Nothing Much; What’s Up With You?

Yes, this space has gone dark once again, despite my intentions. Time — that’s the most precious commodity in my life, and like money for others, I don’t have enough of it. I am always coming up short.

I feel I can blame some of this on my back, which really isn’t my back so much as super-tight muscles, which got tight because my lower back likes to wander out of proper position, so maybe it is my back. Whatever it is, it has put a huge pull on my need for time: extra chiropractor appointments, physical therapy, massage.

Every day I need to be somewhere at 11, which doesn’t sound like an unreasonable time, but by the time Bear and I go outside, Ki’o gets medicated multiple times and I distill my life down to its essence as doorman to a cat (Marrakesh: out the front door, in the back door, out to the garage, in on his own, out the front door, in the back door, out to the garage and it’s not yet 9 a.m.), plus breakfast . . . I don’t know, but all my morning time seems to be consumed by anything but writing.

I lost half a week at work to my back/muscles, and then I took a planned week to sort my books, and I am still not back on track. I got the accounts receivable and payable caught up; now I am attempting to get the vast number of screens scattered all over the floor up on shelves where they belong, but that involves a lot of moving, twisting and bending, and sometimes I have to talk myself into that.

Sorting my books suggested that my built-in bookshelves are still not a finished product, so Saturday I went to Western Lumber, where I was greeted enthusiastically despite not having darkened their doorstep since the demise of my woodshop. I bought one 12-foot plank for $45 — very glad we’re not trying to build an entire house, and that’s before the demand from Florida starts to kick in — and did better than I expected at making at least two slices each to cut to length with my undersized chop saw. Somewhere in here I have to find time and space to stain, dry, stain, dry, coat, dry, sand, coat, dry, and then I will be able to get the last of my books and tchotchkes off the dining table.

But I also have to get my covid booster shot, which you would think ought to be a matter of a half-hour or less — until you count the part where the three previous shots, plus the flu vaccine, each set me back an entire day. At this point we might want to consider the “nocebo” effect, where I’ve talked myself into the day-after ill effects, but whether the side effects are real or in my head they manifest as a wasted day, and since I need to be somewhere every single day by 11 it’s making this more of a problem than it ought to be.

The county is hosting a clinic, but not until the 19th (I’ll get my flu shot then, because I’m not about to try both vaccines in one day), and the state’s vaccine bus is coming to town Sunday, but their website doesn’t make it clear if they’ll be bringing the bivalent — a word I’ve not heard anyone pronounce, so maybe it’s biv-a-lent, perhaps bi-val-ent, I’m ambivalent — vaccine that’s so much the rage that one of Kara’s friends spent two hours yesterday driving around Denver trying to find a dose. And that’s after she had an appointment, but wherever her appointment was they’d run out — apparently with no need to notify those with appointments.

So if I can get my act together before today’s 11 a.m. physical therapy appointment I might just try Walmart’s walk-up invitation for Pfizer. I’m a Moderna kind of guy, and I still don’t understand why Moderna’s new booster comes with 50 micrograms of goodness to Pfizer’s 15, but my microbiologist friend Pete assures me either booster is okay, and Pfizer is what Walmart has (City Market is still waiting for the doses that were supposed to be sent to them Oct. 1).

Which, speaking of Oct. 1, was my sixth wedding anniversary with Lynn, but it’s also the 20th anniversary of the day she arrived here in Gunnison, moving in with her computer and plants. Twenty! That’s pretty good, hm? I was going to write about it Saturday, but I went to Western Lumber and bought and cut a board instead.

And then our not-so-special anniversary lunch plans disintegrated, which is what we’ve come to expect any time we try a commemorative meal, when our chosen restaurant was, of course, closed. We defaulted to Chinese. In a tribute to our first attempt at a fancy date almost 21 years ago, Double Dragon’s fans — a covid prevention measure — were running full blast, wafting cold air all about. Way back when, on a January night in Wisconsin, we got stuck in the very corner of the White Stag with a floor vent blasting cold air right onto us. We were overlooked by the waitstaff and the food was cold and mediocre, neither of which happened at Double Dragon, so perhaps our lot in life has improved after all.

This is where the romance and passion of 6/20 years has led to: to acknowledge this day, we got each other the gift of compost. For months we have been debating whether to get a suitable-for-the-kitchen composter that purports to reduce food waste to dirt in mere hours. It seems like it ought to be one of those too-good-to-be-true sort of products.

But then we talked to Dee and Owen Blacklock, back in town for the memorial for Bonnie Baril, and they have one. Which shouldn’t surprise me, although I had forgotten that the Blacklocks have always been on the technological vanguard. At any rate, they gave their Lomi high marks. If something is good enough for Owen Blacklock, by gosh, then it’s good enough for us.

However, we didn’t get a choice of shipper, and the company for some unfathomable reason opted for FedEx, which means our Lomi is still near its point of origin in Canada and we might be celebrating yet another anniversary before we ever see it.

So. Western Lumber, drafty default Chinese food and a non-existent composter. How could we possibly get any more romantic? It’s breathtaking, really.

That’s what I’ve been doing, then, these past few weeks, rather than blogging. I have many things I mean to tell you about, or at least offer my opinion to the wind, or my wind to the opinion. If only time weren’t so precious a commodity! Or if I had a cat who could open doors by himself.

I’ll see you when I see you, I guess, is about the safest thing to promise.