Beginning Again

Beginning Again

Beginning is the difficult part.  Beginning again might be more difficult.  After some shenanigans by the Board of Regents at Salt Lake Community College, where I had been serving as the Provost, I resigned in protest and have moved into retirement a year or two before I had anticipated doing so.  It's not that Lora and I didn't anticipate the shenanigans.  We have been through this loop before, and so put our home in Utah up for sale, sold it more quickly than we had anticipated, bought a place in Mountain Home, ID, and have pretty much moved into it.  Last weekend, my son and I moved most of the furniture and most of my shop equipment out of storage in Utah to Idaho.  The first couple of days were spent putting the house together, and the last couple of days putting my shop back together.   Well, mostly back together.  There's some residual stuff still in storage in Utah, and some of it important.  I will fetch the residual back in a couple of weeks.

In Utah, the shop occupied a corner of the garage, and a corner of my life.  With professional and other obligations, I found it virtually impossible to keep up with this blog.  I do not have unlimited stores of energy, and the college sucked me dry.  Today, Lora flies back to Michigan, with Bella, our granddaughter, to attend a wedding, and so I thought as good a day as any to begin again.  She has been looking forward to it with mixed feelings.  Her nephew is getting married, and this really may be the last time she is able to see her brothers and the extended family.  Like most, however, her relationship with her family is fraught, and it is not my place to detail it here, but simply to suggest that her family would suffice to provide enough conflict, or drama, for a domestic novel or two or three.

Her trip leaves me with the dogs, the cat, and duh bunny.  The bunny, uniquely named spot, is a recent addition from the D&B store, forever after the Duh Bunny store.  It also leaves me with a couple of tasks.  One is to replace the brick molding around the back door.  That should take an hour or two.  The other is to build a shed.  That will take a bit more time.   I look forward to the project, in part because it is the sort of thing that I would have been discouraged to take on in weekend bursts, in part because it is necessary to keep the garage free of storage and miscellaneous junk, and in part because it represents a new challenge -- something to keep my mind occupied.  I hope to chronicle that, and other things, more openly, now that I do not have a public position to protect.

Peace and potatoes ...