Tuesday, November 15, 2011

A Day to Complain

Not really.  I would never waste an entire day bitching and moaning but I am pretty sore at the moment.
Over 35 years in the construction industry I am used to doing things fast.  I always got paid for the job done, not the hours spent.  My shop is pretty clean but I literally have a ton of stuff to put away yet, valuable stuff and heavy.  I am trying not to bury it all this time nor stuff it into cupboards where I can't find it.  Mostly I am putting hooks up all over the place and hanging bits and pieces from the ceiling rafters or wherever I can find room.  It is a lot of up and down ladders and a lot of heavy lifting.
   Then there is the electrical for my gallery area.  Lots of drilling holes, pulling wires and more up and down the ladder.  The tiny screws for the receptacles drive me nuts.  The neuropathy in my hands drives me nuts.
I keep dropping the screws.  They feel like shards of glass in my hands or I can't feel them at all.
   My hours are really weird.  My wife works the graveyard shift, from 3pm to midnight.  I haven't learned how to take a nap.  Sometimes by four in the afternoon I am so tired and sore that I just go to bed.  Then I wake up about 1am after a great sleep and what the heck can a person do at that time of night?  I am nice to my neighbors and wouldn't start up the machinery then.  They would call the cops on me anyway.
   So, here I am in my shop office playing with the computer!  And I will make sketches and I make notes the old fashioned way on a pad.  I still make "lesson plans" as I learned to do while I was a teacher.  What to do and how to do it.  Goals for the day.  Thinking that when my gallery is finished I could paint.  Quiet and peaceful.
   I will read for a couple hours, first the news that flashes atop my computer screen, who did what to whom and what happened while I slept.  I wonder how important any of this is?  What would happen if I didn't know anything?  Probably not much.
   I go on jags and junkets.  I will read ten mystery books in a row and not read another for months.  For awhile I read every art history book I could find.  You know I am into politics so I read some about that too.
I find it interesting why someone would like this candidate or that?  How some people want to bring back "waterboarding".  Really, they do.  I want to bring back the Gladiators! and lots of blood too!  It is the evil that is in us all, that bad dog we feed.
   My educational training is in European History but I am into American History now and am reading lots of books about us.  There are reasons that we think the way we do.  I am just curious and I have the time.
   I have thought of just throwing my watch away.  It is stuck on daylight savings time.  That extra hour of sunlight is responsible for global warming.  I know it is.
   The stem on my watch is welded shut not allowing me to set it differently.  I don't look at it much anymore anyway.  I am not so much controlled by time.  I eat when I am hungry, sleep when I am sore and tired, work until I am not able.
   I have a routine though.  About 6am I will go into the house, feed my dog and take my morning bubble bath in a six foot cast iron tub that is over 100 years old.  I get the water as hot as I can stand it.  By 7am I am dressed for the day and back in my shop or if the sun is up I am strolling my garden.  My main meal of the day is about 10am and it can be anything I fancy.  Sometimes it is a breakfast and other times a full fledged dinner.  Whatever.  After I have eaten something I play with my dog.  It is a routine and he expects this.
   About this time, about 11am I am feeling the day is almost over and this gives me a boost of energy.  Whatever I am doing I work hard from about 11am until 4 or 5pm and then I am drop dead tired, sore and all I want to do is to lie down.  It takes me five minutes to fall asleep.  I am very good at that.
   Not too exciting, huh?  No wining nor dining, no operas or theater.  My friends know to drop by during the day if they want to see me.   These strange hours may not be so strange.  In the summer when the sun out  longer I will adjust them and stay up later.  I go to bed and get up with the chickens!
   It was the Industrial Revolution that tied us to the clock and I am free of that now.
I have the will to be more entertaining, more social and more productive but chemotherapy ravaged my hands and I tire pretty easily.  If I began to hunt for pain I could probably find it everywhere.
   What doesn't get done today I will add to my list for tomorrow.

This is what I do:  HERE

2 comments:

Barbra Joan said...

Jerry, just lately I've read this is several places... and pass it on to you... it's how I live .! but you already know that.
Yesterday is history,
Tomorrow is a mystery,
Today is present, that's why it's called a gift.
BJ

Anonymous said...

You've managed an awful lot of work in a short time and look how clean and pretty! I really wish I had more energy. I too wake up in the wee hours, and rarely manage to make it until 8 p.m. I don't have neuropathy so my heart goes out to you, Jerry. I do have fibromyalgia, supposedly, and I am physically hurting and exhausted by noonish every single day. I can relate a bit to what you've written here.