A piece in the NY Times  today, March 17, about Elizabeth Diamond returning a book to the library only 63 years overdue brought a flood of memories to me. To begin I still have an active library card with the Rundel Central Library in the Monroe County Library System. this was not always my primary library. When I was growing up, the neighborhood library was the Monroe Avenue Branch. It had two entrances, down the stairs to the door under the main door which gave entrance to the children’s section and up the grand stairs to the ADULT section. By the time I was old enough to go up those stairs we had moved and I was using the well stocked and well maintained school library at Monroe High School. I know it was well staffed, I was one of the students staffing it. We shelved books memorizing the Dewey Decimal System in the course of that work,  and tallied the circulation numbers for the head Librarian (yes, capitalized, she was that important). 

Eventually I went off to college where the John Hay Library was the book haven of book havens. For any Brown alumni reading this, that was before the Rock was built. It was in the reading room of that library that I learned of the assassination of John F Kennedy. Although the “Hay” was my home library when visiting  my family in Rochester I used the University of Rochester library to work and just BE in a library. 

At Columbia I worked in the Business School library which was suspended over the gym so the floor had a certain flexibility to it. Other than that and the glorious view out to a new building going up to obstruct the nonview the windows had had been built to take in my memories are limited. I guess because I never came to see it as more than a convenient stopping place. 

Before I return to Rochester I need to make two brief stops.  As 12 year olds our group from Camp Cherokee in Saranac Lake NY went on a canoe trip and eventually we put in to Raquette Lake NY to wait for the camp truck to give us a truck portage to another lake. We discovered the town had a library that was open! We went in to see what it had to offer and we borrowed some books to read on the lawn while we waited. Another story, oft told, my mother decided I need some help reading and arranged for me to spend 6 weeks at a reading camp run by Syracuse University on the campus of a Vanderbilt Camp in the Adirondacks, near Raquette Lake Village. This was after my sophomore year in high school. I was obligated to read at least 4 hours a day! I promised the staff that if they left me to my own devices I would do at least that. They believed me. After 4 weeks I told them I had read every book in the nice little library they had provided and would they please go get more books, anything they thought I might read. I’ll spare you the Moby Dick story saving it for another day.

Eventually I returned to Rochester with Carol who is, if possible more interested in reading than I am, where we immediately got adult library cards in the Monroe county Public Library system, First in the Town of Pittsford and later in Brighton. We moved to the city and started to haunt the Rundel and the new main library across the street which is a three block walk from our apartment when we are in town. Now I access that library from anyplace there is an internet connection to borrow books. I get a thrill every time I open the link and see:

We wait; for our second shots; for the power to come back on; for the phone system install to be completed; for Washington politics to put the past behind us and move forward; for quotes from another project; for data so I can complete a power point presentation; not for Godot! 

Much of this waiting has me up in the early morning just like in the old days when I worked. I know as soon as I get caught up and the deadlines have passed; I will find a way to create or accept new ones. 

I wrote the above a month ago and never got back to it; most of the waiting is past. The politics have moved on; and the telephone project I worked on for over a year is complete. We are doing the final verification that everything works. I spent much of the day going to sites on my list that did not answer the phone so I could verify that they rang. 

Somehow the idea crossed my mind that with this project complete I might find nothing to do. I heard that a committee to search out back up power generators for critical areas in the resort needed a chair. I don’t know much about generators; but I know how to organize a committee and delegate work. So I have been meeting with our Maintenance Manager and another volunteer who is a retired electrical contractor and various vendors. When the quotes come in, I’ll get the committee together to review the results and make a decision to take to the community and to the Board. Then I will need to find some other way to keep busy. Carol says the next projects will fall in my lap, or more likely on my head.

We have made a couple of trips to San Diego to get Carol vaccinated and a couple of trips to Menifee to get me vaccinated. Somehow we were not able to get our shots on the same day; at the same place; but we are both vaccinated and in another week we will both be two weeks out. A certain sense joy and freedom is greeting many of us as we are getting our shots. Still wearing masks and keeping our distance, but it is more about making everyone feel included and safe.

When we were in San Diego we met with Jing and Ron. Jing was a caregiver to my mother; providing massage therapy when she was in the Summit and later when she was in the nursing home. They have a lovely apartment with great views of the harbor and over the airport. We walked to a Japanese restaurant where we were able to be seated outdoors. The weather was fine and we had a grand time. The drive to San Diego is about 90  minutes and there are mountain routes and coastal routes if we don’t need to scurry along the freeway. 

For now we are looking forward to some quiet time with zoom meetings. We are starting to think about what our schedule might look like after April. We do love it here, but hitch itch will rear its ugly head one day and it would be nice to have some sort of thoughts. Maybe Rock Spring WY for Escapade in July would work with a trip back to Rochester for Jazz Fest the end of July on the RIT Campus? But that only takes care of July. Will there be any hope of driving to Canada and putting Saskatchewan and Manitoba on our list of states and provinces finally? I doubt it.  People talk about plans, we talk about hopes. People reserve campsites months in advance, we call from the road at 2 PM  unless we really know where we want to be next week. 

Watch this space for decisions.

After a week of cold (for SoCal) and rain in the high desert we have returned to blue sky and mild temperatures. Carol and I have both had our first Covid inoculations  and things seem to have calmed down some. Even politics seems a bit less roiled than recently. News about who can get a “jab”, where seems to keep changing. Some people going to Petco Stadium in San Diego have been turned away because they are not residents of San Diego County. Many more have not had a problem. Riverside County where we are, was  limiting appointments to over 85 this past week, we will see what the coming weeks bring.  Now we begin the search for our second jabs.

Those who know me will not be surprised that with the telephone project winding down into installation I have taken on a new project that I know even less about. After 30 years our resort has experienced two extended blackouts as a result of Southern California Edison – SCE –  shutting down our area for high wind and fire risk. Our only backup power for the resort is a couple of small portable generators to keep the phones and some office computers going. there is no back up for our well pump or other critical infrastructure. The Board created a special committee and most of the qualified, knowledgeable people signed up, but none would agree to take the chair. As I told the committee at our first virtual meeting my only qualification is I can start the generator on my motorhome AND I do know how to chair a committee. 

We have had our first two meetings and with any luck we will have a completed project in one or two more meetings. It is wonderful when there are knowledgeable, dedicated committee people willing to actually do the work and all I have to do is coordinate. 

Literally as I was writing the above I got a call that the the old phone system lost access to 2/3 of the park and is beyond restoring. We almost made it. People will be a week without internal phone service.

Carol is doing the same with her projects and her art. The fence art keeps changing and so does the site. I will let her speak for herself on http://cgstudio.net if she chooses. 

We have no plans for travel. We have wishes, but no plans, unless you count a trip in Spring 2022. Maybe after we both have our 2nd shots and things settle down further we can take the coach out for a spin. I keep dreaming, but I have so much to do right here that I wouldn’t be traveling for another month or more anyhow. 

Damn, retirement is exhausting 🙂 

Everything I am reading today is a review of the year just past. Call it a dumpster fire, a year best forgotten, a horror show that cannot end soon enough. Yet another year we have lived through and experienced. 

We started off in grand style in the Sahara Desert with our family and a couple of girl friends. we had a stop over in Tel Aviv which was cold and wet for 4 days, then on to Ethiopia for a strange religious event with our friends the Poleshuks. We witnessed a parade of Arks of the Holy Covenant through the city of Lalibela. Yes that is plural and yes throughout the country there are many more than the 12 we saw and yes they are ALL believed to be the original. Little did we know in January that the country would become part of the dumpster fire of 2020 as the government and dissidents  took their disagreements to the streets and to military action. Once again Carol and I have visited a region about to be torn apart by hatred. 

February we recuperated in Jojoba Hills SKP Resort preparing to return to Panama and then Colombia to complete a trip we had been forced to return from early in 2019 for medical reasons. 6 days into this trip we received notification that we  needed to pack to get out of Panama before the airport closed to all travel as part of an attempt to prevent the spread of Covid -19 there. We returned to Jojoba Hills to quarantine for two weeks and decide what to do next. And there we sat into May. 

In early May we received a reminder that our grandson Alexander was turning 21 on May 31. since we were doing nothing and had a full hookup site prepared in their driveway in Virginia we invited ourselves to isolate with them and celebrate the birthday as best we could. We drove across the country in ten days. Once we left Redlands Truck and RV where we had annual service performed, we drove every day except one. We took a day off in Tom Sawyer RV park on the west bank of the Mississippi River.  We arrived in Covesville VA tired and glad to be off the road. we had had no contact with a living sole as we traveled. Well we did shop in one Walmart fully masked and gloved for supplies. We made 6 fuel stops and never got within 10 feet of another person. Pay at the pump and just move on. One relative excoriated us for traveling at all. I think we had less contact with people than if we had stayed still. 

At Dan and Malena’s we settled in for the summer, hoping that our presence was not a problem for them. We did some chores and helped where we could and planned to retreat to our Rochester Apartment by the end of August. Then Carol fell and landed in the hospital. She spent a month before she could return to the coach. During that time the kids sold the house and moved into a beautiful new house with room for their horses – 15 acres- and more house than they really need. I moved the coach and added one more disaster to the year by dropping the right rear tire into the roadside ditch. ENOUGH ALREADY!

We made it to Rochester in late September. Moved into the apartment and moved the coach to Buffalo to repair the damage from the trip into the ditch. I’d like to say that was that, but no. When we went to pick up the coach we found that not all the planned work had been completed. We determined that the coach was usable as is and headed out to the new house in Virginia for a weekend visit and then on to Red Bay AL to complete the work left hanging and to have some other cabinetry repairs and modifications done. While the coach was in the service bay to fix the turn indicator – the part they needed was not available any place in town – they noticed a smell of propane. The regulator was leaking. This is not a big deal to fix if you catch it before something blows up. They fixed it. 

We resumed traveling across the country back to Jojoba Hills and it seems every day I was fixing something minor. When the folding stove cover cracked, again, so did I. Then I bought some 2 part epoxy and repaired it. I think that was in Texas someplace. Once again we were in travel mode only stopping for three nights in Las Cruces to visit with Leora and Stu standing in the cold when they brought us Chanukah Candles  and then on the phone. I did get takeout dinner from La Posta the most popular Mexican restaurant in the area for tourists and locals alike. With three more overnight stops we arrived back at Jojoba Hills to end the year. Naturally the water heater stopped heating water the next morning, Saturday! A call to tech support on Monday yielded the suggestion that we run a sink faucet at the same time as the shower, that worked. I removed one item from the water line that might have restricted flow and we have not had a hot water problem since. 

Our Los Angeles family have all had the virus and so far their cases seem to be the mild variety. The Virginia family have not had it. The youngest, Cory, skidded out in snow and rolled the car into a ditch. He walked away with a scratch on his hand and a new respect for just how slick a road can be. 

It is the 30th. One more day. Put the fire out and lets have a wonderful 2021. We have travel plans for April, I think I will postpone them after the 1st. There is no sense tempting fate.