Happy Birthday, My Love

 You used to be 6 weeks younger than me.  Now you're four years and six weeks younger.   Happy Birthday.

The nice thing about this blog is that I can talk to myself.  I look back at previous years and can see - yep, this is a hard time of year.  The 52nd anniversary of our meeting, his birthday, and now the four-year anniversary of starting to realize that his treatment was not going as planned.

So I do as I have done - and keep busy.  I have really dived into cleaning the barn.  I showed one before-and-after picture last entry.  Here's the other side.

That took 4 (or was it 5) trips to the dump.  I did find a couple of treasures, one that I'm really happy about.  They were in a bin on top of the shelf, under another bin that happened to be full of small cardboard boxes.

When Bob's family was stationed in the Philippines in the 1960's, one of the things they brought home were a pair of brass Kalesa (carriage) lamps.  I loved them, but of course they stayed with the house.  I remember looking for them, without luck, after the hurricane (a lot of the contents of the house ended up being strewn outside, and much disappeared.)

Well - apparently at some point Bob got the lamps, and also apparently forgot about them, because there they were.  They need a serious cleaning up, but here's a picture of something similar

Of course, that puts something else on my "things to do" list. They have been wired up for electricity (for direct wiring into a house) but I might remove that and just put in battery flame bulbs.  And find someplace cool to put them.

When I was at Lowe's getting my lawnmower and chain saw, I also was looking at the battery circular saw.  I'm getting very fond of battery-operated tools.  Not that I *need* a circular saw - but if I ever come up with a project, I was planning on getting one.  There's an old one with a bit of a wonky cord in the barn but I'd be happy to give that up.  But lo! and behold!  One of those boxes held a Black and Decker set of battery circular saw, drill, and skill saw.   I'm charging the batteries now to see if they're still good.

A side note on tools.  I think it was about last June that I wrote that I really should take the brush cutter in to be cleaned and repaired, as I haven't been able to find a battery operated one.  So I finally did.  Eventually now I'll get back to yard work.

[side note to side note.  There was a joke on FaceBook about the tool version of being sorted into Harry Potter houses - and they showed the colors red, yellow, green, and blue.  Without even thinking I went Milwaukee, Black and Decker, Ryobi, and Makita.  But don't ask me to tell one fashion clothing brand from another]

Back to the barn.  In 2019, when the weather had cooled a little and before the hurricane (it seemed that at the hurricane is where everything changed) Bob and I were actually going to tackle the barn.  He would look at it (all of it looking like the before pictures above) and go "where do I even start?"  And I would say "pick a corner."  So that's what I've done.  I've more-or-less cleaned one corner.  Last November, when I was painting the deck and the house I cleaned up the paint cabinet and the area around it.  Today I tackled another corner (didn't take a before picture).  I did two trips to the dump yesterday and two today, with enough stuff piled up for another one tomorrow.  And yet again, anything that looks like it might have a use at all goes to the donation site and quickly disappears.

Will I get it done this year?  Don't know.  I find that I can hit it, hard, for about two hours.  At that point, I've done enough to feel a sense of accomplishment - and then I look at everything else that's there and I just sag (not to mention all the stuff he stuck up in the rafters.)  And it's physically demanding - today I hauled off a hundred pounds or so of scrap metal that I've been piling up.

It's cathartic, and also heartbreaking.  It feels good, and it feels sad.  At times the loneliness washes over me.  So I came in and fixed a hamburger for dinner (I think I had two hamburgers last year - not something I do often) and had a beer.  When I'm done with this I'm going to make a microwave cake to celebrate his birthday.