So, from the earlier post about not hitting the curve, I’m now a day later, and I’m out of some of the initial funk.

First and foremost, of course, I found the missing parts for the exercise bike so the big “spiral” moment was mostly averted.

Second, and almost equally important, I had the guy come to the house and do a bunch of work for the day that helped jumpstart some of my old goals that have been lingering for quite a while.

Obviously, he assembled the exercise bike. I had printed some instructions, and just looking at them was almost a traumatic trigger. They are/were HORRIBLE pictures. You had to stare at segments for 15 minutes to even comprehend where screw 4 went into part 3 that was separated from main part 7, blah blah blah. If you get it, you get it; if you don’t, IKEA looks like ideal schematics by comparison. The guy that came, Sam, is great and has done work for me before. He is really good at this stuff, he’s assembled this type of bike before, more or less, and I think he did most of it without wrestling with the instructions. Awesome. Except even for someone who is GOOD at this, and who didn’t need the instructions, he still took 30 minutes to do it. Now, admittedly, he also put a screw through a broken part and reattached it. It’s not particularly a relevant part unless you’re moving the whole bike around (it’s like an extra roller so you can tip the bike and then move it more easily…if you leave the bike mostly in one spot, the part isn’t that critical). Anyway, he got it together and Andrea and Jacob tried it last night. All functional.

He also assembled a workout bench. I mostly wanted it so that I could lie flat on it, but it does angle up and has some stationary bars to let you hook your feet for stabilizing your lower body, etc. It probably would have taken me about an hour with someone like Jacob or Andrea helping me, while rolling around on the floor and getting frustrated with the diagrams. Instead? Sam had it together in thirty minutes. One hour in and Sam had two of the four projects done.

He tackled the Gorilla cart next. It is a large professional-grade utility cart, and one that I planned for carting all my astro gear from the garage to the backyard in one go so that I wouldn’t have to make a whole bunch of trips. And with a little planning, I could even throw a tarp over it and leave some of my gear in it between outings. Now, I know this cart is a pain in the patootie to put together. I’ve seen online videos of people saying how awesome the cart is but how painful the assembly process was. It’s just big. Sam is really good, has all the tools to do it, AND it still took him a full hour of work to assemble it. When I talked to him, he said, “You know, this is really industrial grade. It’s not really a home cart.” He had to use his power tools to get all the parts to go together in the hour, or he would have been much longer still turning bolts and nuts. Uh huh, that’s why I’m paying you, dude. Cuz I don’t want that pain. Now, don’t get me wrong, he LIKES doing this stuff, but it was a tough slog for that second hour.

The fourth and supposedly final project was one that I initially was going to do myself. We have a trampoline, great quality, amazing device. Yet it was an absolute beast to assemble. They had views of guys assembling some aspects of it one-handed by themselves like they were laying lace doilies on a table. In our case, we had me on the ground underneath the trampoline BENDING the sides as far as I could, while Andrea and her mother hauled on the canvas, and her dad hauled too. With all four of us PULLING, we could attach the parts. But once together, it’s fine. Just REALLY heavy. The solution for moving it is to get 4-6 really strong people and lift it. Uh huh. I always keep 3-5 spare people in my shed in case I need that kind of muscle work. OR you can get wheels made by the same company, attach them in a criss-cross pattern to four equally-spaced spots on the trampoline’s base, and bob’s your uncle, you have a way to use the wheels like a lever. You put in a wrench, lever the wheels into their DOWN position, and the trampoline goes up. Do all four wheels and the trampoline is elevated and ready to roll. Once the wheels are down, Sam can move the whole thing by himself. Great tool. We repositioned the trampoline closer to where we wanted it, and then put the wheels back into their UP positions.

Four projects done in three hours. Pretty sweet. So I asked if he wanted to consider a fifth. A few years ago, or maybe more since I know it was pre-pandemic, we bought a new doorknob for our main door. We needed to replace the latch at the time, which I did manage to do with a bit of help. But there was a second component for the deadbolt — an electronic keypad. I would have tried to install it long ago, but we just ran out of time when we did the first part. So it sat in our living room for a while in a box. Then in a bag. Then we got rid of the box to the garage. Then we weren’t sure where the bag was when we asked him to look at it. Sam initially figured about 30 minutes or so. Hah!

The mechanism was too big to fit into the existing deadbolt hole. And the frame of the outer door is metal, not wood. Dun dun dun. Sam had to get creative to make everything fit, which he did at my request, and one full hour later, we had a new e-pad on our front door. It’s surprising how much this will mean to us.

When I go out, I am almost always going in the car, so I have my car keys with a front door key on the ring. Yet equally regularly, I have 3-4 things that I’m carrying for the route to work, or going shopping, or whatever. I need a new shoulder bag so I can put it all together more easily, my man purse if you will, but I don’t have it right now. But that means I don’t have a free hand to take care of the front door with key, pulling the door tight, locking, etc.

For Andrea, she doesn’t drive, so often when she goes out, she doesn’t need a big key ring with a fob or anything. The only keys she has is to the mailbox and our house. While the garage has a keypad on it, it’s a bit more elaborate a routine to open the garage door just to let a person into the house. With the new pad, if she goes for a walk, she may not even need to take anything with her. Or if she’s the last one out of the house, she doesn’t have to dig for a key, etc. She can literally press a button and turn the bolt mechanism to lock with one hand. All good.

Jacob has a key to the house, but never uses it. He’s almost always with us or we’re home when he needs to go in or out. Often when he gets home, he waits for us to get out first and then slowly follows us to the door. The last few days? He raises to be the first one to the door, in the house, shoes off, and gone before we’re out of the car. I don’t know who this kid is, actually.

There are obvious benefits for guests too. Parents, siblings (at least the ones we like) or friends watching the house can get a code to get in without any need to get together first or hide a key for their arrival. Kind of like an AirBNB for friends, here’s your code. Let yourself in when you get here.

But a bigger irritant was removed today. For some inexplicable reason — and really, we’ve asked — the cleaning company we use keeps sending people to our house without a key. They arrive, complain they couldn’t get in, and leave. We get home late in the day to a WTF moment…whyyyyyy? They have a key. Why did they not bring it? Needing keys is not unusual for a house cleaning service. Most people are NOT home (although the pandemic changed a lot of that). But I think this is about the fourth time in 2 years, and maybe the third time in 3-4 months that they have forgotten their key. Which means things like beds that were stripped so the cleaners could clean need to be re-sheeted so we can sleep in them. It’s not life altering, don’t get me wrong. I know that. It’s just really irritating. This week? Andrea texted the owner and said, “Here’s your code”. We came home, they had been, the code worked, no issues. Hallelujah, and pass the ammunition!

So, five projects that are all relatively minor; yes, I/we could do almost all of them myself/ourselves. But here’s the thing. For the exercise bike? I knew it was going to be a pain in the ass because I’m the one who assembled it the first time, with Andrea. Really, really frustrating. So I’ve sat on the project since we moved in many years ago (we had originally partly dismantled it in order to move it as the seat and frame were too wide for doorways).

The work-out bench was self-indulgent. We could have done that ourselves. Instead, I basically paid someone $30 to put it together and get it off our to do list.

The utility cart, by contrast, was big. We could have done it, but as Sam said, some of it really needed the right power tools to make it go efficiently. I had no interest in spending 3-4 hours assembling it. It cost me about $60 to have Sam do it. Again, done. I feel we COULD have, but meh, nowhere near as efficiently.

The trampoline wheels were ones that I said I thought about doing myself initially. But you have to be down on the ground, fiddling with the frame on something that was a royal pain to assemble, etc. Sam knew it was one of the tasks (we chatted in advance), and he brought a small hydraulic lift so the could get at the frame better. Fantastic. I don’t have one of those though. So I am not confident that even with 3-4 hours, I would get it done. I know it would have been supremely painful and frustrating. Even Andrea didn’t have a burning desire to touch that one, although she felt we could do the bike, bench and cart ourselves.

Finally, the extra project for the door pad? Sam took an HOUR including having to CUT THE DOOR frame to make things fit. I would have had NO chance of doing that, not even close.

So I totally feel that it was money well-spent. I’m not particularly thrilled that TaskRabbit takes a slice of the pie AND slaps on a $10/hour service charge that seems to do nothing other than line their pockets. The TR contractors hate the fee too, but well, they like the website gigs. I had booked him for about four hours to do four projects, and he managed those four plus an extra one, too. That’s a pretty good deal, I think, all things considered.

And they’re all DONE. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. When it comes to home handyman work, I write a mean cheque.

Yet at the end of the whole day, having taken Jacob to band in the morning, worked my office gig for the day, and picked him up, while also liaising with Sam the whole time he was here for any questions he had, I was totally exhausted. Definitely glad to be done.

And I’ll count it as having caught a piece of the pitch. I didn’t drive it deep into left field, but at least it was a credible swing overall. And did I mention that five big projects just came off my old to do list?

This batch is somewhat eclectic, so I’m grouping them all together.

42-47. Spend at least 1 week outside of Ottawa per year. In my tracker, I noted this goal as a travel goal. And at first, I was thinking “outside Canada”. But as I thought about it, I realized that it could just as easily be to Alberta or BC, the cottage, Mexico, the US or Europe. What I really want to do is “get out of my house” for a trip of “some” kind where I am not doing “the same old thing” at home. Before the pandemic, maybe that would have been “outside Canada” as a goal; now, it is outside Ottawa. And I thought about making it just a single goal with several sub-pieces for the years, but they are WAY bigger than that for planning, execution, and just overall effort and experience. So I am creating a separate goal for each of 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027, and 2028.

48. A weekend retreat. Before the pandemic hit, I had been thinking of doing a weekend away somewhere. While Andrea likes the idea of it being a couples thing, and I like that too, that isn’t what this goal is. This is about me doing a weekend by myself to just sit and think about my life, my goals, etc. Maybe it’s a writing weekend. Maybe it’s a vegging weekend. I don’t really know. I just like the idea of trying a weekend to just be alone somewhere, no phones, no connections. To unplug from my life entirely. To gain perspective. Or at least to get a different one. Maybe I last 5 minutes and I’ll be craving the connection; maybe I’ll drift into peaceful bliss. But I want to do it sometime, maybe even as early as this fall.

49. Photos of waterfalls. I love waterfalls, I confess. And as a semi-photography, semi-creative, semi-travel goal, I want to take photos of 60 waterfalls over the next five years. Some will be small, more rapids than falls. I’m okay with that. Some might be a small trickle of water instead of a raging torrent. And I’m okay with that too.

50. Photos of sunsets. Similarly, I want 60 photos of sunsets. Two of my favourite photos from our past travels is a sunset over the ocean from a beach in Hawaii and another of a sunset from a small pier area in Matane, QC. Not to mention numerous photos of sunsets from the cottage.

51. Volunteer at doing something different. I’m not sure what this goal means, exactly. Sounds odd, right? After all, I came up with it. But I guess I mean a new area of volunteering, different from what I am already doing for the HR Guide type mentoring, AstroPontiac or RASC. Recently, the Peterborough Astronomical Association asked for a volunteer to run their website. It’s more work than I wanted, but I considered it until I realized that the site is actually manually programmed. Shudder. I could have taken it, but the first thing I would have done was swapped it over to WordPress probably. But someone else stepped up, so I don’t feel obligated to take that on now. Maybe it will be a different organization that I don’t even know about yet. Something maybe Treasurer-ish? I don’t know. But it’s on my list. Heck, maybe it will be the public library somehow.

52. Ride an e-scooter. I used to want to try a segue, but never really got around to it. Now, they have the e-bikes and e-scooters. I’ll probably just rent one sometime for an afternoon to give it a try. A friend rode one back home over the summer with his brother and fell in love. Now he wants one of his own for Ottawa, and he’s going for a super-powered one. Seems overkill to me. Maybe I’ll eventually buy one, but for now, I just want to try it. Ideally, with Andrea and Jacob giving it a go too to see if they would be comfortable enough sometime on a trip to do a tour with them in some city. I’d love to use it to go all around the hills above Rome someday. It was a REALLY long hike the day I did it.

53. Ride a jetski. I have ZERO idea where or how I’m going to do this. I don’t know anyone who owns one, or where I can even rent one for an afternoon. I could do it at a resort somewhere I suppose.

54. Drive a boat. This one is, seemingly, pretty easy to accomplish. We have a boat at the cottage, and all I need to do is pay to take and pass the boating license test for Ontario which is pretty basic. Probably not this year, maybe for next year.

55. Language learning with DuoLingo. I haven’t quite figured out the specifics of this one. I have DuoLingo, and I do it for awhile and then get out of the habit. The “streak” motivates me but they have these options where you can “save” your streak if you miss a day. Which I don’t want to do, but you can’t turn them completely off. If you miss a day, it’ll ask you on the next day if you want to save it. If you say “no”, it says okay, and then if you have a free save already earned, it will use it anyway for you. To “help” you. I don’t want the help. So the last time this happened, I had three earned “saves”, and I had to wait at least 4 days to kill the streak after I missed a day. I don’t mind using it if I happen to do it at like 12:30 at night, just timeshifting. But if I totally missed doing it between the time I woke up, and the time I went to bed, that’s a miss for me. And so I got out of it, and never went back. It’s not a few seconds, it’s a good 10-20 minutes of practice. Sometimes I have the commitment to do that time, sometimes I don’t. Anyway, regardless, I’d like to complete all the training for French before I retire (for no real good reason), and maybe start on either Spanish or German. I’d love to try something like Mandarin, but I definitely don’t have an ear for tonal languages. That might be a really really tough one.

56. Go see professional fireworks. I thought about committing to this as an annual event, as just “any fireworks”, but well, that wouldn’t require much of an effort. So I upgraded it to “professional” fireworks but downgraded it from annual to at least once. Ottawa has options put on by the Casino du Lac Leamy. They offer four to five countries each year a chance to compete, and they are put on their display in the river behind Parliament Hill. It’s a huge crowd that gathers all along each side of the river, and there’s an option to reserve and pay for the “perfect” seats behind the Museum of History. But there are other venues too (Montreal, Vancouver).

57. Curate the best root beer. Recently, I became really interested in root beer choices. And so I want to do a side-by-side choice sometime to contrast and compare them to choose the one that I like best. Just something fun to do.

58. Curate the best vanilla ice cream for home. I like vanilla ice cream, as it seems like the purest form. Any vendor might come up with a great combo for cookie dough or raspberry or a host of other flavours, but to me, I judge their offerings when there isn’t extra flavouring, toppings, sauces, etc. added. How good is the purest form of the ice cream? That’s the test. And recently I saw an article that did the same in Ontario with everything they could find easily available for take-home ice-cream. But my immediate thought was, “Hmm, would I agree with their choice?”. Hence a new goal to repeat the process myself. I know, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to take the hit for the team.

That leaves me two open slots. One that I’m still considering, but which is likely to remain confidential until I’m certified, if I do it at all (59. Get certified as blah blah blah). And number 60 which is still “open”. I suspect that I’ll fill it with something “event-ish” or a “one-off activity” like the scooter or jet ski options. I’m not sure what it will be yet. But I can think of it as “60. Do something interesting” for now.