A few Measly Steps a Day

Oh, it's part of a series -- I can get all of them!

Hey D, the books show up in this order on Amazon:

Temporary Address
Through Unfamiliar Waters
Refuge and Warm Tea

Is this the correct order to read them in? Or does it matter?

Thanks!

Oh, regarding "Distance is nothing; friendship is everything," you're very welcome!

So many steps have been taken to deal with the following...

Are you ready?

Cat Piss.

Long story made short:

Pissing contests are a very real thing, and cats are the experts. The LR curtains bore the worst of it -- they're at least one foot too long.

My wife wanted to find someone to come in and do a thorough clean up. But one service provider after another had some excuse for not doing it. (It's a biohazard so we need $2000 before we walk in; we only do carpets; dry cleaning doesn't get rid of urine; etc)

So I took matters into my own hands. I fired up our old carpet shampooer and did the LR carpet, and I dismantled the huge curtains and washed the panels separately. The curtains came out completely clean and free of smell. However, the sun-facing edges have tore apart. They are over 30 years old. But when I re-mount them I think I can fold them over and secure them with safety pins.

But every so often I still smell it, even when I'm out of the house! It's like my nose (or brain) has been damaged. LOL

Hi, Guys,

Yes, "Refuge is part of series." The best order is "Temporary Address" "Refuge and Warm Tea'" and Through Unfamiliar Waters." The last two overlap. My writing has improved over the years. I'm editing "Temporary Address" and "Through Unfamiliar Waters." hoping for better second editions. Thanks for buying "Refuge", Square Peg. And it stands alone, so you don't have to read the books in order. I hope you like it. Both of you are thanked in the acknowledgements.

R, Good wishes on retirement. Yes, the first step in retirement is putting your feet up and relaxing.

Square Peg, I don't know if this helps with cat pee - There are products at pet stores designed to discourage peeing in certain areas like on the curtains. I'm pretty sure there are some for indoor use. I don't know if they work on cats. They're meant for housetraining puppies. I do feel your pain. I had a long stretch where our neighbors' dogs did not poop in front of my house. Alas, that time is over. I'm using "No Go" in front of the house. Hopefully, it will help.

Happy New Year.

p.s. Did I ever tell you guys about my next-door neighbor from Brazil? The overly friendly one? The one I turned the hose on? He just got two adorable pit bull puppies. What's a pleasant way to say, "you should walk them on a leash and clean up their poop"?

Growing up on Long Island (pronounced "Long Guyland") I'd see little "Curb Your Dog" signs on some lawns. In Portuguese, that's "Limite seu cachorro," according to Lingvanex. Seeing that in his native tongue might get the message across to your neighbor.

An old guy I worked with was pissed off at some dog that would piss on one of his bushes. One day he somehow added bare wire to the bush and electrified it and then watched with glee how the dog jumped and whelped and never returned. Such a scheme would not work on poop unless it's a long steady stream of diarrhea, and even then I'm not sure the electrical conductivity of diarrhea is anywhere near as high as urine, which, actually, has been characterized.

My wife and I both started "Temporary Address" -- we're really enjoying it.

I did find two missing open quote marks; otherwise it's perfect so far. I can start an errata, no charge, of course!

I'm going out to get more Nature's Miracle, Urine Destroyer, which also repels cats. It contains some essential oils. I've already sprayed my shoes with the small amount left in the old bottle.

I'm looking for a new year in a home that's smells a lot less like pee!

Thanks for buying my books. I'll look for typos and other goofs as I go for a second edition. And there are other improvements I hope to make.
Good luck with getting rid of the cat urine problem. If I come across anything that's supposed to work, I'll pass it on. Oh and thanks for the Portuguese translation. I'll whip up an attractive sign with "leash your dog and clean up it's poop" in three different languages.

Happy New Year.

Hi, Guys,

Square Peg, if you want to tell me about errors you find, I'd love it, but no pressure. People pay good money for that service.. I'm redoing "Unfamiliar Waters" right now, but I plan to give TA another try.
I wrote the guy next door a letter in English and Portuguese. I hope it makes a difference. On my street, there are pipes in front of our driveways through which rainwater can flow. These pipes are covered with concrete, so that we can get out of our driveways without our cars getting scraped on the bottom. The pipes get clogged up. The same neighbor decided to clear out these pipes for me. I told him, "Don't bother," but I didn't say it assertively enough. So he cleared out the pipes. In doing this, he destroyed half of the concrete covering the pipe in front of my other neighbor's driveway. He cleverly left all his tools in front of my house, and he tucked the broken up concrete into my bushes. I'm not a Buddhist, but I think the lesson here is that I need to learn to be assertive without being combative.

I hope all this doesn't bode poorly for the new year.

Here's to a house free of cat pee and good relations with neighbors, and an assertive me.

A friend from Spain told me their word for "retirement" is "jubilación." Jubilation!

Monday - holiday - great start
Tuesday - site visit by someone doing the condo's Reserve Study. Only "minor" issues found. Good continuation
Wednesday - Troubles in Jubilee Land ... when getting my laptop looked at (3 small screws holding the back were missing) I somehow lost one of my favorite folding hats.
I also lost a small sheet of tiny dots used to remove a corn on my foot. Both minor, but annoying.
Evening seminar discussing "Nashville" very much fun, to compensate.
Thursday - The dots were found. The hat did not turn up at the Apple store or the mall's security (lost and found) office. Oh well, time to buy fresh ones.
Attended a university class under the state's laws that lets seniors into classes for $5. Yikes! What was I thinking. I don't have time for this now (too much to do re: condo exit and other interests). Very sad about this as the prof has put together a great course and, naturally, will retired at the end of this term.

Friday - to be determined.

Reading with interest the developments with cat piss, bit bull puppies, book reading (and edits) and neighbors who haven't a clue how to enact that role.

Got my personal name for "retirement" ~ JubliGlee.

'Cept it ain't necessarily so. It's exactly like before, but work is missing as a source of stress. Today, a trade I thought would go through turns I was 24 hours too late in placing it.

Which led me to reflect on the various ways of Motive:

1. Fear of Missing Out - one of the reasons I thought to try the trade. But felt as the positive ...
2. Enjoy an adventure - well, it's been one, but not the one I wanted.
3. Anger - To defend or redeem myself. This is now fired up. Feeling a sharpening of focus with the narrowing of my eyes. Not describing things as what they really are gets me going.
4. Adding fuel is I applied for some market research on being scammed and revisited my sustained anger when I realized they had ripped me off. And eventually they got away with it!

Grrrr. Thanks for your ears. R.

Hmm, it always seemed to me that a good scam would involve offering advice on how not to be scammed. The idea is that the folks who are confident about spotting scams won't be interested. And the rest, well, they're a field of sheep waiting to be fleeced.

A few identity theft services invite their users to enter credit card numbers and driver's license info. But I leave them blank. When it comes to credit card hacking, the credit card company itself is the first to notify me. One Sunday morning they called my landline to ask if I was withdrawing $500 cash from an ATM on the other side of the country. Obviously not, I replied, and so we agreed to close the account, after I went over which of the pending transactions were valid. They FedExed a new card to me the next day.

jubilación / Jubilation -- Very Nice!

Looking closely at the word "retirement," I see TIRE (and not the thing you need for cars and bikes). So I think of "retirement" as another stage of life where you do different stuff that just TIREs you out but in a different way. Maybe something along the lines of "revivement" might be a better term, although no one will know what it means.

Hi,
As the senior (age-wise) member of this group, here are my impressions on retirement. I retired in 2008. I loved my job, so for me retirement was a challenge. I had to find things to fill my time. Yes, I had some interests and friends to spend time with, but not enough to fill up forty hours per week. I think you find your rhythm - how much activity feels right. R, I know you have a lot of interests. So I think you'll do fine. For me, other challenges were health issues which hampered my ability to do what I wanted, and friends and family getting sick, old, and dying. As my friend Kate said, "I need to find younger friends." Also, I used to be a very mellow person. Now little things that didn't used to bother me do bother me. On the plus side of all that, I have so much freedom to do what I want - take classes, go places, do things. visit with friends who also have a lot of free time on their hands. I'm shy, but during COVID, I felt really comfortable about calling friends because I knew that they were probably bored and welcomed the call. And I had so much time for writing. (Truthfully, I wasted quite a bit of time, but I still managed to get a fair amount of writing in.)
So good luck with jubiglee. Let's both put a lot of glee into 2024. This is me signing off. Elaine

More like JubliGlum for now. Day 7 of freedom from work. So far, big estimated taxes amount, submitted. My partner broke a crown and will need an implant with new crown. Our hydrogen peroxide machine for washing clothes without detergent sprang a leak that might cost over $8000 to remedy. Possibly covered by a claim on our insurance, but that firm approval is something state farm dangles in our faces without giving a solid answer.

Plus, winds and major snow storms promised over the next several days. This means getting out there and shoveling it so our sidewalks are passable.

If these are the good times, spare me the bad ones! R.

R, that's a lot of bad stuff to hit all at once. Hope State Farm comes through for you. And I hope you get some good stuff thrown in with the bad.
I didn't know you could clean clothes with H2O2. I'm going to look it up.
Life is good over here, and I'm going to enjoy it.. Mostly I'm getting caught up on all the things I let slide while I was publishing "Refuge. and warm Tea." I'm on to-do list number 3. The good news is that I got lists 1 and 2 done. The bad news is that I'm not sure how many more lists I have. I keep remembering more and more things I have to do. Every time I check something off, two more things pop into my mind.

Wishing us all good stuff.

Isn't H2O2 one of the main ingredients in OxiClean? I didn't think it was possible to make H2O2 at home.

Today is the last day of vacation. I took time off from work to spend with my daughter and their partner, who traveled from Houston to visit. The time went by soooo fast. My daughter was planning to help me start a book using the Lulu platform. I've seen that B&N (and Amazon) can accept PDF documents for self-publishing. But then the book can be sold only through that site. It seems that Lulu allows for unlimited distribution. Of course the first step is to go through my portfolio and collect material that's worthy of publishing, or start writing, drawing and'or photographing.

Hi team.
"OxiClean contains several ingredients, but the important one for boosting and brightening laundry is sodium percarbonate — basically, dry hydrogen peroxide plus washing soda (also called sodium carbonate)"

Well, I guess it does. Learned something.

PureWash uses electricity to ionize water (give water an electric charge). Easy search to find explainers about the process.

My self-dev nudge today has to do with some type of daily but loose reminder system. Between sleep and waking, I played with some rhyming words to "more"

Adore - remember to connect with people
A Door - get "out there" in some way, ya know
Explore - outside or inside
Chore - must do stuff for living like laundry
Bore - like chore, but less urgent right now, like tidy up
Snore - get enough rest
Ore - investments & finances

I have boxes of expired business cards I've collected for their blank back sides. Cheaper than paying 3M for post-it notes. Divide in 6 boxes, mark one of the 'ores' in each, and X it out as I get to it in a day. I can pick the 6 each day.

Just playing with ideas.

Had a friend once who would sing "there doesn't seem to be enough time to the things you don't want to do once they find you."

Yup, today, except for probably 20 minutes to write this note and send email answers to friends, today is going to be devoted to Other People's Agendas. Yuckstuff in short.

Not going to list the specifics this time. Just send sigh and get on with it.