Friday 12/03/2021
December 2, 2018 was day one of my life as a widower. I re-read the blog posts for the first couple of months. (Click “It started here” and then follow the tiny pale grey link at the end of each post.)
Then I finally got around to finishing the book Dennis loaned me, Irv Yalom’s A Matter of Life and Death. In it, he and his wife wrote alternate chapters during her final months dying of cancer. I think my blog posts for days 0.1 – 0.40 or so, hold up rather well in comparison to Yalom’s closing chapters about the weeks after his wife died. Despite not being a psychotherapist with years of experience, I was equally frank, and I think I analyzed my emotions well, and drew interesting conclusions.
Now here I am, three years on. It doesn’t feel like three years gone. I’m sure it would feel like a much longer time had we not had the stupid pandemic. I would have made at least one, probably two or three, overseas trips, for example. But all the pandemic days (500-plus of them now!) are pretty much alike, no events to make milestones.
As I noted in the special post preceding this one, I have numeric evidence that I’m probably losing my verbal edge. Crossword puzzles test a very narrow range of skills, though; mostly remembering vocabulary, and understanding allusions and references. I don’t have a lot of evidence that I’m mentally failing in any other areas. (But would I notice?)
Anyway, today I worked a little on the VW model, and spent a couple of hours with two other Davids — David M and David G — trying to diagnose a problem with a “Lecternette”, a small portable sound system. I actually got my soldering iron out and used it! That was to put a new phone plug on a microphone cable that had failed.
Trying to get the soldering iron in my toolbox in my storage cage in the basement, I had to make some room. I threw out the large cardboard box my iMac had come in. I’ve always kept the boxes computers and such come in, with their customized foam inserts and all. And they sit in the storage location and eventually get thrown away. The box for the previous computer sat in the back of the garage at 2340 until the roof rats had made nests out of the cardboard before I threw it out. So, anyway, out went a very large (like 40″ wide, 30″ tall, 10″ deep) box. My storage cage is better now.
Codgerville 