Thieves in the Garden

There are thieves in my garden.  They have stripped the fruit from the crab apple trees, gulped down the winter-berries, picked the snails from the pond, chewed open the walnuts and scattered their shells, chewed on what's left of the osier dogwoods and munched on the fallen apples, wormy and soft now.  I can live with all of this, but they are now stealing from the birds.  They are attacking the feeders.  First it was squirrels hurling themselves from the lowest boughs of the Norway Spruce trees, landing squarely on the platform feeder which stands four feet down and four feet out.  We caught them swaying innocently from the platform screening, vacuuming peanuts and cranberries.  Yesterday I cut the boughs and made wreaths for my staircase with raffia and ribbon.  The leap is too long for them now, but I'm not optimistic that the battle is over.  

Last night the raccoons came and strong-armed the pipe holding the suet feeder, swiveling it downward until the feeder slipped off.   They dragged it off somewhere secret to pry it open and eat the peanut butter cakes. So today we'll hunt for the feeder in the buffer at the end of the yard and we'll kick the leaf piles hoping to discover their hiding place.  Then we'll head to the home improvement store to purchase supplies to make a stove pipe raccoon baffle.  

I have three things on the Christmas list I gave to Hubby.  A ring, garden shoes, and a motion sensitive night camera to catch thieves in the act.  Not in that order.  The camera has been on the list for three years now.  I will get the ring..  it's not his fault..  In January I'll buy the camera myself.  

Snacking on Snails, Suet, and Sunflower Seeds

There are 40 actual work days left in my “career”.    When there are no days left, my part of the world will be the same distance from the vernal equinox as we are now from the winter solstice.    There will be two ski trips immediately after, and when I return from them there will be more birdsong in the neighborhood and the fish will swim a little faster.   For the last year I have cut back to part time --  transitioning --  and now is the time that concerned friends ask me, “what will you do?”  Their brows furrow and they watch me closely.  It feels to me like a test question posed to determine whether or not I’m ready to take on all that time, as though I might end up smacking my head against the walls out of boredom or something.   Frankly, I haven’t a clue and I’m tired of trying to think up answers.   Seems funny that on Thursdays they aren’t interested in what I will do from Friday through Monday.   There are no long stretches of unfilled moments in my life since cutting back to three days.   Instead where there were two, now there are four days of rushing around trying to get the things done that I want to do, with very few moments to watch the birds and sit on the bench next to the pond, no less to get that spare room fixed up or separate and move plants in the gardens, maybe take a course, or read a book cover to cover, or take long walks in the woods.    I am not feeling obligated to run around trying to fill my hours. 

We have raccoons, or at least one raccoon.  Same one or ones that snacked on my trap door snails this summer.  My bird feeders, pole and all, have been on the ground for three days in a row.  The lid on the tube feeder was obviously toyed with and the suet feeder was pried open,  both the suet and seeds gone.  Hubby reminds me that the suet is “a buck and a quarter a cake”, as though I can really do anything about it other than stop feeding the birds.  (Not an option).   Today I found a plan for making a bird feeder pole out of galvanized pipe sunk into cement, complete with a guaranteed to work raccoon baffle.    A new project to fill all that time.

Popcorn and Scrabble

It's been 15 months since my knee surgery.  They corrected the muscle that kept my knee cap off track, they cleaned out the torn cartilage and smoothed things out, but they couldn't correct the arthritis.  After a year of pain, I experimented, based on a book I read called "Saving my Knees".  For the last few months I have been biking only with almost no resistance.  No hiking, no long walks, no quad building, no PT exercises, and for the first time in 15 months my knees do not hurt every time I move.  I'm not limping.  I am walking straight up the stairs, and straight down the stairs.  I know they are not healed, but what can be going on inside if they are no longer giving me constant reminders of advancing age?  If I run for the train, I know that I shouldn't have.  But I think I can ski again. I have begun falling asleep to the memory of standing on the top of the world. All around me is powder soft  snow. I slip over the edge and silently turning my way down the mountain.  

Unlike my dreamy winter gliding, however, autumn is wide awake and is in a full free fall.  The squirrels have returned to their pre-winter kamakazi launches from the nut strewn curbside to the white center line.  I have no idea why it is they don't look both ways when the the temperature dips, but they don't, sending me skidding on wet leaves.  

Fall is also hurricane season, and today there is a hurricane brewing.  I brought in the feeders and moved the bench from the bottom of the yard to the garage wall where it is more protected. Last night I received nine text messages and a phone call from work.  For the first time in memory they have closed the offices from Virginia through New York.  The roads are closing, no public transportation anywhere, and from my kitchen table I can hear the wind building.  We have large, century old trees all around us.  The Norway spruces tower above us, and the ash, maple, linden, and sycamore trees are in close second. They are healthy and hopefully can withstand the storm.  No where to go and no way to get there if you wanted.  The probability of lanterns, popcorn, and board games hangs in the morning grey.    

Just sayin...

There is just no point in making the journey if you're going to sit down in the road and have a temper tantrum about how hard it is, or lift your arms to the sky and whine, "Carry me, carry me!"  I am an optimist.  I am not sarcastic, cynical, or jaded, and no one is going to convince me that there is virtue in giving up.  "As good as it gets" is plain nonsense!   

Every morning I look at those little baby fish, now growing at an alarming rate.  They will need to be removed from the pond soon.  I tried to catch 'em.  Couldn't do it.   I put on the waders, swished the net around, and they laughed at me.  I bought a minnow trap and left it in the pond for two days.  They were nestled all around it when last I checked, but not IN it.  

My friend says to wait until winter when they slow down, and then catch 'em.  Sounds like a good plan.  I hope I have not become attached to them by winter!

The Name Game

I've decided to change my last name to my husband's surname.  Should be a simple task.  I downloaded all the necessary forms, and armed with my birth certificate, my old social security card, my marriage license, and my old driver's license and car registration, I embarked on what I thought would be a three stop, simple process.  

First Stop:  Passport office - 10 minutes away
Easy Peazy.  In and out in 10 minutes.  They took my picture, took my marriage certificate, took my form - filled out and signed with my new name on it -- and took $110.00.  I mailed it off.  FATAL MISTAKE.

Second stop:  Driver's License Center- another 5 minutes up the road.
A MIRACLE - Only a 15 minute wait, but uh oh..  I need a new social security card with my new name on it in order to do ANYthing here at all.

Third stop: Social Security Administration - 45 minute drive in heavy traffic.
After waiting 45 minutes -- 30 of which was taken up with another woman insisting over and over again that she was told she could change her name without her birth certificate -- they called my number.  They asked me for my driver's license, (new or old name, didn't matter), my birth certificate, and my marriage certificate.  Uh oh.  Marriage certificate was in the mail to US State Department. 

45 minute drive home in heavy traffic.

So....  after nearly 3 hours I am home again.  The passport office said it will take two weeks to get my new passport.  As soon as I do I will go get my SS card, which will take 2 to 6 weeks to get.  Then I will go to the driver's license center to get my license and title changed, and by then it will be election day and I MIGHT have my new ID in time to vote!

And can I just ask..  why is it easier to get a passport than it is to get a driver's license???  I'm probably missing something..  I'm guessing it's the SS Card.  The State Department will probably look at my application for a changed passport and check the SS number which will show my old name, and they will send it back unprocessed.  We shall see.

Nectar

I can hardly believe how quickly this summer has passed.  This summer the water lily blossoms set up a schedule exactly timed to my work schedule.  They bloom on Tuesday mornings and sink by Thursday afternoons, denying me the pleasure of their blossoms.  I can count on one hand the number of lilies I've seen wide open this summer.   I think it was my leave of absence last summer, when I spent hours with my feet propped up observing the otherwise unnoticed events of each day, that I decided to work part time.  I realized that I was missing too many of the things that are really important to me.  I've missed the wrens and chickadees when they fledge.  The baby fish in the skimmer wait much too long to be rescued.  I've missed the chipmunks dragging long strings of lysmachia into their rocky front doors.  The cardinal flower has come and gone before I can really look at it.  I've missed the young catbirds turn from carefree juveniles to ardent berry hunters.  The bench at the back of the yard has only been used a few times, and on one of those occasions I spied a robin patiently waiting on her nest in the hollies.  I never saw the babies.  I've missed my own autumn nesting too many times.  I want to bake crusty rolls and cinnamon breads, freeze soups and blueberries, jar tomatoes.  Hubby asks me why I want to stop working when I have such an interesting job.  The answer is always the same, but he doesn't really understand.   Life is too short, and I am simply am missing too much.  

The mornings are crisp and clear now, with the hint of yellow busses, book bags, and new clothing in the air.  Our summer has been so dry that brown leaves litter the lawn, but I can see the bright red winterberries bunching up on their stems, and the spice bush leaves are beginning to fade into yellow.  Looking out of the window in my powder room, I see a cement bird bath, a large butterfly bush, and beyond that the pond.  Since the butterfly bush first bloomed it has been visited by all sorts of creatures from hummingbirds to skippers.  Red admirals frequented the bush all summer, but for the last couple of weeks two tiger swallowtails have been regulars at the bush.  One has lost one of its tails and the tip of its wing, but it still visits every day.  Soon it will disappear completely and its caterpillars will fold up into a leaf and winter over.  Soon the fish will sink to the bottom, and the warblers will make their appearance, stopping over on their trek south.

Attack!

One morning a week or so back, I took my morning coffee outside and sat on the bench next to the pond to feed my fish.  I immediately noticed that all of the potted water plants were upended, and all the floating plants were dislodged and had moved into the mouth of the skimmer.  There were roots and pieces of plants everywhere.  Absent was the roiling knot of fish that normally greets me as soon as the green fish food bucket is in sight.  I could see dashes of orange and black and yellow and white hiding under the water lilies, but not a fin or scale would venture out.  That damned blue heron - the one that tried to land on the porch roof last month - had surely paid a visit to my pond.  They never forget where to find a meal.  Most of my fish are now a good 8" to 10" long.  It's a wonder a heron would even try!

I tossed a handful of food onto the water. Eventually one fish dashed upward and snatched a mouthful.  Following suit, another whizzed across the surface and disappeared back to the lily roots.  One by one, they mustered the courage to come out of hiding.  I counted them. Two large fish were missing, and none of the little ones had appeared at all.  One orange fantail goldie was stuck on the bottom with only one side fin moving..  drifting off kilter, fluttering up an inch, and sinking again.  A puncture wound was visible on it's left side.  I was sure it was a goner.  It's months away from leaf time, but Hubby and I put the netted dome over the pond anyway.  It makes me sad to know the dragon flies can't get to the blooming pickerel weed, though I notice the bees and skippers have no trouble getting through the netting.  And the frogs just keep on croaking..  I think they can just crawl under if they want out.  (Yes "they".  There are now two of them.) 

The fish have recovered from their trauma.  I know this for sure because they are dashing out from under the lilies as soon as they see me with the green bucket. They following me around the edges of the pond until they form that tight ball of motion where I toss their food.  The rocks on the right side of the falls slid into the water, probably loosened by that big bird tromping around on the edges looking for a way in.  So I donned my highly fashionable waders, and into the pond I waded.  As soon as I was fully in the pond there were a dozen curious, brightly colored shubies swimming in and out of my legs and bumping into me.  I have to shoo them away from my arms and hands while I lift the rocks out of the pond.  Silly fish.  But the really good news is that one of the missing fish and all the babies have reappeared.  The other missing fish, a black fantail goldie that I had nicknamed "Ghost", is clearly gone.  The orange fantail goldie is back to her old self, though, waddling through the water as only a fat fantail can.  But now she sports a half inch long beak tattoo on her left side.

I am on a new kick..  a new knee thing.  I started using the recumbant bicycle to strengthen my knees when I discovered that biking on a real bicycle didn't hurt them, but in fact actually made them feel much better in the days after.  Walking hurts. Standing too long without moving them hurts.  Sitting too long without moving them hurts. Then I found this book by Richard Bedard called Saving My Knees; How I Proved the Doctors Wrong...    Now I'm not a doctor, and I can't say this will work for everyone, but wow!!  He is describing to me what I am finding through my own experience!  Only difference is, he didn't have the arthroscopic surgery like I did.  Still, I am hopeful.  In the last couple of weeks I've noticed a marked improvement, and I've started a knee diary.  Time will tell, but I'm very optimistic.  He also has a website and a blog..  I recommend anyone with knee pain to give it a read.  http://www.savingmyknees.com/

According to my "Countdown" widget on my android phone...

...there are 220 days left until the day I retire.  That's actual days..  not workdays.   My friend Madeleine is retiring the same day I am.  She and I went out for sushi today, being that it's Monday and I have transitioned to three days a week.  We sat on my patio afterwards, eating our "no-sugar added" fudgsicles, watching the fish, and dreaming about all of the things we will do.  We will join the garden club, we will take pottery classes, we will wrap up all those unfinished projects lingering in our upstairs guest rooms, including that project to clean up and turn the guest room back into the bedroom it used to be when the kids were at home.  We will lose pounds and gain muscle, and we'll get denser bones for all our effort.  We will fire the maids and the gardeners and do it all ourselves..   oh wait..  we don't have maids and gardeners.  Well..  we will whip our gardens, our bodies, and our guestrooms into shape, and then we'll play bridge.   Or Mahjong.  Or maybe get a part time jobs.

 

I graduated from high school when I was 17 and went to live on a farm - a hospice for the poor in the hills of West Virginia.  Okay, okay.  It was a hippie commune.  It was hard work and I didn't like it.  I liked the goats, especially the kids, but then we ate them and I didn't like that either.   I came home, got an office job, left for college in the fall and never lived at home again.  On the week I retire, it will have been 40 years since the day I left home to go live in West Virginia.   The twists and turns leading me from then and there to here and now seem remarkably complicated.  To my children it probably looks like straight lines from this, to that, to that, to here.  They are only beginning to understand the anxiety of trying to navigate this twisty old stream, and they are still years from knowing when to hold on and just let the river carry you.  

Catbirds Celebrate Independence

It's the 4th of July and the juvenile catbirds are celebrating their independence.  I bet there are a half dozen of the little guys dashing about the yard and ducking in and out of the viburnum.  They are not afraid of the squirrels who run toward them when they land near the feeders, or of the robins who monopolize the bird bath -- a very popular commodity in 100 degree weather.  They are not even afraid of me.  They hop from the wrought iron butterfly to the top of the bench, then over to the goldfinch feeder to harass them while they hang upside down.  Then with soaring speed they fly straight up in the air about ten feet and do a free fall,  landing just an arm's length from where I sit.  They look at me sideways, see that I am amused, and work up some new antics to entertain me on this hot, hot, hot, hot day.   


I had a bunch of fish in the pond.  I counted them every day..  there were eleven; 7 shubunkins, 1 lionhead, 1 gold  fancy tail bugged eyed I don't know what, 1 black fancy tail bugged eyed I don't know what, and one little baby brown fish that is now completely gold.  My school of fish is growing now.  I have counted at least five fry of about an inch long.  And then, God help me, I noticed tiny little mosquito sized fry hanging out in the water forget-me-nots.  I didn't even try to count them.  I suppose next year I will be trying to give away fish.  


Next year I will also be retired.  239 days from now, actually.  A study came out shortly after I had my double arthroscopic knee surgery.  Findings show that arthroscopic surgery does not improve arthritis pain.  Well phooey.  My knees still hurt, are still stiff, and it has been one year next month since my surgery.  Yes, I did PT religiously  Yes, I bike and stretch and do all the stuff you're supposed to do when you can't do impact exercises.  Makes me think I didn't retire soon enough.  I do find, however, that gardening and pond watching do not hurt my knees.  Neither does bridge, or reading books, or biking, or drinking wine, or playing guitar (haven't done that yet, but plan to), or writing blogs, or working out on the elliptical machine, or probably swimming, and I hope not skiing...  kind of iffy on that last one. 

How hot is it this 4th of July?  Well I just looked outside and laying in a shady patch of the driveway like a bear skin rug was this poor, little black squirrel.  He'll be heading over to the pond pretty soon.

Dinosaurs and Shipwrecks.

For the last three months I have been reading accounts of merchant ships torpedoed by WW I German U-boats and sunk.  I read about the tons and tons of wine, wheat, typewriters, furs, machinery, and metals that found their final resting place on the oceans bottom.  I read about the  hundreds of horses which were drowned in the holds of the sinking ships; the 30,000 pounds of dinosaur bones which were carefully recovered from a Canadian site, only to sink to the sandy sea floor; and about the loss of human life, simply because these poor souls were at sea doing their jobs during wartime.   I am going on vacation, and just in time.

I was reading about our destination -- all sun and fun and sand -- and searching for the name of an excursion company who will take us snorkeling.  I love to go out on the catamarin and feel the rise and fall of the ocean under the canvas hammock of the boat.  And mostly I love to look down into the reefs at the brightly colored fish going about their lives.  In searching for my snorkel trip, I learned that there will be not just coral reef to explore, but shipwrecks.  Shipwrecks...   hmmm.   Before I would think, "Shipwrecks!  Cool!"  Now I think, "Shipwrecks..  I wonder what the story is."  

When I went to feed the fish on Sunday, they were romping around the pond, knocking pots off the plant shelves, and tearing up the water clover.   They would not eat, being far too busy chasing each other about.  Meanwhile, my little dark brown baby fish is now almost completely orange.  The pickerel has bloomed, as have the yellow water iris and the blue flag.  There is one water lily bud poking its way out of the lily pads, and a new calla lily is about to bloom.  The butterfly bush is starting to open up into purple spikes, and the trumpet vine flowers are just begging for a hummingbird to come by.  Best of all, though, is the bats who have found the bat house!  If I smash my face against the stone wall of the house, and look up into the box with binoculars during a very sunny part of the day, I can see their little ears and noses moving.   Mosquitos be gone!  Summer is just a week away.

My knees hurt again.  Don't let them tell you that scoping works if you have arthritis.  It does not.  They do feel a little better than they did before they were scoped, just not what I had hoped.   If I stand up too long, or walk too much, it will be three days before I can move again without pain.  Biking is perfectly fine, does not impact them unless I have stood for too long or walked too much the day before.    Aleve helps.  Durnnit..  

Wrens, Robins, and Unanswered Questions

A robin has made a nest in the holly bush right outside of our dining room bay window.  I found her there, sitting and waiting patiently for her eggs to hatch.   A week or so later I caught her flying back and forth -- I assume feeding her babies.  Now she is gone, and so are the fledglings.  I'm guessing that they are among the young spotted robins who are splashing and drinking from the falls in the pond.  I know the adult birds in our yard take their fledglings to the feeders and to the pond.  I've watched the juvenile catbirds perch on the viburnum above the falls while an adult splashes below them.  They watch -- "WHAT??  Really?  You want us to go in there?"  And of course, eventually they do.  I wonder if the adults think about them once they are gone.  I wonder if they worry just a little.

The chickadees have already successfully fledged a brood in the little nesting box in the crab apple tree.  They fought a valiant fight over the box in early spring, winning it from the wrens, but now the wrens are back and have taken over the box.  Despite a rather detailed honey-do list, hubby neglected to empty and clean it for the spring, so now it has at least five broods worth of nesting material inside. I can see the sticks and feathers coming out of the vents on the bottom.  The wrens have chickadee feathers to line their nest - a luxury!  The activity at the feeders is frenetic, above and below.  The chipmunks have produced a bumper crop of young this year and the little ones perch on rocks at the falls, watching me closely to see if there's any risk in movement.  Twice we have seen the red fox pop his head through the fir tree by the front feeder, scouting for a greedy squirrel who might be preoccupied with fallen seed. 

There is a plant in my pond that I have never liked.  It grows too tall and the leaves flop over and break. I have brought it in for the winter for three winters now, on hubby's insistence.  This spring, as it sat in the window waiting to be planted, it decided to flower...  twice.  Two large white blossoms atop a tall stem.  I feel a little guilty for all those moments when it nearly went into the weed pile.  I cut it back and planted it in the pond again, and it graced us with another beautiful bloom.  In fact there are other firsts this year..  Since we took out the pussy willow bush (which had grown into a tree) there is more light.  The blue flags in the bog, which are at least 10 years hold, have bloomed for the first time.  

CT scan shows that the aortic dilation has grown 1 mm since the November scan.  It is now 4.6 cm.  The heart is strong, the bicuspid valve is functioning as a normal valve with only a very slight regurgitation.  4 more mm to go before surgery. I saw a video of my surgeon's team.  They were replacing parts on man with the identical thing I have.  They put him on a bypass machine -- a heart and lung machine.  They brought his temperature down to 52 degrees, flat-lining his brain.  When they flat-line you.....   where do you go??  No one has been able to answer this question for me.

May flowers came, even without April showers!

In just two short days my first born will be 30 years old.  Time flies so quickly and seems to accelerate as I grow older.  When I was 30 I was restarting college..  and I had a 3 year old.   It sounds cliche but it's so true..  it seems like just yesterday, literally, that I looked into her little face for the first time.  And I can still remember thinking how odd it was that I had never seen her before, but I recognized her.


It seems like spring came early this year.  We have already had several 80 plus degree days.  The pond was up and running a month earlier than last year, and the flowers came early as well.  My daughter's lily-of-the-valley bloomed two weeks ago (we call them "hers" because they usually begin to bloom on her birthday week.)  Luckily, they are still blooming, but they are at the end of their bloom time rather than the beginning.  The odd thing is that the hummingbirds, which normally show up between the second and last week of April only started visiting yesterday.  The latest they have ever arrived.  


Today I sat for one hour on the porch with my binoculars and iBird Pro at hand.  In that short time five warblers visited the pond for a dip in the falls:  An American Redstart; a Northern Parula; a Black and White warbler; a "Myrtle" Yellow-Rumped warbler; and a Canada Warbler.  They have all visited in prior years, but this is only the second time the Northern Parula has come through.  The Red-Eyed Vireo is back as well -- a regular in the neighborhood.  


The American toads have shown up again, trilling all night long.  And their arrival marks the departure of the green frogs, but only temporarily.  They will return when the toads have left the pond and the tadpoles have hatched.  As I write this I can hear an oriole way up in one of the ash trees.  They also come around in the spring, though they never stick around long, preferring the retention pond down the road.  


In three days I will have another echo-cardiogram and another CT scan.

Transitioning to Retirement

This is the end of my first week of part time work.  It is also the first time I have been a part time worker in 40 years. Next year at this time I will be retiring. I'm exploring my options.

I just read a post from a friend which she entitled "women's work".  She was lamenting the fact that in cleaning her kitchen floor, she was doing a job which was never finished.  She would have to do it again, and again, and again, and again.  She was not gratified by what she disdainfully called "women's work", but felt gratified when she built the arbor in her back yard using power tools because it was a "real" accomplishment,a tangible product, and was there to stay.  She congratulated herself, wallowing in the "what a woman!" accolades of her friends, rejecting as inconsequential the household work she labeled as women's work. The suggestion was that she had moved beyond the trivial and mundane to the meaningful and exciting labors of men.  Her post bugged me.

Is maintaining the condition of our lives, including our material possessions and our relationships, unimportant? In scrubbing the floor, or doing laundry, or repairing a leaky pipe, or patching stucco aren't we keeping the hum of life's machinery moving along, ensuring that things don't fall apart some day?   I believe most women or men in the younger generations don't even think about roles.  Even my old guy does mundane housekeeping things, and he doesn't feel he's doing "women's work".

In my first marriage I did the lion's share of the household maintenance and repairs, including hanging doors,hanging wallpaper, painting,  repairing windows, plumbing and electric, cleaning the gutters, cutting the lawn, and planting gardens. I built a mudroom off of our back door, insulated it, dry walled it, and painted it. I used power tools.  I also cooked the meals, did laundry, tended to children, and had a full time job for 100 percent of our years together..  not to mention the Girl Scout troops. So I tried all of those things, and no one said I was doing "men's work" or "women's work" by holding the household together.  I am sure my friend, who did not know me then, thinks I am a weak female because I don't do repair work or build things that she has ever seen.   Hundreds of thousands of single  men and woman across the world keep their worlds running on their own.  She is not special because she had a taste of doing it all and liked doing one better than the other.

So to my friend I say: Don't define the value of my work based on whether or not I have created something tangible, whether I have risen to some corporate apex, or based on some mistaken sense of contributing something permanent.  And especially don't decrease my value as a person based on where I find fulfillment.  I think it's terrific that you built an arbor.  I think you are smart and clever, and I'm glad you overcame your fear of power tools.  But don't ask me to affirm that you have stepped over some barrier or are a more extraordinary woman for doing so.

I have worked outside of the home for 33 years, at a job that never ends, never ends, never ends.  I am an archivist.  There is no product - nothing that says "There, that's finished".  Even when you think you're done, two years later something turns up that adds to what you've accomplished, which forces you to find remediation against the problems of overuse or time, or which requires you to undo everything you've done and re-arrange things.   In this job I am gratified by the orderliness of things, by the successful preservation and conservation efforts, and by the logic of the catalogs and indexes, even while knowing it is all temporary and will require more effort in time.   But for the present, where we all live, I make my own life as a researcher easier, and I make the lives of my colleagues who seek information easier as well.  I contribute to the future in a real and tangible way, but I am really all about working in the present.  In 100 years no one will look at what I've done and say, "look at that arrangement, that's really neat! Joan did that!"  But I believe they may look at the condition of the collection and say, "Wow, this is in really good condition!"  Some archivist will comment, "Great, someone thought to write a description of this and it's just what I was looking for!"  I know this to be true because I've said it myself, probably thousands of times.

On Monday a beautiful red fox came to the pond.  Today I watched a bluejay fight with a red bellied woodpecker over something that the bluejay decided, after winning, that it didn't want.  Bluejays aren't into bugs or sap.  This week I went skiing.  I worked on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday..  Today we went to the orchestra. I also blogged and counted my fish.   First week...  fabulous.  30 or more years still to come.

Second Opinions

David and I went to visit the cardio-thoracic surgeon at Penn this morning.  We got a great education about my particular valve defect, and the condition of my heart, aorta, and valve.  My heart, even with it's defective bicuspid aortic valve, is working normally and is healthy. The surgeon (whose specialty is aortas and aortic valve disease) says it medically an aneurysm, but not yet by medical definition ready for surgery until it has grown another half centimeter.  Sounds like a small amount, but that could take some time.  Apparently for most folks it will grow at a rate of .1 cm per year, but for people who have an aortic valve defect like mine - a bicuspid aortic valve - growth can progress more slowly.  It will need to be surgically corrected in my lifetime, but not this year and maybe not for a few years.  If it were done right now it would be open heart surgery on a heart and lung machine - a pretty risky surgery, or as the surgeon put it "the big one".  The hope is that when the time comes, medical advances will make surgery much safer and less invasive, and given the quick rate of innovations in medicine these days, it seems like a really good plan to wait a bit. At this point they will do another CT and echo in May, and if there is no movement they will do them yearly.  There are no major restrictions other than lifting heavy, I can ski, bike, do cardio on the machines, and drink a big glass of red wine every day.  I need to monitor my blood pressure closely and keep it at a normal level.   Honestly, I feel as though I've gotten my life back!  You can bet that from now on I will be taking out trip insurance, though!  Life is just way to fickle. And by the way, the surgeon and his CRNP,  a part of the Adult Congenital Heart Defect Program at the University of Pennsylvania,  met with us for over an hour, answering every question we had and even some we hadn't thought of.

I am giddy, and grateful, and am glad that I decided to dial back at work this year and to retire next year.   I am looking forward to doing active and fun things, and also to reading more books, cooking more meals, watching more birds, and of course, sitting on the bench near the pond and watching the fishies swimming round.  I wish my children would get checked out.  (ARE YOU LISTENING, CHILDREN?)