Exhausted...

Of late, I have been somewhat remiss making the rounds of my blog friends. I am sorry. I have been a bit distracted.

There was the wedding--already noted here. And then there is the kitchen redo--currently ongoing.

Now, I admit, I am doing NONE of the work on the redo. We have two brothers who have come in--they are custom builders, meaning simply they do work when contracted to so do; they no longer work on speculation. So, while they still build entire houses, they only do that when someone contracts with them to do that. As you might expect, business has been a bit slow for them.

So when we went looking for a builder to redo the kitchen, we came upon their names, by way of referral. What a great job they are doing. A future post will detail the project a bit more, complete with photos.

Here's why I am exhausted--I have too many balls in the air. This business of being retired is crazy. People have always told me that--and, truth be told, at first it was NOT so. I officially "retired" in 2002. I had not planned to retire exactly when I did, but the company I worked for thought it was a good idea.

So, when I first began time at home--and before I started teaching in my adjunct capacity--I had time on my hands. Days crawled by. I always thank our dog for keeping me on an even keel. She was thrilled to have me home, and thought 4 or 5 walks a day were a grand idea.

Well, those days of little on my hands are gone. I have responded positively to various requests to help out here and there--mostly with the Presbyterians. I am now finding I need to pull back.

OK--where am I going with this post.

These last several days--of watching workers rebuild a kitchen--have got me to thinking about my paternal grandfather. I have written about him several times before here, and here.

As he approached retirement age, he and my grandmother were teaching at a small college in Pennsylvania. With a bit of land on the college campus available, he decided to build the house in which they would live out their final years. Now, when I think of my grandfather, I do NOT think builder. As a young man, he had done many things with his hands--including homesteading in Saskatchewan--but he was much more a thinker than a builder. But he doggedly set about to build a small two story house.

It was during that project that he discovered he was going blind. He went to sight up part of the building to see if it was level, and realized he could not see with enough acuity to level the project. So, my aunt helped him do that.

When the house was finished, it was perfectly adequate--not elegant, but livable. My parents, brother and I even lived in the upstairs, which was made into a small apartment, for a brief time in the mid 1950s.

Now, these days, watching the workmen, I think about my grandfather. How did he do it? He was an old man when he began that project.

And I think I am exhausted?