Over a year-and-a-half since Paul died, I am still very much in the throes of clearing stuff. I have more or less reached the stage of finding ancient backup disks and user manuals for PCs dumped more than a decade ago.
Then I remember I hoard old Apple hardware.
Why do I do this? Let me run through the thought process.
Continue reading Unplanned ObsolescenceI decided to retire from professional modelmaking, once my last commission was completed. I made the decision some time before I was widowed, as it was partly in order to free up time to look after my late husband.
Many retirees will tell you they are often busier than ever once they stop having to go to work, and can’t work out how they ever got anything done when they still worked.
Anyway, I’m now retired. I have as much time on my hands as I need. I can do whatever I want, more or less whenever I feel like it. That’s the way it works, isn’t it?
There is a lengthy list of things I plan to do in my retirement. There’s decades’ worth of photos to sort, catalogue and scan. There’s still a monumental amount of stuff to work through and clear. I want to get on with my own modelling projects.
What’s wedging a spanner in my retirement, then? I have so much time available, why can’t I just get on and do all the fun things?
Obviously, there are plenty of not fun things that have to be dealt with. Running the house, paying the bills, grocery shopping, maintaining the property, that damned clearing accrued stuff. Then there is guilt. I still feel guilty about doing something for fun. Part of my brain still thinks there’s something else I should be doing instead.
There’s the daily domestic routine, getting up, mealtimes, and so on. Once a month there’s a local neighbour coffee morning, and the modelling club also meets monthly. I still need something more granular than once every four weeks, though. This is the part that’s taking time to coalesce. I hope it won’t take too long, though. I’ve got lots to be getting on with!
An article came across my social media a little while ago. Please take a moment to visit the link and read the article.
This part struck home:
Neil said, “The funeral wasn’t the hardest part, the hardest part was when everybody went home afterwards and I walked back into the house on my own. For the first time in forty years there was nobody there. No conversation, no television in the background, no one asking how my day had been, it was just silence. That was the moment it really hit me that Linda wasn’t coming back.”
I’ve written about grief. I’ve written about how the sharp edges become dulled over time. What I hadn’t thought about was grief’s co-conspirator—loneliness.
Continue reading The other side of lossGoogle, like hoover, has become a commonplace word to mean “internet search”. In the beginning it was simple, proud to give search results in fractions of a second. The company even had a motto: do no evil. Other search engines have since bowed to the inevitable. Google über alles.
Now? The motto is long gone. Alphabet, the parent corporation, is enormous with tentacles spreading into everything. Search results, initially just full of advertising, are now becoming garbage regurgitated by so-called artificial intelligence.
Continue reading When you thought things couldn’t get worseThis is not about the 90s TV show. I’m talking about people who enter your space and stick around for whatever reason, but aren’t family.
I made some really good friendships during my school years. After leaving school, though, we all sort of went our own ways. The friendships sort of petered out. I have no idea if others in the “gang” stayed friends, but I lost touch with all of them. Perhaps it was losing the catalyst of being at school, the shared experiences of academic life. Perhaps it was because we no longer met up in classrooms or playgrounds, every day of the week. I don’t know.
Continue reading Friends