The Rambler

As we've been relaxing into the new house, continuing to unpack and rearrange, life has been settling down some, and we are adjusting to our new normal. Being settled doesn't mean being sedentary though - we have been busy.

Pretty much as soon as we got here I plugged into the local Indivisible group. I quickly took on leadership of a couple different activities, which consume a not insignificant amount of my time. We also participated in the No Kings 2 protest in Iowa City. Like other protests we've participated in, this was a fun and energizing thing to do, standing in solidarity with our fellow community members in the fight against tyranny and to call for restoration of our democracy. As members of our local Indivisible group, we also walked through the crowd and handed out flyers to try to pull in more members.

Kristin has spent almost a month traveling back and forth up north to help out her folks as Carole continues to recover from her injury. That has left me here with the just the dog for a good part of the time since we moved in, and I've taken advantage of that to both relax, and to do a few projects, including building a garage workbench, replacing a bunch of light switches in the house, and doing some general clutter cleanup and organization.

It is tragic to have a garage without a workbench, but alas, the garage of our new house did not have one. Rectification of this situation was of high priority, but unfortunately, I also was lacking in tools - specifically, a table saw - and began looking at new units and balking at the prices. A quick perusal of Facebook marketplace turned up a nearly identical saw to the one I'd had in Decorah and had given away. The saw was a few block's bike ride away, so I pedaled over, took a look, liked what I saw, and bought it on the spot. After getting it home, I determined it needed a little bit of work and some parts, which I easily found and ordered on eBay. Within a week of starting my saw quest, I had a very nice table saw, and spent only about a tenth of what a new saw would have cost. With the table saw ready to go, in short order I had designed and built a workbench. Unfortunately, my ideas of having a nice workbench and doing projects on it haven't yet panned out, as it is currently serving as a glorified shelf, covered with stuff that needs to find a new home. That will change soon though.

As to the household, we've lived with used stuff for a long time, mainly because kids are hard on things and we never wanted something expensive at risk of being damaged. But now that it is just the two of us and a dog, we decided that we'd buy a really nice new couch. We've even decided that the dog will NOT be allowed on the couch. The plan is to have a nicely furnished living room that looks nice and is an inviting space. Maybe we'll even start making friends and inviting them over! So in pursuit of that goal, we spent about 3 weeks visiting and revisiting several furniture stores and did a lot of looking and sitting, until we found what we hope will be the perfect couch. It is now on order and we get to wait a few weeks before we have it. More to come on that.

Finally, it has started to become apparent that our Appalachian Trail and RV adventuring served, to a large extent, to delay our perceived retirement due to the fact that we were never settled into anything, and life was a near constant adventure. We never had time to experience the absence of a daily work schedule with everything else intact. Instead, we simply switched from one lifestyle to a different one. And now we have switched back to our previous lifestyle - but without the daily work schedule. It is yet a new view of life, and one we are still getting used to.