Mid-point Assessment

Since my personal goals are established semi-annually, twelve per cycle, at new year and at mid-year, the halfway point on the current twelve has arrived.  I did a little better than average.  I wanted to purchase a new mattress as the current one sags enough to impair sleep.  This calendar year I have stayed at a few hotels and can tell the difference.  I looked casually at IKEA and a few other places, priced on-line options, but have not purchased.  I will after the yom tovim.  Clearing the basement is my biggest tangible project.  I have made progress but will need to hire help with clutter removal.  It is really part of a grander aspiration to have a single storage place for our things, eventually moving items out of our rented storage unit.  My energy to this waxes and wanes.  Time needs to be scheduled as I did for creating My Space, though with far less motivation.

Financial review has gone on schedule.  My goal has been to do it with no action needed.

My children live an airplane ride away.  I plan to visit each.  St. Louis done.  California by year's end.  It's a very tangible project with clear end points and a certain pleasure to its pursuit.

My personal efforts are also mostly more tangible and measurable than they have been in advance.  I read my assigned three books and then some.  I've seen two movies on TV, one of two in the theater, leaving one more to go in the theater, which I can do after the yom tovim.  I have visited two old friends from high school, both in metro NY.  My three day trips included the Galer Winery in Pennsylvania, the Nemours Mansion in Delaware, and the Rockland Bakery in New York, none of which I had been to previously.

The remaining tasks may be harder to fulfill.  My weight would be better if about 10 pounds less.  I use weight as a measure, but it's really more of a process to promote my health.  Diet restriction has hit a lull.  I was eating breakfast every day for a while but gained a few pounds in the process.  I changed it to two meals a day which has gone better.  No snacks from 8PM to 6AM, based on research by a metabolism guru at U Colorado, has been reasonably consistent though not perfect.  Exercise was doing very well for a while, then sidelined following an appendectomy, then limited in the early morning by arthritic stiffness.  My consistency to moving it later in the day has been hampered by my OLLI schedule and I have not been able to recapture the intensity.  Still, weight remains the best objective surrogate of progress, even if the real but more difficult to measure goal is stamina and energy.

I had planned to do something beneficial for my synagogue, though I'm not convinced they want anyone other than the people already engaged to create anything new.  I asked the Rabbi in the past how I might advance the congregation.  He suggested I come to minyan more.  To be fair, I've hardly done dick, and counting in the minyan requires dick but his vision of congregational advancement seems much more shallow than mine.  I'll give it another go with the President and Rabbi and maybe some past Presidents after the yom tovim.

Then the two I probably won't do, develop a web site and write the book that makes me famous.  Writing has been on the list before in several forms.  And I do write well, but in spurts.  The web site got as far as initial inquiry.  I don't really have a good enough purpose for having one, though a more interactive blog with my own format could justify this.  Revisit by year's end.

So there's how twelve projects plod along, a little at a time.  All are doable except the Great American Novel, and even there if I believed in myself more I have the capacity to do that.  Some are done or almost done.  What interested me three months ago does not always sustain itself, so these are best approached as assignments rather than self-sustaining insatiable initiatives.  Most have a measurable end point.

As retirement makes the days more amorphous, the "should do today" list doesn't have any external imposition or any feedback other than what I offer myself.  Halfway through this cycle, doing OK.

Old Mansions

Economic inequality, that gap between the rich and the struggling, has gotten a lot of attention in recent years as the gap widens with some untoward public consequences.  Even so, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous had its mass audience.  People visit palaces where kings resided all over the world.  In America we have mansions, often monuments to the self as much as places to live and entertain.  Recently I toured one near my own home, not having been there before despite living nearby just shy of forty years.

Nemours is the estate of Alfred I DuPont, one of the largest stockholders of the company that bears his name and at one time its most influential individual.  While he never lost contact with the powder workers he supervised early in his career, he was not above some indulgences.  He collected clocks and played the violin.  His wife collected chairs.  He slept upstairs, entertained lavishly on ground level and created a Mancave for himself in the basement.  He had a swivel chair at his two desks, early versions probably not as good as the ones at my desk.  Two lanes of bowling, one ten pins, one duck pins, with a mini-movie theater occupied one room.  He had two billiard tables, one with pockets, one without.  He liked to hunt and at one time a living area had animal head, reduced to a single bison head over his main desk at the insistence of his last wife.  The rifle collection seemed ordinary, kept in a secure case in the billiards room.  Basically he knew how to pursue his highest level of amusement, the same pleasantries available to anyone else though without the private ownership of the means.

As I tour many of these gilded age homes, and this one in particular, I think about which elements are adaptable to my much more modest means.  What do I like to do?  Cook for sure, entertain not so much.  Sit at my own desk, high priority.  Hunting, not something Jews do.  Fishing, pleasurable but not a destination in itself.  Sleep in comfort, high priority.  Have a pretty yard, yes.  Do heavy work to maintain my pretty yard, no.  Collect vintage anything for the purpose of having it, no.

Mansion tours expose what is possible but they also offer a means of shopping downward to assess the features and set realistic priorities for my own less lofty comforts and indulgences.