time hanging out with homosexuals, lesbians, and people of color.

But that could also reflect a social change: in the Republican Party of 2012, Barry Goldwater would be a moderate. To consider how we might change in the future, we would need not only to imagine how our own personality traits might evolve, we also will need to consider how the culture around is is likely to change and how our personal circumstances will change.

To imagine how you might change over time, you’d almost have to imagine all of the future: what will the world be like in twenty years, and how will you adapt to it?

Do we know anything about the future? Well…

We can be pretty sure most Americans will have less as a very few continue to gather more. “Most Americans” applies to virtually all of us here at this blog.

Almost certainly our children will have fewer opportunities than those of us who are over about 40 had.

Education will continue to grow more costly, so that middle-class adults will be mired in debt most of their lives.

Medical care may (or may not) become more widely available but at the same time will become even less accessible than it is now, and quality for the average person on the street will continue to degrade.

Pay rates will continue to move toward Third-World levels as American companies continue to offshore work, including white-collar and “professional” jobs.

Laws governing our movement and behavior in public and in our private lives will become more restrictive.

Surveillance of our movements in public and in private will become more pervasive.

The impetus to get rid of “safety nets” and other forms of collective altruism will never go away and may in the end triumph.

Global warming will affect urbanized societies, pushing populations away from ocean shores but also stressing cities with drought and extreme weather events. Power grids may be affected for longer periods over wider areas.

If these things come to pass, the average American will have to continue learning to get by on less; attitudes toward frugality that have developed after the crash of the Bush economy will become more permanent.

Concepts of family and familial duty may change, as adult children will be expected to provide care for elderly parents who formerly were covered by government programs. More families may seek collective housing that will accommodate three or even four generations.

Ideas about personal health care and eating habits may change.

Just those few possibilities may cause individual personal shifts like these:

If you’re still in your working years, you may start to feel that caring for yourself and your family is far more important than career.

You might become more open to the idea of housing that would let your parents live under the same roof with you. Or you might conceive the idea of housing your family in a compound of small dwellings on the same lot, allowing several generations to live together not just now but far into the future.

You might lose interest in saving for the future, as it becomes increasingly difficult or even impossible to do so on a low salary under a heavy debt load.

Or you might become obsessive about saving for old age, to the point of becoming miserly in your present day-to-day life, knowing that any old-age support system that survives will do nothing to keep you out of poverty.

You might change your attitude about living with your kids, and you might start priming them to expect that they will have to care for you to some extent when you reach advanced old age. You or your spouse may decide to be a stay-at-home parent.

You could become more open to “alternative” healthcare strategies that are not science-based, as it becomes more difficult to get in to see medical doctors and as doctors have less and less time to listen to you.

Your political thinking could change as changes in the way government functions affect you positively or negatively.

Your thinking about the distribution of work within a family might change, as changes in education, pay, and access to medical care continue.

Seeing that the trend to convert higher education into voc-ed produces a nation of ignoramuses led by a small elite with more sophisticated intellectual training, you might change your thinking about the purposes of higher education.

Pretty complex, isn’t it? I think it’s not so simple as a “failure of imagination.” Change happens slowly, not only within us but all around us, so that often we’re not even aware of the change happening. To envision yourself ten or twenty years on down the line, you have to envision not just yourself but a lot of things and a lot of people as they may be in the future.

How do you imagine the Future You?

Garrison Keillor was in town today. Tina, M’hito, and I bought tickets to the late afternoon show, which we prefaced with a splendid meal at our favorite fancy restaurant in Tempe. The recent cold snap has done snapped and gone, so we were able to sit outside in the restaurant’s pretty garden.

While we were there, Tina spotted her favorite Suns player. 🙂 On the way out she had to stop and tell him how much she admired him, and to our amazement he agreed to let M’hijito take a picture of the two of them together. LOL!

So that was a high point.

We all enjoyed the show. It was a good thing we got out there three hours early and loafed around the restaurant after lunch. The place was packed. Gammage Auditorium, a sort of a wedding cake created by Frank Lloyd Wright in his dotage, holds more than 3,000 people, and every seat was sold.

The weather is back to its balmy self: 70ish during the day and mid-40s at night. Too late to save our plants: M’hijito says his lemon tree got the coup de grâce, another icing too much for it after the freeze we had two years ago. All of my citrus are also freezer-burned; to what extent they’ll be permanently damaged remains to be seen, but I’m pretty sure the lime will lose about a third of its canopy.

Several years late and many dollars short, I finally had a little insight that will remove a great deal of hassle from the potted plant freeze protection frenzy.

Usually I drag all the outdoor potted plants inside, which gets them out of the deep-freeze but makes a mess in the house and also makes it difficult or impossible to water them. Usually we get rain when temps drop into the 30s and 20s, but the drought continues — not a drop of precip for weeks. The freezing nights lasted a week this time, so by the time the plants could be safely dragged back outside, they were pretty parched.

You’ll recall my white-trash scheme to protect the potted ficus from last summer’s broiling dawn sun, which came pouring onto the back patio after the Devil-Pod Tree was cut down? Looked tacky but worked.

Well, it struck me that with the addition of just a few more cuphooks screwed into the beams holding up the back patio roof and the westside deck roofs, I could simply hang a few of the 87 gerjillion old sheets and defunct curtains (never throw away a piece of fabric!) to enclose those two spots. Many of the plants are already on tho patio or the deck; the others aren’t far from them. So with the help of the dolly, it would be easy to tuck all the potted plants inside a curtained space. Then get a few halogen shoplights, set them inside the “tents” — making sure they’re a good long way from anything flammable — and plug ’em in.

This would almost certainly protect the plants from the kind of light freezes we get around here; and since no fabric would be directly in contact with their foliage, they should escape the kind of freezer-burn they get where frost touches their covering.

Brillyant, eh?

When the weather’s better, strings of lights could be draped along the hooks, creating some nice decorative lighting.

Coming home to a sparkling clean house was also mighty nice, for a change. The scheme to break up the tiresome and tiring housecleaning project into small, once-a-day tasks is working in a big way. It’s so much easier. This morning the bathrooms were clean before I was even out of my nightshirt.

In addition to allowing you to keep the house clean without having to dedicate a half to a full day each week to unpleasant work, it can also let you devote more time to a given task to do a job more completely and better. Yesterday was “clean-the-kitchen” day. After the routine sink, stove, and countertop polishing, I cleaned the oven manually, something that’s been pending since the discovery that the self-cleaning function is unusable.

So that leaves me with a clean warming oven that can’t be used for much else. Anything that might splatter grease or drip juices will have to be cooked in the grill. Pisses me off, but at least if I ever put the house on the market, I won’t have to stick my head in a metal box full of Easy-Off fumes.

The furniture that got oiled earlier in the week still looked great, so I decided to take the English oil to the kitchen cabinets, too. That was a big job. Though there aren’t very many of them, rubbing oil into woodwork that goes all the way to the ceiling and then polishing it off isn’t much fun. But it worked. The damn kitchen practically glows in the dark!

What an incredible sensation, to walk into a kitchen in the morning and find it completely, totally clean!

All this cleaning and gallivanting and wrestling with yardwork has kept me away from the computer, not an unwelcome development.

Lately I’ve come to feel mighty sick of sitting in front of a computer monitor. It’s no wonder my back hurts — who knows how many of this year’s little ailments have been brought on by spending hour after hour sitting at a desk? When scrubbing toxic oils into cabinetry and furniture feels like a welcome break, you know you’ve been sitting on your tush way too long!

This morning I walked away from 104 unread e-mails, several of them from clients and from FaM’s ad agent. Just couldn’t bring myself to deal with them.

This afternoon I deleted every blat from Twitter and Facebook and routed future messages from those sites into the trash. Deleted every blat from Google Calendar, figured out how to make it quit sending “notices” saying “you have nothing doing today,” a constant annoyance. This cut the urgent e-mail chores to only 30. And they will have to wait until tomorrow. I’m not workin’ on that stuff on a Saturday night.

Really. E-mail has morphed from a convenience to a nuisance. No wonder the young people decline to use it in favor of texting.

Image: Garrison Keillor. Jonathunder. GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

 

A little revelation dawned today: a part of a large job that I thought was the easiest part is actually the largest PITA and the hardest part of the job. Is it possible that when we think of a job that consists of a series of tasks, we may over- or underestimate the amount of energy or time required for any given one of those tasks?

As you may recall, if you’re doggèd enough to read this blog all the time, a week or so ago I decided to follow my friend KJG’s advice to divide the misery that is housecleaning into one task a day. This scheme has many things to recommend it, not the least of which is that one can maintain one’s shack without the weekly housecleaning frenzy that reduces one to a blob of exhausted jelly.

The plan  has been chugging right along this week: Monday, vacuum & dust-mop 1860 square feet of tile floors; Tuesday, steam-mop floors; today, dust and do pool maintenance…

Okay. Vacuuming and dustmopping were pretty easy. Steam-mopping the whole house: piece of cake. Dusting…ho-o-o-llleeee mackerel!

Maybe it’s because I haven’t done a halfway decent job of cleaning in more months than I’ve been alive. Or maybe it’s because I hate it, because here in lovely uptown Arizona you can dust the furniture on a Wednesday and write your name on the coffee table on Thursday. Something there is about futility that doesn’t lend itself to enthusiasm. Or…maybe it’s that dusting seven rooms of furniture, blinds, ceiling fans, bookcases, framed pictures, framed mirrors, door frames, molding, curtain rods, and miscellaneous doo-dads is, objectively, a MUCH larger job than merely pushing a machine or a dustmop across a couple thousand square feet of flooring.

Thot i wuz gunna DIE by the time i finished!

Part of the problem is, I’ve neglected this job for way, way too long. “Dusting” has entailed a kiss-and-run swat with a microfiber rag for lo! these many months. With the day focused on just one job, one is led to think…

• Gosh, those beloved Thos. Moser chairs are looking downright dessicated.

• Is there anything I can do about those gouges in the top of the family room desk?

• When did this chair in the bedroom develop a crack in its underpinnings?

• Dang, but my office desk is filthy! Can’t I scrub up all that body oil and grime from around the keyboard and rodent?

• How is it possible for so much dust to have accrued on the lampshades?

• Why does the rodent, in the absence of a mouse pad, deposit a galaxy of gummy little black spots all over the desktop?

• Maybe one ought not to pile a modem, a router, a gadget with a jillion USB ports, a defunct cell phone, a camera case, and a spaghetti pile of cables into one box thingie at the back of the desk.

• Why has it taken two microfiber rags to dust the bedrooms and now already I need another clean one?

• I’m going to have to sit down with a dry paintbrush to get the dust off all these accursed fake flowers and foliage.

And so on.

But neglect aside, I suspect that what seems like a small part of the project really has always been much larger than I perceived.

Consider: in the first place, you can’t pick up the office so as to find surfaces to dust without tending to the vast piles of paper that flow in through the mail. So the day started out with bookkeeping and filing tasks that I never welcome. Took an hour to move the junk off the desk, and there wasn’t even that much junk!

Or there was: Entered data from three months’ worth of brokerage and IRA statements. One could say I got behind…considerably behind.

Same is true with the rest of the rooms: stuff has got to be picked up and put away or thrown out before you can get to the stage where you can clean the dust off things.

Often, too, one repair or another has to be made, and these tasks may expand into more tasks. Today, for example, I happened to remember my mother’s folk remedy for scratched table tops: walnuts. This required me to defrost a walnut, since said provisions reside in the freezer.

Massaged a great deal of walnut meat and oil into the maze of scratches ripped into a rather beautiful desk top by whatever mystery material had attached itself to my laptop one day. A stone, presumably. Whatever, it made one heckuva a mess.

As a matter of fact, the walnut trick worked pretty well. Of course, it didn’t fill in the deep scratches that whatever-it-was inflicted. But it disguised them nicely, blending well into the cherry finish. Now I had a schmear of walnut oil in the middle of the tabletop.

Drag out the English Oil and some old rags. Apply said oil to the table; polish polish polish polish polish polish… DAMN but that looks good!!!!!!

And now that the family-room desk looks freaking gorgeous, everything else in the room, including two extravagantly expensive cherry and ash chairs, looks pretty tired.

Proceed to oil the chairs, the media cabinet, the dining room table, the dining room chairs, the three nesting tables, the Stickley table in the living room, the Indian table my father liberated from the docks in Ras Tanura, the weird Mexican folding desk, the annoying Ethan Allen coffee table whose excessively shiny surface the greyhound scratched within an hour after its delivery, and a fair amount of floor tiling onto which I slopped English oil. Scrub English oil off the tilework.

At this point, work has begun to expand to fill all available space…

By the time I finish, I’ve dragged pieces of furniture around and dragged them back into place, climbed up to the ceiling fans (balancing on the bed and chairs to reach them), crawled around on the floor, dragged basket after basket of trash out to the recycling bin, repaired a cabinet door latch, done battle with the Venetian blinds, cleaned the top of the refrigerator, scrubbed fingerprints off the woodwork, and on and on…

It may be that this is characteristic of jobs in the workplace as well as in our personal lives: that we think of some routine tasks as being smaller or taking less time than they really do. If that’s the case, it becomes a time management issue for each of us, and for managers or administrators, it becomes a personnel issue.

If we don’t have a good grip on how much effort or time a given activity takes, then we’re at risk of overwork, missed deadlines, or job burnout — and we may not even know why. With the teaching, for example, the amount of time consumed by course preparation and setting up websites is phenomenal (especially if you use Blackboard) — and since for adjuncts it’s unpaid time, keeping that task under control is useful. Similarly, when I was running the Great Desert University’s scholarly journals office, my dean undoubtedly was not aware of how much of my time was being wasted by riding herd on my eccentric secretary. As a result, she (the dean) allowed the situation to simmer along until I let it be known, by deliberately launching a message to a part of the grapevine that I knew would quickly get back to her, that if said secretary wasn’t gone by a certain date, I was going to quit. Had she been more aware, as a manager, of how her underlings’ time was breaking down, things never would have gone that far.

The take-away message? Maybe it’s a good idea to review tasks occasionally to identify those that are the most time-consuming, if for no other reason than to budget adequate time to complete them — but ideally, to consider ways to do them more efficiently.

 

 

 

Good grief. It is sooooo cold outdoors that the water in the backyard hose has frozen into a thirty-foot-long tube.

No joke. Last night I turned the hosebib to “dribble” by way of protecting the plumbing. Long about bed-time, the dog wanted to go out, and what should we encounter in the backyard but le deluge! The hose is leaking at the juncture of the two pieces I’ve connected.

These are RV hoses, much lighter than ordinary garden hoses and so easier for me to haul around. You can safely drink out of them, too, which is good because the yard dudes and other workmen will often gulp water out of a garden hose. But RV hoses come in short lengths, so you have to connect two of ’em to come up with a hose that will reach where you need it.

By 11 p.m. the hose that was furthest from the house had frozen solid. The length that was directly attached to the hosebib was still unfrozen, so water had burst out of the connection between the two hoses and flooded the patio.

This morning you could’ve gone ice-skating out there!

It’s after noon, and the two pieces of hose are still frozen solid. One has cracked, but the other looks OK. Disconnected that one and laid it out in the sun, hoping it’ll defrost by evening.

Temps dropped into the 20s here last night. At 7 this morning the thermometer on the back porch read 28. Everything that wasn’t covered is damaged or lost.

The citrus are already noticeably frost-burned, even the tough old oranges. Their leaves should grow back in a year or so, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll flower this spring and whether the fruit that’s on the trees — a LOT of fruit! — will survive.

I’m going to be extremely unhappy if all those candy-sweet oranges are trashed. Ordinarily that fruit supplies my breakfasts, generously, from January through the middle of April. I’ve pulled off a few and they look OK, but much more of this kind of cold and they certainly won’t be.

A sheet blew off one of the bougainvillas, so that plant is now history. The others look OK, far as I can tell by peeking under the coverings. Unfortunately the citrus trees are way too big for me to cover, so they will be seriously damaged if this keeps up for another few nights.

Down at the dentist’s office, the staff were huddled in heavy sweaters. They said the high-rise that houses their office was freezing when they came in this morning, the systems having been powered down over the weekend. The receptionist was shivering in her boots!

As for the dentist  himself, he wasn’t too alarmed by the current TMJ spate, since there’s no clicking sounds when I move the jaw and since the specific pain points are not out of the ordinary. He speculated that it was caused by the late, great infinite-loop of an indexing job said to go back to using the annoying mouthguard until it goes away.

At Chuck’s Auto Service, where I dropped by to see if they could fix a busted tail-light, the men had NO heater in their garage. Zero, zip heat. Ohhhhhh! I don’t see how they could hold a screwdriver in their frozen paws, much less do any work with it. Chuck was driving a customer home (no doubt taking advantage of the car’s heater…bet he was in no hurry to get back to the shop!), but two of the guys were under the lifts.

They said they knew an aftermarket retailer where they could get the part for a lot less than Toyota charges. I’m sure it still won’t be cheap, though…. Ran into a concrete planter that had been artfully placed in the middle of a parking lot and painted dark brown, rendering it virtually invisible after dark. Charming. The collision sounded like it did a lot of damage, but no: only the red glass on the rear turn signal shattered. The bulb inside still works, and there’s no denting of the body.

So it coulda been worse.

I hunger and so I am going to see if the grill works in Arctic temperatures…

 Image: Frozen waterfall. Juliancolton.  Public domain.

Ever look back on really old New Year’s resolutions and reflect on whether you actually did them?

In an effort to find mention of a major purchase I made about six years ago, I called up the earliest posts of which WordPress still has a record — far from the site’s first post, but all the way back to 2007. What should I find but this post from the end of December in that year.

I called it a “to-do” list because the usual broad “resolutions” seemed too vague to lead to any meaningful action. What became of all those?

1. Three days a week, add bicycling or mountain park hiking to exercise routine

Har har! Not a chance!!

2. Lose five to ten pounds by

a) staying off the sauce,
b) increasing exercise as above, and
c) continuing to eat lots of whole foods and less sugar & refined grain

Now there’s a righteous concept.

a) nope
b) give me a break!
c) did that, but only because that was already my habit

3. Bring food to the office instead of ponying up $8 for the miserable restaurant fodder that passes as lunch

Well, actually… what happened there is I just quit eating on or near the campus. As things went from bad to worse with the annoying woman I’d stupidly hired as my secretary, I took to leaving earlier and earlier in the day and doing most of my work out of my home office. This meant I started eating lunch around 3 in the afternoon.

4. Drink tea, not coffee, and less of it

Whatever made me imagine I could shuck off my beloved daily coffee fix?

5. Learn to put widgets on iWeb pages

My goodness. I was still using iWeb in 2007? Well, no. You can’t put widgets in iWeb. Or couldn’t. The program doesn’t even exist anymore.

6. Join four social networking sites

Sure, I joined four social networking sites. Hardly ever use them. Facebook annoys more with every new revelation of its privacy-invading habits and Borg-like ambitions, and the public passion for Twitter continues to mystify me. You can take the horse to water...

7. Aim for two no-purchase days a week

These days it’s more like two do-purchase days a week. While I was still working? I expect two no-buy days was reasonable, but don’t recall.

8. Snowflake the Renovation Loan principal down by $1,000 (that’s $83.30 a month)

In 2009, when I realized the university was going to shutter our office and can all five of us — I had nine months’ notice — I started “noonlighting” by taking on face-to-face community college and online GDU courses. One semester I taught the equivalent of four online sections — the same workload I had when I taught full-time for the university — while holding down my full-time editorial job. It was a killer, but it allowed me to pay off the loan before I was laid off.

9. Invest $250 a month in an interest-bearing account to build liquid savings and to provide the option of paying off Renovation Loan within five years

Don’t recall whether I did this specifically, but something along these lines was going on. See below.

10. Invest net income from side job (approx. $3500 a semester) in the same interest-bearing account

Substantial amounts were going into a money-market account at the credit union. Before the Recession-That-Was-Not-a-Depression hit, that account returned a little interest (certainly better than an ordinary savings account). And by the time I was laid off, the loan was paid and some $28,000 had accrued. I’m still living on the remains of that stash.

11. Wear better clothes to the office, using the wardrobe now expanded by after-Christmas clothing purchases

Heeee! Hilarious!!

When I do have “office”-style clothing, I don’t wear it. I find that stuff uncomfortable, and I’m past the point in life where it’s worth making myself uncomfortable to please strangers and passers-by. I continued to wear my favorite Costco jeans to work, and the fancy clothes bought on sale gathered dust in the closet.

12. Try to wangle a Power Mac from the university

That didn’t work.

13. Build cross-campus collaboration by trying to land another research assistantship to be staffed by grad students in the publishing program

Did that.

14. Build new ways to mentor graduate students and reinforce editorial training

Mmhhh…well. We started having weekly editorial meetings, during which we discussed what had been done and what needed to be done. After awhile, though, La Morona’s presence became so annoying that none of us wanted to meet with her interfering, and so that idea petered out.

15. Make new friends

a) through Meetup.com
b) rejoin the choir

I did join Meetup.com. Joined a hiking group, and within a week fell down the stairs at M’hijito’s apartment building, sustaining a severe ankle strain. That put the eefus on my hiking schemes. Another Meetup.com group proved to be an agglomeration of fruitcakes and nerds even more hopeless than me. I lost interest.

And eventually, after an interlude with the Unitarians, I did rejoin the choir. That was good.

LOL! How hilarious.

Do you recall any New Year’s Resolutions of yore? Did any of them ever work out?