Life at Home

I’ve been home from my BBQ and Brew southern tour since April. June seems like a good time to do a check in.

When I’m traveling I have no end of mental stimulation - new towns, new people, new experiences, interesting history and stories in the places I visit, an endlessly changing landscape (although to many people spending an entire day driving through nothing but corn fields may not fit any definition of excitement). This constant flow of inspiration affects all my senses, and I have no trouble finding themes to write about.

When I’m not traveling, however, I immerse myself in an environment that doesn’t change much day to day. My mental stimulation has different triggers, shaped by the mundane of everyday living. Obvious themes that might guide my writing don’t appear as organically as they do when I’m on the road. There, my mind takes everything in and wanders aimlessly until something pokes my imagination and sends it into a particular direction. That’s how many of my blog posts get birthed. I make notes to myself about the sounds and sights, and before long I have something to write about. It may not end up being interesting to anyone but me, but such is the nature of blog writing.

At home I tend to flit from one activity to another, not stopping for very long on any one thing. I make to-do lists and chart my weekly progress toward completing them. My plan for the week almost always derails by the end of the day Monday or Tuesday as new distractions emerge and then get bumped up my priority ladder, pushing the uncompleted items to next week’s list.

I spend time puttering around my house, decluttering closets and shelves, dabbling in my garden, experimenting in the kitchen, making plans for big projects that will likely never get off the ground. Lately I’ve been spending excess amounts of time looking for items that I inconveniently hid from myself. When that happens I can spend hours or even days spinning my wheels, willing the item to reappear. When it fails to turn up I have to admit that maybe I threw it away in a weak moment of extreme clutter-busting. Frustration turns to anger at myself for losing something I now desperately need.

Occasionally while looking for one item I come upon another that I had totally forgotten about. Sometimes it turns out to be something I had been seeking for months without success. Now that I’ve moved on and don’t need it anymore, do I put it back where I found it? If I do will I remember where it is the next time I think I need it? Or do I keep it out so that I don’t forget it exists again?

Such is the mundane life of a retiree with too many choices and an inability to prioritize effectively. Indecision leads to frustration and lack of imagination, which in turn leads to massive inefficiencies and the occasional escalation of small problems into big projects.

Here are a few examples of what I’m talking about. If you ever wondered what my life is like when I’m rattling around my house alone and something isn’t going according to plan, here you go.

The Camper Curtain Debacle

This one was entirely avoidable, as is the case with many of my problem-solving ventures. I’ve had my camper since 2022, and in early March 2026 decided that before my next road trip I should maybe, perhaps, wash my curtains. Four years of collecting desert dust, beach sand, small insects, dog fur and plain old dirt seemed long enough. It was time for an intervention. The rest of the camper is relatively easy to scrub down and wash, inside and out. But to launder the curtains I had to first figure out how to detach them from the windows, remove the stiff thingy inserted to weigh them down to prevent random flapping, and then put them back together to hang up when I finished.

I removed the easy ones, but when I examined the curtains over my bed they were wedged between a block of wood holding the top edge of the curtain against the top rim of the window well. I tugged on it but it was tightly fastened and seemed to be glued into place. I was determined to get these curtains out as I knew they were filthy. (As an aside, one thing to know about me is that when I get frustrated with a seemingly insurmountable problem, I have been known to make hasty and highly inefficient decisions.)

In this case I wondered why anyone would make it impossible for me to remove and clean the curtains, but that indeed seemed to be the situation. Determined to find a solution and get those curtains washed, I did (what I considered to be) the only sensible thing. I took a pair of sharp scissors and cut as close to the edge as possible, leaving a small sliver of raggedy curtain sticking out along the top of the window. I went on my month-long BBQ and Brew tour with no actual curtains over my bed. Instead, I stuffed pillows and bags of supplies to fill the window well space and block inquisitive eyes from peering in. My solution worked well, and I was satisfied that I had done the best I could but resolved to bring it up with my Drifter Van people the next time I saw them.

When I returned from the trip I brought the van into Drifter for the repair of the gray water drain pipe that had an unfortunate clash with an object one day on a busy highway in North Carolina. Kim, one of the co-owners of the company and always an energetic, helpful and enthusiastic fellow whenever it comes to customer service, asked me if there was anything else they should take a look at while they had the van. I lamented about the curtain and pointed out that I had had no choice to cut them out in order to clean them.

He looked at me like I was an alien from Mars. From inside the van he points to the piece of wood attached to the window well and asked, “Why didn’t you unscrew this and remove the piece of wood so that you could release the curtain?”

I paused to consider, and was able to come up with only one response: “Because I’m stupid.” He seemed genuinely shocked that I would openly admit to such a frailty. As a transplanted Ukrainian, he has apparently not heard many Americans display such brutal honesty about themselves.

At any rate, now that I know how to remove the piece of wood (no clue why it wasn’t obvious before…), I can go about the business of making and installing new curtains. I have a friend who is going to help me, and we thought we might be able to use the old curtains as our starting point since they are intact except for the strip I cut off. Sadly, I have yet to find them, and in my earlier frustration when removing them I may have made the unwise decision to throw them out in the trash. Why would I have done that??? It was perfectly good fabric! As I go about my spring cleaning tasks I keep hoping they will magically reappear, but hope is dwindling at this point.

So my simple problem of wanting to launder my curtains has now turned into a big project involving procuring new fabric, measuring, cutting and sewing, and attaching fasteners so I can roll them up and down, and then installing them.

*I don’t function well when faced with too many choices.*

Matching the color and texture of the other curtains inside the camper will be impossible, so decisions also have to be made about acceptable (and cost effective) alternative fabrics that blend in with the general decor. And I’ll need to get my sewing machine that I have forgotten how to use back from my daughter-in-law Maria. My friend who has offered to help promises me that this will be an easy, quick fix but I’m not so sure…

The Coffee Maker Near Miss

Like many of you, I enjoy a good cup of coffee in the morning. I am willing to pay for freshly ground beans from local roasters, and a few years ago I invested in a pricey coffee maker that will grind the beans before brewing. I’ve been very happy with it so you can imagine my alarm when the machine I love so much stopped working.

I keep the manual close at hand but it turned out not to be useful for the problem I had, but despite that several bouts of trouble-shooting made me think I had fixed it. Sadly, the problem kept recurring and at one point I unplugged the machine, let it rest overnight, then rebooted it the next day, all to no avail. It was stuck and there was nothing more to do.

At that point, frustration again took over my good sense, and I decided this was an important enough problem to warrant reinvestment into a brand new machine. The first one had lasted about five years. I am familiar with the concept of “planned obsolescence” and figure these types of appliances are rarely designed to stand the test of time, so I told myself it was probably dying on schedule and I needed to replace it. My original brand was no longer available in the U.S. (a victim of the tariff war, perhaps?) but I was able to find a suitable substitute that I thought would do the trick.

Excited by the arrival of the new machine (who among us doesn’t love a new toy?), I immediately opened the box, set it up and tried it out. This one came with its own milk frother. Woohoo! A perk that the old one didn’t have. But whereas my old machine would brew both a cup of espresso and a full cup of regular coffee, this one only had barista type espresso options. Besides the espresso button, which I was familiar with, I also could press the “lungo” button or the “ristretto” button. When I did so, thinking this was the Italian version of “small, medium or large” I was disappointed to discover that it only brewed versions of espresso, all in very small quantities. Gone was my ability to have a freshly brewed cup of “regular-sized” coffee.

Arrrgggg! I was complaining about my situation to a friend (the same friend who is a master seamstress and kindly offered to help me solve the camper curtain problem), who began busily tapping on her phone while I was blabbering about how I now had two expensive coffee makers, neither of which could brew an acceptable morning cup of coffee. As I was talking she interrupted to ask me a couple of questions and continued tapping away. When I finished, she read the answer to her question that she had asked her AI app, which offered not only likely reasons why I might be having trouble, but also options for trouble-shooting based on which problem ended up being the one I was dealing with.

Why had it not occurred to me that there might be an easy solution online? Especially in this golden age of AI? I went home and followed “Claude’s” suggestions for identifying the nature of the problem and its corresponding solution. Voila!! I was back in business within mere minutes and brewed a perfect cup of coffee, just the way I like it! I’ve had no recurrance of any issue since then.

*Fortunately for me, I had not thrown the original coffee maker away.*

*Every household needs two very similar, expensive coffee machines, right? Espresso, anyone?*

The only defense for my poor reasoning is that apparently I lose the ability to think clearly when I get frustrated and impatient, which then leads to poor decisions. One of the disadvantages of living alone and having no one nearby to bounce ideas off in the heat of a frustrating moment.

The Cuba Documents

Those who have been following my blog posts for awhile will recall that I am working on a memoir. It is going slowly, but definitely moving forward. I now have a much clearer idea of how I’m going to approach the book and what information I want to include. Now I just have to chip away at the writing and organizing, which I am doing. Again, it’s not happening as quickly as I would like, but I have to grant myself some grace. After all, I have a busy life with lots of interests and it doesn’t take much to distract me.

Recently I decided to include a few scenes from my trip to Cuba in 2017, just before Jay got sick. To jog my memory about things we did that might make good fodder for that part of the memoir, I needed to locate all the documents from that trip, which I carefully saved in a folder somewhere and which include the full itinerary, my journal notes, maps showing the route we took and the cities we visited. Also numerous brochures and other items I picked up from the places we went. It was a very rich, rewarding and fascinating trip and I know I saved it all.

I should have been able to put my hands on that folder in a matter of minutes. I have several places where I keep such things, and yet… three days later I still had nothing to show for my search efforts other than a bunch of undone tasks around the house, a dirty kitchen sink, and a neglected dog who was begging for a long walk.

I am lucky that I have friends who don’t mind listening to me complain about my frustrations and personal failings. The same friend who listened to my tales of woe about both the curtains and the coffee maker sat quietly while I lamented the loss of my documented memory of the trip and my inability to find anything useful beyond the photographs I took.

*The trip to Cuba was a transformative experience. I just wish my memory could transform some of the details from the experience into words…*

Knowing I had taken this trip with a group of former colleagues and social workers, she waited until I took a breath and then said, “Why don’t you try contacting some of the group members and see if any of them saved any of the materials?”

What a wise, wise woman! I did as she suggested and while I have not replaced the documents and journal notes I was looking for, I now have the itinerary, which at least gives me the dates and cities and activities. It’s a start, and I will resume the search for the elusive folder the next time I am poking around boxes and closed files.

Adventures in Data Backup

I keep most of my electronic information somewhere in the “Cloud” - that ephemeral space that seems to exist but few people know exactly what it is, where it is or how it works. Recently I had a conversation with my siblings on the topic of data saving and recovery. My brother Sam has (what sounds like) an elaborate system for keeping all his data of whatever nature safe both in the Cloud and on a local drive. His system has built in redundancies (anyone who knows Sam will not be surprised by this) and sounds foolproof. When one of his laptops died recently and he had to reboot it by installing all the factory defaults, he knew it would be a relatively easy path to restoring whatever apps and programs and data that had been on it before.

As I listened to his tale my heart began beating faster in a mild pre-panic. This book I am writing exists only in one place: the laptop where I installed my writing program Scrivener. It does not automatically get saved on the Cloud and as we were talking I realized I didn’t have a clue how to back up all my precious content.

My photos and videos automatically get saved in multiple places, so the biggest problem for those is keeping everything organized in a way that is useful to anyone (me) who might want to locate a particular item. Microsoft documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) are saved in Microsoft OneDrive folders, which has worked pretty well for me, while the photos and videos exist in both Microsoft and Google Photos. For all of these, if the cloud disappears, so does all my precious data. But at least it is somewhere other than only on my computer or phone. For the book material I write and store on Scrivener, it exists only on the laptop, nowhere else. If the laptop dies, my book dies with it.

As Sam was talking, I remembered that I had purchased at least two different external drives at different times for the purpose of saving and organizing my photographs. I created a state of total confusion for myself after being overwhelmed by the enormity of the task of sorting through and collating thousands of copies of thousands of photos and videos, and ended up (apparently) stashing the drives in a drawer. That was about seven years ago.

Maybe five years ago I stumbled across two external drives and decided to see what was on them so I could resume my quest to have all my photos and videos in one, neatly organized location. But I couldn’t open them for some reason and I feared they and the photos on them were lost forever. Rather than deal with the problem I threw the two drives back into the drawer, where they remained.

The conversation with Sam spurred me back to action. He suggested that the Scrivener program itself probably had instructions on how to back up the data, and if not, I could probably find the answer on the web somewhere. (duhhh… why didn’t I think of that on my own - I’d like to think I would have if I had not been talking to Sam, who got me to that idea quicker). Indeed, a quick check revealed that Scrivener has perfectly adequate instructions for how to back up its folders.

I opened the drawer to fish out my two external drives - this time I was able to open them (no idea why I had trouble before) and when I looked at their contents I saw that they both had photos, but not necessarily the same photos. What was I thinking so many years ago and why did I save different photos on different drives if the idea was to back up and organize all my photos into one place? No matter, I figured I could use one of them for the Scrivener data.

Then I noticed another boxy looking thing that looked like a third external drive. Yep. I didn’t remember anything about that one so I plugged it in to see what was on it. It was totally empty, apparently never used even though it has been sitting in that drawer for who knows how many years.

All I can figure is that, in keeping with my tendency to replace rather than fix, I must have bought yet another external drive to start everything over when I couldn’t make the older ones work. So true to form!

So now I have three external backup drives of various ages and data capacity, all with different data on them. But at least I have my book saved and intact, and eventually I might make the time to tackle the much bigger project of organizing and consolidating all those photos/videos, which have no doubt multiplied exponentially over the last seven years from when I first started sorting them.

Lessons Learned

Judging from these examples (and many others I could have included but spared you), I’m now convinced that - at least for me - problem-solving in a vacuum is never going to be as fruitful or efficient as problem-solving in a group, even if that group is only two people. There is value in brainstorming, in sharing your woes and frustrations with someone else. We all know this, yet we tell ourselves we should be able to get out of a jam without asking for help. Where does this resistence come from? Asking for input when examining a problem is not a sign of weakness, but rather a recognition that there is strength in numbers. Ideas flow. Solutions emerge. Wisdom plants roots.

Next Steps

Not sure when the spirit will move me next, but stay tuned anyway!

In the meantime, don’t hesitate to ask for help when you need it. And always, always, always, hold your loved ones close while you still can.