Discombobulated
After working hard to create a cozy home office in which to begin my retired life, I've barely gotten to use it. The joys of homeownership provided me with an opportunity to practice patience and acceptance this week when my previously bulletproof natural gas furnace quit working on a 17-degree night. We weren't able to get an HVAC tech out to the house until late in the day when (of course) the parts stores were already closed. It didn't matter though because the parts we needed, $1500 worth, are only available through special order. To top it all off, a winter storm, rare in our region, rolled into town.
Our house is the classic two-story split-level. It's wide open and the only spaces with doors are bedrooms and bathrooms. The living and working areas are impossible to warm with just space heaters, no matter how good they are. After sitting around under blankets in a house with Interior temps hovering around 50 degrees, we opted to get a hotel room close to Wonder Woman's job — also my former employer.
She had a three-hour meeting this morning over Microsoft Teams. Everyone is working remotely because of the storm. Since we're in a hotel, I got to sit in on the meeting too, listening to my old co-workers discuss subjects I very much want to leave behind. I even had to jump in and provide tech support to my bride when her company owned laptop experienced power issues. I'm just trying to roll with the punches and accept the things I can't change. It does no good to get worked up about stuff out of my control. Fate isn't concerned about my carefully cultivated plans for the first week of retirement.
Tomorrow we are traveling out of town for the weekend getaway I requested for my birthday. Wonder Woman and my daughter both got me the tech stuff I wanted as gifts, namely extra RAM to give me new home lab plenty of oomph. I joke that I want my system to be so powerful that it makes all the lights in the neighborhood go dim when I reboot things. I even maxed out the Internet speed at our house, something I am sadly missing on crappy hotel Wi-Fi.
Our weekend plans are not that complicated. We are going to visit a couple of restaurants that even my international hometown doesn't feature, including my favorite Lebanese place. Wonder Woman will get to run in a park she hasn't visited since April when she did a 50-miler there. Her next big adventure is in South Carolina next month, a charity event where the participants are charged with running a 5K every hour for five hours. I'll be there crewing, of course, trying to keep her spirits up as the inevitable fatigue sets in. She's never run a race in this format, so it will be new for both of us.
I'll pick up my postponed activities next week. None of my plans and goals will suffer one bit because of the delay. Until then, I'm just rolling with the punches.
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