I’ve been retired for over two years and I’ve not done much to show for those two years. I’d expected, by now, to have been finished with my to-do list, or at least well underway with it. Instead I can hardly manage the day-to-day mini to-do lists.
There are still boxes under the guest bed full of things I brought back from my mom’s. By now I should have sorted them.
By now I should have at least learned how to use the 8mm and Super 8 Film Reel Converter Scanner and transferred all the Green/Patrick videos to YouTube and shared them with family. I’ve not even opened its box that I bought in 2018.
What have I done? I’ve read a lot. I’ve played a lot of games on my phone (and more recently Nintendo Switch Lite). I’ve baked a lot of bread. I’ve worried about oh so many things. I’ve not slept well.
Sometimes I think I should not have retired. I got more done when I was working. But I knew that was going to happen, didn’t I?
So many people ask me how retirement is going — it’s not going. It’s at a standstill in a rut at a dead end.
Back when the kids were tiny we visited the shop at Woodend, at the National Audubon Society. I found a teal sweatshirt on sale that I thought was fun. It was too big for me, but sweatshirts can be, right?
What I liked about it was that it had animal paw prints on the front and a legend on the back. Whenever I wore it I got fun comments. When Andrew was young he once tried to figure out real animal prints using the shirt and guide.
Another time, I think Andrew was trying to see if a pair of scissors worked and he cut a hole in the front of the sweatshirt. After that I only wore it in the house. In the several few years, as it began fraying at the neckline and getting holes in the cuffs of the sleeves, I only wore it to keep warm when I got up in the morning.
Dean’s made some disparaging remarks about that sweatshirt and a couple of other tops lately, so when I found a couple of Amazon Basics sweatshirts that looked cozy on Amazon during Prime Days I decided to buy those and planned on tossing two sweatshirts, including the teal animal paw print one.
The morning after my new sweatshirts arrived, I donned one of them, then held a goodbye ceremony for the old sweatshirt.
I also threw my hand-me-down-from-Dean Carnegie Tech sweatshirt and my old Moosewood tee-shirt away. Dean bought me the Moosewood tee-shirt for my birthday when we visited the restaurant when the kids were very young. It had seen its day and was probably 30 years old.
One of the unique things that my family did when I was growing up was to have breakfast picnics at a local forest preserve. We never did this with just the four of us, but as a planned event with extended family or friends. I remember having a breakfast picnic with my Aunt Ginny and Uncle Jack — perhaps that was the last one. I think it was when Jeremy was visiting us one year.
Anyway, we’d load up the car with bacon, eggs, coffee, cast iron pans, an aluminum stovetop percolator, flatware, dishes, tumblers and cups. We’d drive the 10 minutes or so to the forest preserve and unpack it all. Since the breakfast was being cooked over an open flame, the men did all the cooking. The kids ran around and played on nearby swings, the women set the tables.
Dad always made “egg coffee”, claiming the egg helped keep the grounds out of people’s cups. I don’t remember ever tasting it. My Aunt Ginny would not drink it — I don’t exactly blame her.
A quick Google search suggests my dad had a point about the egg keeping the grounds out of people’s cups.
Adding the egg helps clarify the coffee, allowing the grounds to separate from the water easily. The egg white extracts the bitterness from the grounds and enhances the caffeine. The result is a light, clear brew with absolutely no bitterness or acidity and a velvety texture that’s easy to drink.
I think my dad learned this from his mother who was Danish — so maybe the Danes also made egg coffee.
These occasions were so special — a lot of work, but also a lot of fun and the food tasted better eating at a picnic table outside. (Now that I think about this — lots of people had this experience, but it was usually during a camping trip. My family was not a camping kind of family, so this was special to me.
The impetus for this blog post are the dishes that we ate off. I have them in a box and should get rid of them, but just can’t bring myself to toss them. I won’t eat off the dishes or drink out of the cups or tumblers because they are probably packed with carcinogens. Below are a few plates and drinkware.
I even have the picnic basket that once held these plates and drinkware, but it’s full of other things somewhere in the kneewall.
