five month retirement update

At the five month mark the initial retirement euphoria is beginning to fade and it's no longer a novelty to be free from work. The usual winter blues (SAD) has set in and it's hard to get going on these projects. I'll have to tough it out and force myself out of bed each morning and talk myself into starting the day. Of course I can't get started until I've had my morning coffee and that takes until 9:30 or ten. At first I would be up by 5:00am or earlier but now I've settled into a wake up at around 7:00am with a nap in the afternoon. What luxury! This is a typical week:

• I've been staining and varnishing the bathroom door and towel cabinet. I'll start building a closet in the master bath this week.
• I cut out some masonite boards to use as painting canvases and hope to start a new painting this week.
• I went to a fire meeting in Westville and got caught up on the concerns, both political and financial, of our local volunteer fire departments. The wild fires here in Oklahoma are taking their toll. We've been lucky in Adair County. (I've responded to three fires in the last month) Some firemen in other communities have been using their own personal credit cards to fuel their fire trucks because they've run out of operating funds.

Last night I got a call from a neighbor who's grand kids saw a horse down on the creek behind my house that seemed caught in the fence. I called the neighbor on the other side of me who has horses and he came down and we jumped in my truck and took off across the pasture. The creek is at the bottom of a 30 foot bluff and I parked my truck at the top of the bluff and kept the headlights pointed in the general direction of the horse. We climbed down the bluff and and spotted a big red mule standing in the corner of the fence. My neighbor waded the creek while I kept my flashlight trained on the mule. Another neighbor soon arrived driving his truck up the creek from the south. The two of them found the mule just standing in the corner with a dead limb of a tree pressed against his backside. He thought he was stuck and had been standing there probably all afternoon. Some horses and mules when caught in a situation like that will simply stand until someone comes to help. Others will hurt themselves trying to get loose. This incident turned out ok, in fact, it was kinda comical.

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  Today, Dorothy and I drove to Tulsa to a Remodeling and Landscape show at the Convention Center. It was a disappointment. There just wasn't much to look at. We like to go to those shows to get ideas for our own place. It was a waste of time except for the Asian diner we went to for lunch. I had a hot and spicy dish called coconut curry pork.
• I stopped in at the post office this week and visitied with my old boss. While I was there, some of the employees whined about having to do without Dorothy's cinnamon rolls, so next week I'll take a couple of dozen right out of the oven and have coffee with them during their break.