Busy Being Busy

Maybe it’s because last year seemed rather interminable and long, but these days the days are screaming by, and I feel like I’m losing total control over them. I still can’t account for my time, but whatever I’m doing with it, it’s whizzing right along.

My schedule, which probably really isn’t, feels completely jam-packed. But now, as I am trying to recall what interruptions I had to my regularly-scheduled days this past week, very few are coming to mind. I know there were several; you’d think at least one would be memorable. All I can tell you now is that it felt very busy, and between that and problems with the internet (self-inflicted, I think, in attempts to watch my bike race), this was a no-blogging zone.

*****

I sent my oxygen concentrator off three weeks ago for repair to someone who said he was “three to five days” out. This is a man who apparently only knows monosyllables, and never volunteers anything. “Yes, we received it,” was the entirety of the reply I got when I checked to make sure the concentrator was in hand after UPS left it “at the front door” at 5:30 p.m. on a Saturday.

Then, after I sent yet another careful explanation of why I was hoping to pick it up while in Denver for Family Fest, otherwise being four hours or $100 away, I got this: “I will look at it early next week. Thank you.” Which did not address my distance issues at all, other than to ignore them.

Since I got a replacement unit, this hasn’t been the urgent situation it started out as, so I was trying to be polite and respectful as “early next week” became late in the week became a week later became yesterday, a full three weeks after he told me “three to five days.” So I outlined the timelines for him, the one he promised and the one that is really unspooling, and got this: “I had to order parts unfortunately. They should be in next week. Sorry about the delay.”

Reading between the barely-written lines, this means he has gone past looking at it and skipped right over giving me an estimate, as was strongly implied would happen in our earliest correspondence. The way my life goes, I will have a concentrator we can use but don’t really need for some low, low price that would have justified buying a new one rather than refurbishing one that is of uncertain vintage but at least a decade old. And we’ll get it a mere two months after promised delivery.

*****

It turns out, the editors of the seventh edition of my poetry anthology failed poet Bill Knott pretty badly — and I only just learned this. After my post the other day, I read the full version of his charming sonnet as it was printed online, discovering that not only did the editors botch a key word (guessed to be “grok,” now appearing on the internet as “think”), they also left an entire line out of the sonnet.

The missing line is “When we step from the house,” and it appears early in the sonnet, so its absence never diminished my appreciation of the piece, but now that I see how poorly the editors treated Mr. Knott, I’m wondering what else they got wrong. This book has been on my shelf of favorites, but now the entire compendium is suspect. It’s one thing to miss a typo, or a line of type, in a flurry of words like you find in a blog; but in poems where every word counts, it’s completely dismaying.

*****

My shelf project at the woodshop appears to have been shelved. I thought I had a couple of temporary pauses, but at the rate I’m going, my shelf is destined to remain numerous pieces of badly-cut wood. I started it so long ago that I naively figured it didn’t matter if I made some mistakes, because I could just buy more lumber, but now with price and supply issues, I may never be able to buy another stick of wood as long as I live.

Not that it matters, because my weekends are so packed there’s no time to fit the woodshop in. I feel like I filled nearly every minute of last weekend, and got to less than half the things on my obviously overly-optimistic list.

*****

I am trying to compose this while tracking my bike race. It hasn’t been a “grand” tour for me at all this time around — every year it gets more difficult to find a means of watching it. Feeling burned by the expensive experience of last fall, I am trying to get by on the cheap, which so far has mostly meant: barely following the race at all. It hasn’t been the grand experience it has in the past, although I did finally get to see portions of today’s stage, two weeks into the race.

*****

Our breakfast group, which has not gathered in person since probably March 2020, is coming here tomorrow to see if we can, any of us, manage sustained conversation in close quarters. As we’ve gone zooming along this past year-plus, several of us have taken to multi-tasking during breakfast, all of which seemed fine and perfectly acceptable over the internet but much of which might come across as rather rude in the Before and possibly Future Times. So I need to fold my laundry today rather than during breakfast tomorrow.

And there’s the part where I have to clean a pandemic’s worth of detritus off the dining table. Before that, we were entertaining regularly enough that I needed to keep it at least a semblance of clean; now, since it’s just Lynn and who cares about her thoughts on the matter, the table has been subsumed, like every flat surface in my life, with heaps of paper and toys.

I have all of today to find more appropriate places for everything. Except for the parts of the day when I’m running errands, which I have to slot in between visitors to the house. Windows are being washed; some planting is happening; and in some fit of delusion I told a friend we had plenty of space and he could store some stuff here. We don’t have plenty of space and I don’t know what I was thinking, particularly the part where I didn’t clarify just exactly how long we’re storing it for, but there were no storage units available and he lives so simply I figured he couldn’t possibly have too much stuff . . . we’ll see how big a mess I made for myself.

I did think — stupidly, I realize now — that this might inspire me to actually clean out my own in-holdings in the garage, but when am I going to do that? I’m so busy being busy I don’t seem to have time for anything else.

*****

And that’s what I know, this rather disjointed morning. I’ll try to figure out what it is that’s got me so busy and report back. Sometime. Any ol’ day now. Maybe in three to five days. You know how that goes.