Yup; I'm still a fan of ceiling fans

Back in the Row House a half a dozen years ago, we hired an electrician to install a ceiling fixture and some ceiling fans, and I reveled in those. Two years ago, we were in Panama for an extended amount of time, and although the Airbnbs that we stayed in had air conditioning—after all in Panama, the temperatures are always between 80 and 90, and so is the humidity—they had no ceiling fans, and I missed them.

So when we moved into this condo back around Christmas time, we considered getting a ceiling fan in my bedroom. In February, we had an electrician come and give us a quote, but maybe February is not the best time of the year to be thinking about cool breezes, and we told him, "I'll think about it and get back to you." After all, all that work is a bunch of money, and it's good to sit and think before you randomly spend a bunch of money.

By the time May rolled around, I was very glad I'd given myself time to think, because I had in fact changed my mind: Instead of getting a ceiling fan installed in my bedroom, we asked the electrician to install fixtures for three ceiling fans, one in each room of the condo.

Now, a couple of weeks later, I can say I'm really glad that I made this choice. For a while in early June, the temperatures were hot enough that we actually turned on the air conditioning. (This is the first time in my adult life that I have lived in a place with central air conditioning, so saying that "we turned on the air conditioner" is  big honking deal for me.) Having the ceiling fans in conjunction with the air conditioning meant that we could keep the temperature a little warmer and still be comfortable.

The last two weeks, in which the weather has been glorious, has mostly meant opening up the windows all night and closing them during the day. As anybody who has ever read anything at all about passive solar heating and passive solar cooling can tell you, our condo is oriented in the very worst possible way for taking advantage of the sun and the wind. Because the bulk of our windows are on our long western and eastern walls, in the summer this place heats up like a greenhouse – think about parking your car in the sun. The prevailing winds in our area from west to east, but a building to our west blocks those winds, so at night, even with the windows open, the house would not cool down if we didn't have these fans circululating the air.

There's something wonderful about sleeping under a ceiling fan; my time in Panama with only floor fans and wall-mounted air conditioners makes me doubly or triply appreciative of how quiet, unobtrusive, and comfortable these ceiling fans and breezes are.

**

Here's a little irony.  My husband has spent the last two weeks on a trip to Europe for some IEEE stuff. He called me to describe the irony of this trip. For much of our married life, his summer travels meant he got away from our un-air-conditioned home and basked in the hotel air conditioning. This summer, for the first time ever in our married life, we own a place with whole-house (well, whole-condo) air-conditioning, but the beautiful-yet-historic hotel in France had zero air conditioning, AND there have been epic heat waves there, and so he sweltered in style.  

Fortunately, we've had a lot of practice at that!

Musings on downsizing: particularly, heirlooms

Last November/December, my husband and I downsized from a row house into a two-bedroom condo.  I had so (SO!) many thoughts about this process, but at the time I didn't write much of that down because I was of course completely overwhelmed with doing the gazillion tasks with purchasing the new place, getting the row house ready for sale, and of course, downsizing.

(There was also the fact that I was getting ready for a surprise job that landed in my lap at the same time, but that's a different story).

At any rate, here I am 6 months or so after moving, and thinking about the aftermath of downsizing, and I have to say: thumbs up all around. I am happy to be in this compact space with things that I truly love around me, and also without nearly as much baggage to deal with lurking in storage or taking up space on shelves, getting in the way of those things I love.

In fact, one of my goals over the next few years -- once I finish up the surprise job that plonked down on me for the year -- will be to sort through about 3 or 4 bankers boxes of ancient family memorabilia to organize it, digitize it, and then get the physical copies the heck out of here.  These are boxes that I inherited from my grandfather, or that were sent me by distant relatives, all of whom knew that at the time I was interested in family history.  But the family history isn't nearly as compelling when it's packed away in a disorganized jumble in banker's boxes.

All this is to say, downsizing many other heirlooms was one of the things I am super glad I did before we moved (although some of these things hadn't exactly achieved "heirloom" status; I'll use that term because I'm not sure what else to call them).

I went through boxes and boxes of photos of my kids, sorted them out by who's who, and mailed each pile off to the appropriate kid.  I included a note telling them they were welcome to save the photos, share the photos, or toss them:  better to have that choice now than several decades from now, I figure.  

I took photos of the stuff in my home that I thought might have sentimental value for my kids, and asked them to let me know if there was any of it they might want to have now or someday.  There was actually very little of that.

As a side note, that's one of the aspects of "stuff" that my friends complain about: their parents insist on saving/storing/hoarding stuff because "you're going to get this someday", but it's things the kids don't want: furniture that's bulky/fragile/impractical, dishes that require special care, clothing or decorations that come from another era . . . even when the kids insist they won't want it, the parents insist they should.  My friends tell me they dread having to go through their parents' homes some day.  Meanwhile, the more stuff from our row house that we gave away or re-homed, the more my children said, "Thank you", because they won't have to deal with it themselves. 

And on the flip side, if the next generation really is going to appreciate something, there's an argument for letting them do so now.  If I live as long as my dad did, my children will be geriatric by the time they'll be reading my will together.  I'd so much rather they get to enjoy the things that delight them while they are still at the stage of building their own memories, and for those that have children of their own, while their kids can appreciate the stuff, too.

There's also this: inheritance drama can be real.  My sisters and I are a delightedly unified front, but my dad's second wife, who outlived him, has decided she doesn't want us anywhere near her home.  There are small things my dad left behind that I would love to have: his childhood photo albums and the albums from our own childhood, for example, so I could include those in my heirloom project.  There's a teddy bear I made him when I was in high school.  My sisters have their own wish-items, I know, of things that his wife doesn't want but is keeping nonetheless.  Maybe someday after she passes, we'll go through the home with her children and get access to those . . . but what a ghoulish, uncertain way to think about those things that would otherwise give me warm, fuzzy thoughts.  The whole process taints the memories that come with those objects.  That is nothing that I would wish upon my own heirs.

In the meanwhile, I'll just return to the fact that it's lovely to have a home space where I get to see things that I enjoy seeing, and where (most of) the things that I had been hanging onto because I think "my kids will appreciate this someday" don't have to wait for "someday" to be appreciated: I've already sorted those out and passed them along.

Tiny toys in tiny bags

 Here are (almost) all of the tiny bags I bring to church.

My sister made tiny drawstring bags that she used as gift-wrapping, and that started my collection.  After a while, I decided to switch to using up my stash of rescued zippers, and I love how they look like teeth once I add eyes drawn with a sharpie.  The zippers are much easier for small fingers to manipulate, too.

And why do small fingers matter?  Because this collection of tiny bags contains tiny toys.  I carry these bags to church, and pass them out to the children sitting in pews near me.

A toy in a bag is much more interesting than just a toy, and the kids have come to love the surprise of what comes in this week's bag.  I almost always get the toys back at the end of church: there used to be a matchbox car among this collection, but it apparently has driven away.

It's very easy to make these tiny bags, and now when I happen across a nifty tiny toy in a free box or such, I snap it up to add it to the collection.  I don't know who likes this collection more: the kids who play with them, the parents who mouth big "THANK YOU"s to me, or me!

Second-hand compliments: even better than first-hand ones!

Like many people I know, I try to remember to thank people for what they're doing: our department coordinator, the department chair, the people that clean our building or organize the behind-the-scenes computer systems. 

But here's a twist that I've really been enjoying: it feels even more meaningful when I get to pass along something that someone else was saying.  Like, the other day, I was talking to someone who I'll just call "Amy" here, and I mentioned a compliment someone else gave her: "I was over at the registrar's office, and they were talking about how they asked you for help with pre-commencement work because you're so good. They said, 'Amy's the bomb'."

And Amy paused, and then told me how much she needed to hear that: she'd just applied for a position that would have been a kind of promotion, and got passed over for it, and hearing that she was valued meant a lot at that moment.  I think the compliment felt all the more real because it wasn't face-to-face.  I mean, we're supposed to be nice to one another in person; it's a whole other level of compliment to know that people are saying good things about you behind your back.

One of the passages from the Bible that has struck me comes right after Jesus is baptized, and God says to those hanging around: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I take great delight".  What strikes me about this is that the introduction isn't about the role that Jesus takes on, but about the interpersonal relationship. 

After I read this, I started trying to introduce people I know that way: instead of "this is X, who runs with me," but "this is my dear friend X, who makes my life better by keeping me active"; "this is my one of my favorite pew mates; she always makes me smile"; "this is my inspiration as a department chair; we all know we're in good hands with her." In other words, I try to not just say who the person is, but who they are to me.  I love how much that seems to touch people. 

A salad gift

 Our CSA season is underway. (That's "Community Supported Agriculture", not "Confederate States of America", to be clear).

Back in February we forked over (heh) a couple hundred dollars, and now every week we get to pick up a giant box of vegetables, grown locally and organically.  When we signed up, we could have chosen "small, medium, or large": we chose "medium" for historic reasons, but that turns out to be a LOT of vegetables for just two people.  And when my husband is traveling, as he often is, I truly can't eat all the veggies myself.

The organization we order from calls each week's delivery our "share", and I've been taking that term literally.  I visited a far-off friend last week and took her a head of lettuce as a hello gift. I made a huge salad (recipe below) for our condo's bi-weekly patio party.  I'll be taking veggies to my daughter tonight when we have dinner together.

The friend I visited told me that one of her friends gives salad as a birthday present to her other friends.  We all loved that idea, and spent a bunch of time chatting about that idea.  I'm definitely filing that one away in my back pocket.

At any rate, having vegetables in my fridge that are not stuff I bought in the store, but are rather the vegetables farmers happened to choose to grow for me, means that the recipes I come up with to share can be rather quirky.  My condo-mates at the patio party marveled at the salad I brought: they asked for the recipe, and said in almost-admiring tones, "I never would have thought to put those things together!". 

Yeah, me neither.  Before yesterday, I never would have suggested a bok choy/fennel/radish salad.  But you know? It turned out great.

So here's the recipe:

The base: 

• hardy vegetables, finely chopped. 
• The recipe I was riffing off used Swiss chard, but as I noted above I had bok choy, fennel, and radishes. 

The dressing: 

• oil and vinegar (I used olive oil & cider vinegar)
• salt and pepper
• garlic, minced
• a bit of paprika (or jalapeño peppers, or something tangy)
• parmesan cheese

I think it's the parmesan cheese that's the magic ingredient; it really makes the whole salad incredibly yummy.  

I still have more of the bok choy and fennel, and I still have half a jar of dressing . . . and this afternoon, we'll be picking up our next box of veggies.  So I think I'd better start looking around for a friend who needs a gift of a salad!

The three things conversation

Every day at 3:14, I call N-son for the Three Things conversation. 

(Okay, actually, it's almost every day. Sometimes one of us is otherwise occupied.  Still—unless I shut it off because I'm in a theater or a meeting or something—every day at 3:14 my alarm pings, and I try to stop what I'm doing, and call N-son.)

The topic of this short phone call is to trade our stories about these three things:

1. Something that made you happy.
2. A good deed you did.
3. Something you're looking forward to. 

That's all we need to talk about.

The calls usually last 5–10 minutes; if it gets close to 10 minutes, one of us makes "Mama hates phone calls" noises (which is true), and we wrap it up.  Sometimes saying good-bye after a short conversation would feel rude or dismissive, but we both know that we'll get to talk again tomorrow, so it's okay to cut it short today.

I started doing this a bit more than a year ago, when N-son was feeling particularly lonely and left out, and I wanted a way to connect with him.  The fact that we've been doing this for more than a year tells you how much we really have come to relish this daily ritual.

There have been a lot of ups and downs during the year; some of these conversations have veered off into describing the downs.  I have reminded N-son that neither one of us has to pretend to be happy . . . but that even when things are going terrible, there are small good things, too.  You can acknowledge the hard times, while still using the glimmers of good as the rungs of a ladder to help you start climbing up out of the pit. And this seems to work.  There have been times I've listened to N-son rail angrily or dejectedly through a 15-minute rant about his situation, and then he paused, and said: " . . . . but there have been good things, too.  Here are my three things . . .".

I also like adding #2 (a good deed we did) into the usual mix of gratitude: I try to get us out of our own heads into thinking about other people and our world.

As someone who hates talking on the phone but who loves my kids, I have to say that I've come to treasure this ritual.  The fact that it's scripted makes it a lot easier than the "just saying hi/how are you?" conversation that I find so awkward; it's a good way to catch up quickly.  And during the rest of the day, we both look forward to the time we'll get to chat. Sometimes we go out of our way to, say, pick up a piece of trash from the street so we can count that as our good deed. Sometimes I get to tell another person, "I told my son that you were the thing that made me happy today," spreading the happiness even further.  In fact, my friends all know what the 3:14 alarm means, and sometimes they'll join in on the conversation if they're with me when it rings. 

And that's it: the Three Things Call.  And now I'm getting past my 10 minutes of writing, so I'm going to hang up this post.  Talk to you later.

Stiched handles, and plastic bag bans

Two thoughts on cloth-versus-plastic, when it comes to bags:

1.  Stitched handles

As much as I try to keep my possessions to the only-what-I-need-or-love level, I still seem to be swimming in a large collection of reusable shopping bags.  The handles on one such bag ripped out when I was carrying something very heavy, and I guess the normal thing to do would have been to toss the bag, but I lavished some 45 seconds of repair time on it nonetheless.  Once I had the sewing machine out for another project, it was a simple thing to sew the handles back to the bag.

Et voila.

When cities or counties ban plastic bags, they actually make the problem worse if they're not careful about what goes into the place of those bags: merely saying "reusable bags" encourages stores to give out heavier plastic bags, pretending that those are multi-use.  It seems like the magic words for effectiveness are "stitched handles": that tends to actually lead to reduced plastic use, reduced litter, etc.

2. Economic differences of bag bans

I'm in a neighborhood group that is urging our city council to adopt a plastic bag ban: I've been helping to write draft language and to argue for why our city needs such a thing.  One of the criticisms we often get from people opposed to such bans is that bag bans are hardest on the poorest in our communities.  Surprise/not-surprise, these arguments usually come from white, affluent people who don't normally go around worrying about brown, non-affluent people.  

I was glad, therefore, for this article on the changes to the Philadelphia bag ban: it addressed a lot of the concerns about implementing bag bans, charging for bags and the effect on communities:   

https://cleanwater.org/2026/01/06/philadelphias-bring-your-own-bag-bill-how-we-got-here-and-why-it-matters

An example of a key takeaway:

While the memo suggests exemptions or free reusable bags for low-income shoppers, evidence shows that broad exemptions increase food costs and litter in underserved communities unless reusable bags are widely available at no cost.

Three key findings support this:

1. Eliminating bag fees at discount grocery stores increases food prices.
2. Corner stores, common in low-income neighborhoods, bear the greatest burden when bags are free.
3. Urban neighborhoods adopt reusable bags faster than suburban areas.

So there's that.  We'll keep plugging away with the council, and maybe someday I'll have neighbors using cloth bags instead of plastic . . . I certainly have a few I could share with them!

"Commencement means beginning" . . . of the free stuff

It's that time of year: students are moving out of their dorms and leaving behind oodles and oodles of things that are in perfectly good shape, but that they can't fit in cars or suitcases as they drive/fly back home.

For about a dozen years, a small group of people at my college organized a giant yard sale from the stuff that was left behind: it filled the gym, and pricing things at $1 a bag, we still raised thousands and thousands of dollars for charity.  It was an incredible feel-good thing: keeping so much stuff out of landfills, delighting our neighbors (including recent immigrants and other low-income people) with amazing deals on furnishing their home, and gifting charities with big checks.  

But it was also an incredible amount of work, too much work for people to figure out how to keep doing at a super-hectic time of the academic year.  Eventually, the organizers understandably burned out, and the program died.

There's a new group trying something smaller, but on a smaller scale (and without the yard-sale component--instead going more directly to charitable groups that need furnishings for their clients).  I volunteered to help; I've spent about two hours helping to sort/count stuff that they'd collected from departing students, and I'll spend two more hours later today as well.  As a perk, I get to nab a few things that'd be useful to me.  I've held off purchasing mirrors for our condo for just this reason, and sure enough, there were at least 15 full-length mirrors in the mosh-pit.  Now one of those mirrors is hanging on my bathroom door, just where I needed it.

I also picked up a few storage cubes that I'm using to pack away my winter clothes on a high closet shelf, and some little notebook disks. These are things I know I don't need to buy, if I'm just willing to wait for the seasonal bonanzas the come from being at a small college.  

Even though I don't have a basement . . .

Of the 85 million different things that are hard/liberating/challenging/freeing about downsizing from a full-sized home to a condo, the basement was about 27% of those things.  (Even though I'm a mathematician, I'm not at all good with numbers, so take those figures with a grain of salt).

The basement is not only a place for storing a bunch of things that it's easy to forget about, combined with those items about which I pretend, "I'll use this someday", it was also, for me, a notable area for some of the hobbies that I loved.  The basement in our row home contained -- most significantly of all -- a woodworking bench with all my tools, and large shelves for holding my canning jars.  Getting rid of the "I'd forgotten about this" clutter was a chore, but it was a chore that I felt good about.  Saying good-bye to my woodworking bench, on the other hand, felt like leaving a huge part of my life behind.

So imagine my amazement and jubilation when I discovered that, in the bowels of condo that I moved into, a bunch of residents had cobbled together a wood-working shop of their own.  Not only is there a space here in which I can do woodworking, but there are fancier tools than I have ever used in my life, and a community of people who hang out there to give advice and to chat.  

The most impressive thing I've built so far is a set of canning jar shelves that go up in the condo. 

The shelves, nearly done, sitting right outside the
woodworking shop, where one of my sawdust-is-glitter buddies
is hard at work on his own project. 

I made this under the tutelage of a regular hanger-out in the workshop: a guy named Ted. He refused to let me throw together a set of ugly shelves, and instead showed me how to use chop saws, table saws, routers, dremels, and more.  He even drove me to the hardware store in his pick-up to help me select plywood and other supplies (things that don't fit in my own little hatchback).

And the shelves came out really nicely! 

The shelves in the condo, 
doing their job of holding canning jars.

This beast is 7 feet high, 6 feet wide, and 1 foot deep.  Most of the shelves are adjustable.

I'm loving this thing I made (really, that Ted tutored me through making), but even more I love that it represents a community-shared-space where I'm going to get to have even more sawdust-inspired fun. I thought my circular-saw days were behind me, and instead a whole new world of amazing tools and the projects they inspire lies before me.

A folding chair fix (observed by a spider)

I love the community vibe in my new condo.  One of the quirks of this group is that during the summers, the social committee hosts "Wiener Wednesdays" on the patio; people bring side dishes (the food is nut-free; the people are allowed to be as nutty as they want), and we grill hotdogs together.  

The powers-that-be have gladly accepted my offer to become the chair of the newly-constituted "Sustainability Committee": a committee that currently has exactly one person on it (yours truly).  One of my first actions was to use Wiener Wednesdays as an opportunity to have the secretary of our association give me a tour of the recycling bins (we want better signage, so people don't mess stuff up the way that people who don't have clear directions tend to do).  Thrilling, right?

While we were still on the patio noshing on our wieners, though, another condo resident sat on a chair whose seat started giving way on her.  She and the chief griller started making "need-new-chairs" noises.  I took a peek, and it wasn't the frame that was a problem -- just some stitching coming loose.

So, the next morning, the entire body of the Sustainability Committee mobilized into action!  I brought the folding chair into my condo, grabbed a spool of gray button thread and a suitable needle, and stitched the chair back together. 

A little gray spider hitched a ride on the chair; I didn't see it until we (the Chair of of the Sustainability and the Chair of Folding) were both inside.  The spider was content to hang out at one end of the chair frame and observe while I hung out at the seat of the chair and sewed; only one of us was doing thread work.  Maybe the spider was getting ideas for new web designs, I dunno.

The repair is not particularly fancy, but it's also not particularly noticeable.  I successfully carried the chair and spider back out to the patio, and notified the powers-that-be that their new committee is already on the job.  

This is going to be fun.

Meta cherry blossom experience

 

Double-magnetic knife rack (my diy hack)

 I am a total fan of hanging things on walls, particularly things I use over and over again.  Even before we moved into this condo, I'd made sure I had lots of hooks for our kitchen implements, and I installed them on what little wall space is available in our long, galley kitchen.  

Also, hanging cast iron.

Because this kitchen has a very helpful pass-through to the dining room, the only remaining vertical space above the counter is on the refrigerator.  I decided this spot was where I wanted a magnetic knife rack.  BUT.  Obviously, I'm not going to screw a knife rack into the refrigerator.  I'm also not a fan of adhesive strips; they create messes when you take them off, and they make changing your mind about where things go much harder to do.

What I really wanted was a knife rack that was magnetic on both sides, so that it would cling to the refrigerator and also allow the knives to cling.  But none of the knife racks I saw online had that option. 

Then, the other day when I was in the Restaurant Store (kind of like an outlet of equipment for people who own/run restaurants), I found an inexpensive screw-in magnetic knife rack . . . and I had a brilliant (if I say so myself) idea!  I bought two of them, and used a trio of thick screws to screw them to each other. 

Voila! Magnetic on both sides!

The disadvantage, which doesn't seem to be too major, is that this is twice as thick, so the knives are a bit further out than on a regular knife rack.  But the advantages are just what I'd hoped: it's easy to move this knife rack up and down along the fridge if I need to do so.  Moreover, if I decide later I want to take these apart, I just unscrew them and they're still perfectly useable as screw-in knife racks.  

What I've been up to lately (a peek at my "retirement")

I spent the first year of my retirement overseas, working on a book and also being a tourist.  

I figured that when I came back to the U.S. this past summer, I'd learn what its like to truly be retired: I have read so many other blog posts about the joys of waking up without an alarm, of no longer needing to care about artificial (or not artificial) work deadlines, of running errands mid-week instead when the stores and streets are empty instead of during the crowded evenings or weekends.

Hah.

First of all, my running buddy and I get together three times a week.  Although we've allowed ourselves the luxury of pushing back our starting time from 6:00 to 6:30 a.m., the alarm clock is still how I wake up every day.  It's not because of work; it's because that's my choice (well, and because my friend works, so we can't really run later in the day). But still, it's rare that I turn off that alarm and just sleep in.

And then, a bunch of things happened.  

One is that toward the end of September, my husband and I fairly impulsively decided to downsize significantly and move to a condo.  There were a bunch of reasons for doing so eventually (and I hope someday to write a blog post about that).  But there were also a few reasons for doing so quickly -- in particular, noisy neighbors who talked loudly all night long on one side of our home -- and so all of a sudden, we were in a swirl of moving.  This threw us into a deadline-intensive couple of months:  between mid-October and now, we've been caught up in buying a place, fixing it up, triaging all the stuff in our row house, moving what we wanted into the condo, prepping the row house for sale, and getting it on the market.  That has been intense, I tell you!

Another thing is that I got ready to teach a class.  I know, I know, I'm retired: but it's only one class.  I figured it would be a good way to help my former department (several people are on sabbatical this spring, and they need a bit of extra help), and I thought a part-time gig would be a good way to help structure my time once my book was submitted to my publisher.

Oh, and that reminds me of another thing!  The book, whose first draft I finished while traveling last year, was accepted by a prestigious publisher and is now under contract!  So another thing I've been doing -- and will continue to do -- is to work on the picky things related to preparing it for eventual (2027) publication.  This is stuff like getting permission for the gazillions of figures I use, working on promotional materials, indexing things, copy-editing . . . it's very bureaucratic. (Kind of like a job.) So, yay for that!

And then there's this other HUGE thing.  While I was in the middle of moving and booking, my professional society wrote to me and said, "As you know, the editor of Illustrious Journal [not its real title] is stepping down suddenly in January. We think you should take over for a year as Interim Editor; could you do it?"  

Now, usually it takes about a year to train people to be the editor: they get one year of shadowing the previous editor and taking on the various tasks one-by-one as they get up to speed.  Since I was in the thick of all that moving/packing/cleaning/repair stuff when they made the request, I didn't even do any pre-January training.  I told them yes, I'd do it, but that during December I'd stick my fingers in my ears and sing la la la la whenever any Illustrious Journal stuff came my way, because really, I had to make sure I had a place to live. Then January came, and, my goodness, what an amazing amount of administrative stuff I'm learning!

So this is my retirement: waking up at 5:45 most days, running with my friend before the sun comes up, teaching a class, working on the administrative aspects of a book manuscript, and dealing with a deluge of editorial work and funky computer interfaces.  I tell my friends and colleagues: "the sooner you get behind, the longer you have to catch up!".  I'm snowed under with catching up, for sure. If I'm posting a bit less than I'd thought I would, well, now you (and I) know why.

**

I do want to say that all of the above stuff I wrote is part of why retirement is so cool: this is a lot of stuff to do, but it's all stuff that I chose.  I would never have been able to take on Illustrious Journal if I'd been teaching full time; the class I'm teaching is one that I truly love teaching, and knowing that I'm teaching it while retired makes me feel much freer about the way I teach it.  (Dude! I'm not grading homework!  I hate grading, and generative AI makes the homework process all the more problematic.  I'm so glad to be able to just shove that aside).  

There's also the freedom to structure swaths of my time how I choose.  Late in the summer and early in the fall -- before my husband and I decided to move houses -- I got to spend time with my dad, whose illness progressed, creating occasional emergencies and eventually overcoming him.  I got to visit him several times while he was feeling well and while he was feeling ill, and my sister and I could be with him for his final week.  I am incredibly grateful for that time together. 

So this is a bit about what it feels like -- at least, for me -- to be retired.  It's not relaxing, nor boring; not in the slightest.  But it definitely feels like retirement gives me chances to respond to events and to choose my own adventure.  

Fixing super-fancy blinds with not-super-fancy hacks

When we did the final walk-through of our condo before settlement, we forgot to notice that one set of blinds hadn't been fixed.  The previous owner had claimed she would repair them prior to the sale -- or rather, her proxy/friend had agreed, since the previous owner herself is in a nursing home and not super able to manage her own affairs.

These are super fancy blinds: they're honeycomb with double-layering, and can be raised up from the bottom or lowered from the top.  They have pull cords at the side, but they don't have those long strings that are choking hazards; the pull cords have a ratchet mechanism, so if you pull a cord toward the left, say, it comes out about a foot while ratcheting up the blinds a foot, and then it itself springs back into original place.  Then you pull it again to ratchet up the blinds another foot, and it springs back, etc.  It's sort of like a pump handle, but it's a pull handle, instead.  I'd never seen these!

We have lots and lots of windows in the new condo (yay!) and they're all very large and quite tall, and consequently all these blinds are likewise very large and tall, and I'm sure they are very pricey.  And because the blinds throughout the place all match each other, we don't really want to buy one new blind that clashes with the rest, so fixing this would mean tracking down the original manufacturer and make and model.  Ugh.  I suppose we could have tried to insist post-settlement that the owner make good on this, but she is in a nursing home and we did sign off on the walk-through that things looked okay.

So I decided to try a DIY repair.  After all, if it works, it's a YAY repair; if it doesn't, we're no worse off.

Here's what was wrong with the blinds.

1. They'd split in half: somewhere in the middle, they'd come unglued, so a lower portion of honeycomb was sitting on the bottom bar, and an upper portion of honeycomb was hanging from the top bar, and in between, there was just space and the two nylon cords that raise or lower the bottom bar.
2. Except that the bottom bar couldn't be raised or lowered, because the ratchet string had gotten detached from its mechanism, and was now lying on the window sill like a snake soaking up the sunshine.

We had a work crew in the condo replacing some flooring, patching up holes, repainting, and performing other happy cosmetic tasks.  They declared themselves at a loss to fix the blind (which I hadn't even asked them to do, so I'm fine with that), but they had ladders set up, so they could get the blind down and hand it over to me for my own personalized and creative patching.

It's hard to see the stitches,
but here's where I sewed the top and bottom together.

To fix the first (that the blind was split in half), I got a needle and thread.  Perhaps I could have tried glue, but the original glue failed, and I didn't want to have to repeat these efforts if my own glue did the same.  I know that stitching will make that one row of the blinds look a little different, so we're not going for Better Homes and Gardens here.  

From the other side, you can't see the stitches at all. 

To fix the second (that the pull-cord had become detached from the ratchet mechanism), I could see the internal cord was (phew!!!) luckily still intact, and held from sliding down further inside by a fortuitously placed knot.  I used needle-nosed pliers to grip that string and pull it further out, agains the tension of the internal spring.  

On one side the cord is attached with this bead-like thing.
On the other side, the bead was missing and the cord was detached.

The bead-like clamp that had held the ratchet string to that internal string was broken, so I just tied them together, and dabbed a bit of superglue onto the knot for good measure. 

On the other side, I just tied it with a knot.  
No bead.  It's not elegant, but it works.

And here's what the blinds look like, now that they're up.

Like, you can see that there's one line that's different, but it's not horrendous, really.  For a 10-minute, $0 fix, I count that as a YAY!