A Sunday Selection
In retirement, one day of the week wanders into the next with barely a care. My pal Mike and I have made a point of keeping track of each other’s minimalist schedules, almost as though our prior working lives, so governed by scheduling, require some outlet. Mike plays formal senior softball games on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and usually a pick-up game on Monday morning. He does home shores like vacuuming and dusting on Wednesdays and Saturdays. He has family gatherings on Sunday and Tuesday afternoon and evenings. I’m not sure which is more amazing, that he is such a man of routine or that I have somehow managed to find it my business to be so familiar with his routine. Both say a lot about the mind of the retired executive and the synaptic connections that don’t want to go away just because Medicare insists on intruding.
My week is less routinized for several reasons. Right now I teach one night a week and that anchors my week to Tuesday nights. Even though I have long since stopped punching any semblance of a clock, I am still aware of what the French have liked to call “les weekend” since the rest of mankind pretty much works on the five day work week schedule still. Traffic patterns are different on the weekend versus the weekdays and events, family or friend gatherings, tend to happen around the weekends more often than not. Certain stores and eateries are closed on Mondays to accommodate longer weekend hours, but those are petty adjustments that are easily incorporated. The biggest reason for my justifiable flexibility is that my work as an expert witness knows few boundaries. It can go red hot at times that require working day and night regardless of what the calendar says or the outside world wants to be doing. It can also go stone cold for long stretches. I never know exactly where it is or will be until it proclaims itself. But that’s OK because my otherwise flexible schedule can deal with it for the most part. I even have to fly out to Des Moines to give testimony in a case next month and I told the budgetarily cautious attorney that I didn’t mind sitting in Des Moines doing what I do without billing for waiting time, since so long as my room and board were covered, I could while away my time on my iPad just as easily in Des Moines as in San Diego.
Besides writing and keeping up on my reading, the other big filler activity for me is, of course, gardening. Unless I decide to go out and help the Des Moines parks and recreation people, I doubt I will be able to fill in with that activity, but while I am here on the hilltop, going out into the yard in work pants and long-sleeve t-shirt are de rigueur for me any day of the week, including Sundays. I have learned through scrapes, bumps and bruises that the garden is no place for shorts and exposed arms and hands. So today I am determined to finish up my new landscaping project and to do that requires a trip to Lowe’s for more crushed gravel and a whole lot of hefting and lifting of fifty pound bags as well as trimming fountain grass and other things to get the project across the finish line.
Most people formulate a project and then come up with a reasonable schedule to accomplish it. obviously, some people are inveterate procrastinators and they may never get around to doing their projects. But I am burdened with the need to get to it as soon as I conceive it. So, I met with the landscape designer on Thursday afternoon, I got her ridiculously high quote on Friday midday, I arranged for Omar to come and demolish the old garden and help me position the pots and larger plants on Saturday, and I used Sunday to finish the crushed stone surfacing and smaller plant installations. The gardening monkey was clearly on my back all day today, culminating with a visit from Faraj and Yasuko and Mike and Melisa at 4pm to look at my achievement. We all had a good laugh about the $43K pricetag that the project was carrying if I had the designer do the work.
I make no bones about the fact that the designer would have undoubtedly done a better job than I did, though I did it more or less single-handedly in a day and a half and she said she needed five days with a full crew to get the job done. She would have had far more plant material than I had, but I doubt seriously that the plant differential of almost $20K couldn’t have been purchased in similar volume by me for one twentieth of that amount. Mark-ups are a bitch I guess unless there were some real exotic plants headed my way, which i probably wouldn’t want the responsibility to maintain anyway. As for the overall aesthetic, I sort of watched her YouTube channel enough to know her basic style, so I stayed more or less true to that (though I’m sure that would make her scoff).
Most people use their Sundays to relax and be with family and friends. Out here, many people use the day to go on bike rides or motorcycle rides. The roads are filled with them. Being retired, I see very little reason to use Sundays for motorcycle riding, not to mention that this morning started off more than a little bit misty and wet. But even if it had been sunny from the get-go, I’m sure that my gardening monkey would have prevailed and I would still have wanted to finish the project rather than go on a casual ride through the ranch country to the East, as I often do when I have nothing more pressing to do. I guess that makes me an accomplishment junkie of the worst order, but then again, I already knew that and I didn’t need a gardening project to prove that to myself.
The landscape designer was also going to clean up and add to my cactus knoll, so that is in my sights next for renovation. truth be told, it needs attention since it sports a wide variety of cacti, but they have gone uncared for over several years for want of other property priorities. I already had Omar do the heavy removal of several of the less than pretty plants (an oak tree sapling and an overgrown thicket of aloe and jade plant). I have several pieces, a large pot and a concrete Japanese lantern, to place on the knoll, and I may just tackle that tomorrow to get them positioned for the day laborers later in the week. Joventino comes Wednesday and Omar is scheduled for Saturday again. I haven’t really decided what I will have them each do, but I plan to order superbags (1.5 yards each) of crushed rock, bark mulch and Decomposed Granite. That should be more than enough to keep them both busy when they come.
Joventino will be surprised to see how I spent my Sunday. Omar too might be surprised that I finished the job after he left. I feel good about my Sunday selection of activities and now I hope to be able to sleep without waking with a backache from hell.