Just Browsing...

I love looking at real estate listings.  Granted that there actually is a practical, if not immediate, reason to do so, namely the purchase of a retirement home in a few years.  The bigger reason though is that I just find old homes to be interesting.  

The house shown below is old, but I wouldn't use the word interesting to describe it.

This was my late brother Chris' house.  The last time I was in that house was probably early February, 2017, as it was being prepared to be sold by his wife.  My thought was to just go through the place, with her permission (of course), looking for any old family things that could be saved, prior to the sale.  I don't recall what I found there on that day, as it was an extremely difficult visit.  Prior to this, I had been there late morning on January 5, 2017 when I found my brother after he had passed away.  At the time, there was no heat in the house, so his body was frozen.  My fingers can still feel the sensation of touching him, thinking initially that he was just sleeping.  

More on this is noted in prior blog postings.

Seeing the listing was kind of stunning for me.  I have stopped once or twice over the past few years (as recently as three weeks ago) just to see the condition of the place, as it slowly rotted away.  I don't believe that it has been actually occupied since it was sold in 2017; as best I can recall from Chris' wife, it was sold to someone from New York, but nothing was ever done with it.  Fast forward to now, and I did see a condemnation notice on the door from the City of Scranton, so perhaps the absent owner thought it best to cover his/her losses and get rid of the property.  Interestingly enough, there already is a pending sale for it.

The timing of this listing/sale in mid-January I suspect is a kind of synchronicity of sorts, given the history noted above.  Maybe this is a kind of karmic way of getting it all over with together.  Maybe this is a kind of ending chapter.

Whatever happens regarding the sale, I just have one hope:  That whoever buys the property fixes it up and that there end up being children living in the place.  I think little kids running around is precisely the kind of exorcism the place needs.  The house, and my brother's memory, would like such a thing.

Making 2024 Small

"How 'bout getting off of these antibiotics?

How 'bout stopping eating when I'm full up?

How 'bout them transparent dangling carrots?

How 'bout that ever elusive kudo?"

(Thank You, Alanis Morissette)

As I noted in a prior post, every end of year I think about what happened in the 12 months past, and what I want to accomplish in the 12 months to come.  "Resolutions" sounds so formal...and I'm not a really formal kind of person...so I'm going to go with "goals"...and I've been thinking a bit more about this over the past week or so.  My track record in achieving these goals is, by all objective standards,  terrible.  Like Don Quixote though, I keep at it for reasons that mostly escape me but nevertheless seem like something of a noble quest. 

Anyway, a part of what I want to accomplish in 2024 can be thought of as "Thinking Small"

Thinking Small

Given my pending birthday this year, I actually think I am reasonably healthy.  Granted that there are a few chronic things going on (heart rate issues, for example), but all things considered, I think I am doing okay.  This noted, I need to do a better job of managing my weight.  That's not for reasons of vanity or anything else of the sort...it's strictly because I want to be as healthy for as long as possible, mostly because there is still a lot in my life to be done.  First on the docket for this goal is to simply think smaller in terms of what I eat.  As in just eating less.

Managing weight is basically a simple math problem:  Calories in, calories out (burned).  For me, a big part of this is that I simply sit too much.  Especially when I am at work.  More on some work stuff in a moment.  But I can't afford to be desk bound for hours at a time either.  This is an easy thing to write, but hard to do (for many reasons...), and I don't have a way to solve for this yet.  But I am going to figure something out.  

Perspective

I need to re-envision, if you will, my relationship with what I do for a living.  I don't want to work less, I don't want a simpler job, and I don't want to be "comfortable".  What do I want?  It's not a question of want in as much as it is a need...I need a greater mental and physical balance in my life.  Some might call this "work-life balance", but that doesn't do this justice.  Besides, I have an entire posting in my head on the subject of "work-life balance", so I'm not going to hash that out here.  Instead, I just need what I do to earn a living to not exhaust me, mostly because it shouldn't.  Yes, what I do is important, and I get to work with great people; however, I'm not curing cancer, stopping crime or preventing the fall of Western Civilization.  

I need to find a spot where I work hard, help those I work with, and have more time for the rest of my life.  Simple, huh?

As a side note, my retirement from the full-time workforce isn't imminent, but it's also not that far away.  Do I have a date in mind?  Yes.  Am I going to share that?  No.  One of the smarter things I learned from nearly three decades working with very smart people at Prudential is that you never give an employer too much advanced notice of your retirement.  Why?  The moment you do, you give your employer license to possibly treat you not as well (Think "He's going to be leaving anyway, so __________."). 

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

I've already started working on this goal. What is it, you may ask?  Well, I need to let go of some things.  Most of these things are physical stuff, as in I have DVI to HDMI converter cables for some reason.  As in I have a ton of old books that I don't ever plan on reading.  As in I am right now looking on a shelf where I have old notebooks.  Heck, I don't even know what is in these notebooks.  I am simply awash in stuff.  There is also some mental stuff in the back corners of my head as well that could probably do for, if not a purge, then a re-assignment to the mental equivalent of a Siberian Gulag.  

Time

"Time the past has come and gone

The future's far away

And now only lasts for one second, one second"

(Time, Hootie and the Blowfish)

Time is speeding up as I get older, a point which I think is ultimately at the heart of what Einstein was trying to prove with his Theory of Relativity.  It's only been over the past 2 or 3 years that I've actually been aware of this fact.  Nevertheless, I have things to do, and it's getting to the point where those things need to be larger in my life and less about the nuts and bolts of what I'm doing between 8am and 5:30pm-ish most days.  There are pictures to be taken, words to be written, things to be torn down, things to be built, cats to be petted, people to help and walks to be had with Ms. Rivers. 

None of us are promised time, by the way.  It all can end at any given moment for reasons of the tragic (struck by a drunk driver) or the dramatic (nuclear holocaust created radioactive cockroaches) or the mundane.   We just don't know, so it's all the more important to treat the time we have with the sense of reverence that it deserves.

Simply put, I think we all need to do a better job of honoring our time.  

Persistence

Recent events have left me thinking "why me?" once again.  This, by the way, is not a question of "why did this terrible thing happen to me?", but instead, why am I the one who is still standing?  Think of it as being a kind of survivor's guilt that's tough to explain to someone else who hasn't been through certain kinds of terribleness.  Anyway, as I ponder this sort of thing most every early January, I've come to the conclusion that it all comes down to one word: Persistence.  Either I've been blessed with this personal quality or I'm just too pig-headed to back down from things.  Both probably are true.  While this has certainly served me well, I'd gladly give a bit of it up if it would be/have been available in some small measure to certain others.

So, long ago, was it just a dream?

Time to march into 2024.