Saturday, 6/8/2019
One week from right now (9am) I will be preparing for the moving van to arrive. But this morning I did something scarier: committed to a tour in September. I’ve been talking for a while about taking some kind of cruise or tour, probably with Road Scholar, in September, after I’ve been moved to my temporary flat. Where to? people asked, and I casually said, oh, maybe the Greek Islands.
So yesterday I opened up the Road Scholar website and browsed around, and continued doing that this morning, and finally settled on this one: “Island Hopping in the Aegean“. It seemed the best combination of places, dates, and especially price, because single-occupancy wasn’t a huge penalty over double. It took a while to muster the courage to click through the purchase process, and I hesitated a long time before committing and am still spooked by it. But it’s done. Unless I decide to bail in the next couple of weeks, I’m at least financially committed to spending September 6-20 cruising in a small ship around some Greek islands.
It would have been so comfortable to have just said, “nah, I’ll think about it later” and clicked away. I could feel the pull of mental and emotional inertia, like the gravity of a black hole… Some of the impetus to go through with it was that I spent some time yesterday and this morning reading through our New Zealand travel blog. Just ten years ago we did those six weeks in a van around both islands. Funny, an ongoing theme in those blog posts is the constant hunt for internet connectivity. I bet that isn’t such a problem today.
Spent a bit more time completing the documentation package for Katie the Tax. Then left for the Museum, stopping on the way to mail my estimated tax payments. I have to thank the Channing House email list for that. Although I had the envelopes and vouchers ready to go in the “Current Tax Year” pendaflex, with a post-it on them saying “mail before June 15”, I might well have forgotten. But there was an email earlier in the week reminding everyone that the deadline was coming. OMyGod yes! I thought. And wrote the checks and stamped the envelopes.
I wanted to put a return address on them but realized that my return address stamp, which I’ve been using since the 1980s, has the wrong (old) address. So I hand-wrote the 850 Webster return address, and then went online and ordered return address stickers.
At the museum I led a tour for, initially, 25 people, but several dropped off so I ended with about 15. Only notable thing was that someone swiped my transistors! I had two TO-5 transistors in a little plastic box, which I let the group hand around, it makes the comparison to the vacuum tube (which they have handled at a prior stop) much clearer. Today, the little box didn’t come back to me, and when I asked the group at the next stop, nobody had any idea. Bummer.
I went out for supper, then while watching Jeopardy I made a list of all the shows I’ve got subscribed on the DVR. Planning to subscribe to the same ones, or most of them, on the new XFinity DVR after moving in.
Codgerville 