For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
I awoke this morning to the sight of two mating bugs on the bedroom sliding glass door at 407.
I'd find it all romantic, but for the vague memory from something I saw on the Discovery Channel years ago that these blissful joinders in love end with the female sucking out the contents of the male's thorax, or biting his head off, or something like that.
Nature as metaphor.
At daybreak I found myself flying solo after P registered her displeasure yesterday at the finished version of the condo, first to the contractor, then to the decorator, then ultimately to me. I'm guessing she's back at the farm right now.
I had even bought a bottle of her favorite champagne to celebrate the first night in the completely renovated space. That was a wide, unscoreable miss.
Which sort of sums up the weekend, as I think of it.
On Friday night, mouth still sour with the taste of Paxlovid, we drove over to the Binghamton Airport so I could pay the airplane mechanic more than 25% of my starting salary as a baby lawyer for what he characterized as a "good" annual, with very few squawks. God help us when the Columbia is actually broken.
After the sixteen minute flight back to ELM, Peg and I sent remote birthday wishes to our friend Tommy on his 40th, then settled in for some rest before the long flight to Perry the next morning.
The flight was a good news, bad news proposition. The good news was that the weather was beautiful most of the way, and we actually had a little bit of a tailwind, which is a rarity when flying south. The bad news was that the magnetometer failed somewhere over Pennsylvania, which meant flying without a compass rose or the little bug on the instrument panel that shows where the plane is actually flying relative to the horizon. In bad weather that could've been a problem. Instead, it's just another repair coming our way.
We arrived at the farm in time to play a little golf, the best round for me of the entire weekend as my skills seemed to degrade over time, and for P to see some old friends out on the porch of the country club. From there we headed to the Elks Lodge, where P was greeted like a returning hero by her posse from the last two decades.
I realized upon arrival that my golf shoes and better clubs were sitting in my truck at ECP, so on Sunday we ventured up to Tallahassee to spend a wheelbarrow full of money on more golf shoes and a used driver for Issac's old golf club set, which was all we'd left at the farm. Somewhere along the way we got the idea of buying a better inflatable pool, replacing the old truck bed model so we could fill it and leave the icy well-water to warm while we toodled around in the truck.
As luck would have it, the first place we stopped had exactly the pool P was pining for, and soon we were back at the farm filling it up.
Or, rather, trying to fill it up. Turns out it takes a hell of a long time to fill a thirteen foot diameter pool, and we gave up at maybe two feet and hopped in.
Then we resumed trying to fill it on Memorial Day, only to make an unfortunate discovery.
See how it's a little lower on the left than the right? Turns out the thing must be completely level to fill, lest one end begin to overflow and the whole pool collapse and flood the yard. Which is what happened.
Memorial Day was, alas, sort of a bust for me. I thought I had an appellate brief due today, and over the course of eight hours frenetically cranked out a draft that would normally take the better part of a week. Yesterday I learned from staff that the calendar entry was just a reminder that the brief is due in a little over a week. Of course. One of the rarest of things these days, a holiday with P, down the drain.
Then I was up at five yesterday morning to keep working on the brief when I'd normally be writing this blog.
Then, of course, there was the disaster of yesterday's unveiling of 407. Enough said about all of that. The thing speaks for itself.
So today I'll take a deposition in about an hour, in-person with the witness for the first time in I don't know how long. From there I'll travel straight to the airport so Delta can fly me to Houston for another deposition tomorrow, then home to ECP tomorrow night to bask in the lonely grandeur of the condo.
The view is nice, I guess. Always has been.
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