I Love a Project

Two more weekends and we'll be done. We started painting the cabin in mid-May. We figure we should be done at the end of the Labor Day weekend.

It's been a long summer of work, both of us hefting our brushes and rollers and putting in a least a couple of hours every day. No trips to the brewery at Port Townsend for lunch (ferry ride of about a half-hour, walk to bar, drink, eat, walk back to ferry, ferry to Keystone, nap) because we didn't want to carve more than two hours out of the day unless it had something to do with stir sticks and blue tape.

And the payoff is near. And we realized something: we love a project.

My mother loved a project, and I think that rubbed off on us all. Barbie is in the process of turning her guest house into a real guest house as opposed to the repository of uneeded stuff that it's been so far. Her project has consumed the summer as well. Step-daughter Lara is taking some online courses. We're contemplating the master bath at home as our next project, a good one for the winter.

And Susie? Well, her whole career is an on-going project, what with changing companies, hiring her daughter, flying to Vegas to Jersey to London and getting to ride back on the company Lear jet so that she wouldn't have to wait in the JFK mess in New York after the latest terror threat.

A couple more hours today on the deck gridwork - tedious, tedious work. There's simply no easy way to paint it - and then painting the deck floor, and then doing a slow walk around the house to touch up missed spots ... and we're done.

What next?

My Retirement Was Announced Today

My retirement from selling fine paper to printers, at least. I'll never conventionally retire. I'll always be working at something.

I've sold and managed people who sell for the last 20 years, and now I'm done. I've been in the print/paper business for a total of 33 years. I like to tell people that I started at 12, but I don't think they're buying it anymore.

And just think. There was a time when I thought that 33 was old. Now it's just the amount of time that I've spent in an industry.

I read an obituary last week about a woman in Maine who was in her late 80s. She'd written a humor column for a newspaper for years, and here was her obituary in a paper on the other side of the continent. I was inspired. She made people happy. She made them laugh at the vagaries of life. I, like her, can write for the rest of my life, and can hopefully make people laugh and think, and can have a career that lasts longer than my paper sales career has. That's exciting.

Now I wonder how long I can keep my 150,000-mile Sales Warrior Vehicle running.