Another day - another milestone.

Today I completed the on-line application for Social Security Retirement Benefits to start with the New Year. With each one of these steps anticipated with a certain anxiety and completed with a feeling of satisfaction, the reality of the pending revised state of affairs settles in. I only hope it is a good fit all around. A few significant details remain: medicare supplement insurance for myself and COBRA coverage for the spouse. I also need to work up a 2012 budget. It will be preliminary until some of the expenses are firmed up.

What makes for a good fit under the pending circumstances? It probably behooves me to settle on some criteria, otherwise my evaluation of fit will depend upon the whim of the day. Add a dash of lifelong impulsiveness and one has the recipe for trouble.

As folks can see from my last two posts, I have struggled with the spacing between paragraphs. The extra space between paragraphs is to compensate for not indenting. I don't know why it became a problem just then. I hope I have it figured out. Do you think it might be the doings of a high school English teacher reaching back from the beyond?

So! What does one do when they find an article in the British newspaper, The Guardian, on Wisconsin's governor and his risk of recall? Blog about it, I guess. There is, in my estimation, a more balanced view and more thorough coverage of the Palestinian push for a vote for statehood at the UN.

The Globe and Mail out of Toronto is also on my Favorites list. A recent article on the Canadian Wheat Marketing Board can be of interest to any of us who eat bread--whole wheat or white.

The National Catholic Reporter has also earned a spot on my Favorites list. It's articles keep the juices flowing.

It's time to see what Slate Magazine is up to today.

My note of June 22nd spoke of the 3 week mark of Carol's summer of hospitalization. The hospitalization and rehabilitative nursing home placement continued until today--one day shy of three calendar months. Keeping with the number 3, I guess it is appropriate to post a comment. I can't envision when the next 3 will occur and prompt another posting. The situation is essentially in a holding pattern for the next 6 or more months and then there will be additional surgery. One thing we have learned is that all deadlines are no more than rough estimates subject to revision and even reversal on short notice.

The old couple's household is once again intact. The only comment Carol made with respect to the appearance of the house after a three month absence was "It doesn't look like a bachelor pad." I was thinking, but didn't say it: "I wasn't trying to impress bachelors; I was trying to impress ladies." I need to wait and see what impact rehab had on her sense of humor.

I try to reflect on what I may have learned during these past three months, and the impact this experience will have on me here on out. I find myself summarizing the whole shabang with the observation: "When it comes right down to it, one is really very much on his/her own." It is not that friends and family are not helpful, but one has to be in a position to accept and make good use of that assistance. One can not always wait for someone to offer; there are times when one needs to ask for a little help and to be quite explicit about what type of help is being sought.

The retirement planning effort now has a whole new set of variables.

It is done. Today I submitted my letter of resignation making my retirement effective as of January 1, 2012. Now I will need to work on the items on my retirement checklist, so hopefully things will be in place come the new year. As I work on that checklist I suspect the whole business of retirement will become more and more real. For now it appears as a relatively minor occurrence when placed along side of Carol's continued hospitalization, which is now it its second month. This says a lot about perspective and the relative nature of things.

I have just spent some three weeks as the spouse of a hospitalized patient. The first two weeks were spent almost exclusively in the hospital with the exception of those nights spent in a motel trying to catch some sleep, showering, shaving, and changing clothes. Hospitals are not completely novel environments for me; I spent the first decade of my career working in one. I now work in an outpatient medical setting and find that the job takes me into hospitals and nursing homes on a moreorless regular basis. What was foreign or novel about the past three weeks was my role in this setting or context.

I found that I kept thinking about Army basic training and how my memory of those days and that experience was so familiar to what I was experiencing right now. I was in a role in which I had not previously been for more than one week. There was all kinds of uncertainty on all fronts as medical staff worked to stabilize one aspect of care after another. There was absolutely nothing that I could do to change the situation in which my wife and I found ourselves at the moment. And I was dead dog tired. I have often found that fatigue is a very interesting lens with which to view real time experience. I seem to lose the ability to contextualize the experience, to modify its impact, and most certainly to control or limit my emotional response to it and the immediate expression of that emotional response.

I can only surmise that the way in which I experienced the past three weeks and the experience itself (Is it even possible to separate the two?) will have a substantive impact on me well into the future.

Please don't assume that I am retired or that anyone else is for that matter. Just because I look old and what little hair I have is gray doesn't mean that my only responsibilities are getting myself out of bed in the morning followed by a little personal hygiene and getting dressed. Most everyone, who reads this blog, knows that I am not retired, which means I am venting about my experiences with non-readers. I suspect there is also a message for myself in all that: don't make assumptions.

There has been a slight change in the clean-up arrangements for the evaporator. On Saturday, the 30th, I packed the refilled L-P gas cylinder and the evaporator parts, that I had brought home to clean up, back out to the sugarhouse. (The recent rains had made it too soft to drive to the sugarhouse, so the pack frame was called out of temporay retirement and taken down off the nail in the basement.) The smaller of the evaporator pans has a small leak--an unsuccessful repair from late last season. It reopened at the start of this season, and we simply made due with it. A little syrup would leak out occasionally and become sugar and burn sealing the leak temporarily. We found out last year that the seal is dissolved by the sour sap, which resulted in quite a mess on the floor of the sugarhouse. This year I wanted to avoid such a mess. When I returned to the sugarhouse on Saturday, it was clear that our temporary fix was not working, so I emptied and disconnected the smaller pan to avoid any more flooding of the sugarhouse and to bring it home to clean. It is now in my garage in a kiddie wading pool. I am using some milk stone remover to loosen the scale. I applied some elbow grease to the project last evening, and it appears to be achieving the desired results. I will tackle it again later this week. Hopefully, with the additional effort the pan will be clean and ready for a return trip to the welder for another repair attempt.

This week I have been reading William Kittredge's Hole in the Sky. I am halfway through the book and find myself thinking that I will start over as soon as I finish it. It is a little like reading a foreign language in which I have very limited facility. I understand the story in terms of the facts and events, but the author's description of his emotional response to these facts and events is quite indecipherable. He has what appears to me to be a very obtuse style when he speaks of his subjective interpretations of and the meanings he ascribes to the events and fellow actors in his life. I don't think he is intentionally trying to be cryptic or enigmatic. At the outset, I thought I would catch on to the author's style after a chapter to two. Such has not been the case. His vocabulary is simple and common enough. What it is that eludes me eludes me still after 125 pages. It may simply be the brevity with which he speaks of these things. There appears to be an absence of adjectives and other descriptive words in his writing. It is mostly nouns and verbs in succinct declarative statements. Many of the sentences are grammatically incomplete which makes them mysterious at least to me.

Mr. Kittredge has an interesting story: he was in the Air Force during the Korean War and in graduate school working on a MFA (University of Iowa, Iowa Writers' Workshop) in 1968 during the Viet Nam war. (He had earlier earned an undergraduate degree in 1954 with a major in agriculture.) There was a certain parallel in those two conflicts especially as he experienced them. Between the Air Force and graduate school, he operated a ranch in southeastern Oregon. He was third generation rancher in that area. He speaks of the not so glorious side of fathers and sons and the choice of careers. Maybe what I thought was particular to the 60's is, in fact, typical of every age.

Now, am I being obtuse and enigmatic?