The Rest of my Life
5/12/01
My poor PC was returned to me on Wed. by a frustrated repair shop that could not find anything wrong with it. I took it home and plugged it in, and voila, it worked!
The best guess is that something electrical was curdled when the power came on, and the machine needed to be unplugged for a while to let it clear out. Not a real satisfying diagnosis, but I'm back on line, my book is safe (and now backed up in 3 places!), and I'm a reasonably happy camper.
Tues and Wed. I was one of some 250 or 300 judges for the mother of all science fairs in San Jose. This is the international finals--everyone there had won a regional science fair, and they came from Moscow and Paraguay and Korea as well as all over the US. Impressive projects, great kids, and a very compatible set of judges I worked with (the reason there are so many is that several dozen organizations sponsor prizes that are awarded here). It was a great way to start 'retirement'.
Sam and I had a deadline for some things we were writing, so that took up the end of the week. It's not done yet, but close...
And Diana and I spent a wonderful Fri. evening eating blazingly spicy Thai food and getting giggly. I think my original estimate of her having 100 different laughs was too small.
Also, Diana and I are going to become Reiki Masters. Sam will be training us. I'm very excited about this--I've known for years that I would do this training someday, but also knew the time wasn't right. Now I know that it is, and getting the instruction from Sam and with Diana will make the experience wonderful. We have our first lessons today (Sat.).
Actually, the first few moments of my retirement were pretty ugly. I have bags of books brought home from the office that have been reproaching me, so Tues. early I cleared off some shelf space on a bookcase in my office and put some books on it. As I was putting on the last book, the entire shelf sagged--the brackets (which slot into a strip mounted on the wall) had bent, threatening to dump all the books onto a bunch of breakable things on the table below. So I carefully removed the breakables, even more carefully removed the books from the shelf, and the shelf from the brackets, and threw the brackets away. Then I started looking for the bag of extra brackets. And the bag of bookends. After 45 minutes, I found the brackets. I never did find the bookends, so later on Tues. I bought some more bookends and put the shelf up again.
Then on Thurs, I was taking a book off the same shelf to move it to another when--wham--the shelf sagged again. I went through the same drill. Looking carefully at the situation, I discovered that the wall strip holes were bent, so the bracket could not be supported well, and thus bent.
Yesterday I bought a 7-foot bookcase, which barely fit in my car. It weighs a ton. Today, I need to assemble it--I got it as far as the dining area before giving up and deciding to take it out of the case there and move the pieces to the office. So I'll end this entry, get out my screwdriver, and set to it.
Thank you for reading.
Copyright © 2001 Pete Stevens. All rights reserved.
BACK NEXT HOME