Day 230, Year 11: Life is Like a Roll of Toilet Paper . . .
Date: Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Weather: Sunny, but Cooler; High 68 degrees F
Location: At Home with the Goldstones, East Falmouth, MA
Andy Rooney was on CBS’s 60 minutes from 1978 until he died in 2011. Evidently at some point he wrote a list of the most poignant things he had learned in his life. A couple of days ago Falmouth friend, Olivia Masih White, sent an email listing some of his wise learnings. There was everything from having a child fall asleep in your arms being one of the most peaceful things in the world (so true) to being kind is more important than being right. But my favorite was this:
I’ve learned….
That life is like a roll of toilet paper.
The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.
How true that is! I hope I’m not too close to the end, but I am surely closer than I was 69 years ago. And with every year that passes, it really does feel like time is going faster. Half of the time I feel like a dog chasing her tail, going faster, faster, and faster. Thank you, Andy Rooney, for putting into words what most of us feel. And thank you, Olivia, for passing on those learnings.
Right now the days are flying by. There are so many things that need to be done before our move next week. Each day we chip away at the list, but there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to get everything done. I’ve decided to focus on just one thing each day. Today was an infusion day and on the way home we stopped at IKEA, one more time, to decide on which bed frame we want to purchase. What I found out today is that all of their beds have a frame in which the mattress sits down inside. That means when you make the bed, you have to fit your hand down inside the two-inch deep frame and lift the mattress up to put on the fitted sheet. The weight of mattresses these days makes that quite a back breaking job. So now I know we need to buy not just a mattress, but also box springs. That way the box springs will sit down inside the frame and the mattress will be on top of that making it much easier to put on the sheets. Tomorrow’s job will be to find a mattress and box spring set that we can afford and that can be delivered to our apartment door late next week. IF we accomplish that tomorrow, I’ll be quite happy.
I really think we are going to love living in the apartment, but moving into it has its difficulties. Because it is a ground-level, waterfront apartment, the only access to the apartment is a paved sidewalk. Mark and I have tried to estimate the distance and we think it is about 150 to 200 feet from the parking lot to the steps leading up to our deck. And then it is almost 50 feet to the front door. I am certainly not going to be carrying a mattress from the parking lot to the apartment door. So we will only buy one after we are promised door to door delivery. The distance from the parking area to the apartment also makes the whole move challenging. Heather is trying to help us locate about four strong college-aged guys that want to make some extra money. If we are successful in locating manpower, we will then rent a moving van that will hold everything and have them load the things from our two storage units and then unload and carry all of it into the apartment. But if we can’t find cheap labor, we are thinking that we will just have to hire professional movers to do the job. Jed is out of town next week and doesn’t return until Father’s Day Sunday, and there is no way that Heather and I can move all of that stuff. So the job on Friday of this week is to either secure the help of college kids and rent the moving van OR hire professional movers. One day at a time.
Tonight was East Falmouth Elementary School’s third and fourth grade band and chorus concert. Sam is in the chorus and we all enjoyed the concert. Mark’s stomach has been ‘off’ all day and he didn’t join us, but Ollie and Jonah used my camera to get video for him to watch. It was 8:15 pm when the concert ended and almost dark. But Jonah was desperate to have someone to throw a few pitches to him on the baseball field adjacent to the school. He had brought along his empty school backpack to wear on his front as a catcher’s chest protector. What an ingenious little character!
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| 160608 Day 230 Cape Cod, USA–Sam's Chorus Concert |
