I take a nervous peep at the pages at the end of my diary. That’s where I’ve written my ‘projects for 2021’. Regular readers of this retirement blog will no doubt remember that projects have been a strong theme of my retirement years. You might think that, in lockdown, they would go well, on the grounds of more time to pursue them to a successful conclusion. You would be wrong in that assumption.
I have to admit that my designated projects are not going well. True, it’s only February but there’s no denying, project-wise things are slow to stopped. For example one of those projects was to obtain an Irish passport. I’m ‘entitled’ to one on the basis of my father having been born in Ireland. The steam, such as it was, has been taken out of this project partly by the fact the UK didn’t leave the EU without a deal. So theoretically travel to Ireland shouldn’t be a problem.
Second, it doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to travel to Kerry in May as we have done for the last 6 or 7 years, with the exception of last year for obvious reasons. But then it never was primarily a practical operation more like what you might call a vanity project. But if vanity was a part of the package then my vanity has certainly been dented by the fact that the Irish passport office won’t accept my photo. Yes, it was taken at home with Mrs Summerhouse’s iPad but I followed all of their requirements, or so I thought. It worked for my British passport renewal but not for Ireland apparently. Any steam left expired at this stage and hasn’t returned, as yet.
A very different sort of project, could it be more different, is the mangle project. This is the one where I cleverly restore an old mangle we’ve probably had in our possession for forty or more years, into a printing press for the ever-prolific Mrs SH and her art. To be successful I had to be able to find all the parts long separated in our garage, assemble these parts and then buy a lathe (I love to buy toys) and straighten out the wooden press part of the mangle. This project never got past the first hurdle because there were two parts of the mangle I couldn’t find. Strike two.
The third aspiration I’ve written down, was to obtain change of use for the barn to turn it into a residential property. The idea here was that I would hand the whole thing over to my scooter-riding, dog-walking architect chum. He, in turn, would pass it on to his mate who knows about these things. That was about 6 or 7 weeks ago and since then I have heard diddly squat. I saw my chum on one of our dog walks and I got the classic, oh yes, I’ll chase him up, I know he’s been very busy. That was about three weeks ago. I’m sure you’ve got the idea with this project. It’s a long way off of rolling smoothly along. I’d say it was off the rails and most probably in a ditch somewhere.
Next we have the vineyard. My goal here was, and still is, to get what’s still alive back into shape and replant the vines that didn’t make it. All this might still happen but not at this point by my own fair hand as we can’t legally go anywhere near the vineyard. I’m trying to work through others which will be fine but my priorities are not necessarily theirs. So this project does not feel like all is going well.
Finally, in terms of what is at the back of my diary, and don’t laugh, it’s the Colorado cabin. Yes, I know you may be sick of hearing about a project that hasn’t even flapped / twitched its wings let along got off the ground and soared. All I can say about this is that the last time daughter and son-in-law came round to deliver our shopping, he mentioned going over to visit the land later this year. A genuine intention or merely making conversation?
The other small part of it is the government’s plan to aid first-time house buyers to be announced in this week’s budget, so I understand. Our Derbyshire house would probably benefit from this in making it easier to sell. Throw into this melting pot the fact we haven’t seen the house for several months and hence my affection is a little dimmed, ergo I’m more willing to sell and you have a very small number of parts of the jigsaw in the sense that we’d have the money to build the cabin. All very tenuous and that’s all I’m going to say about this final 2021 project. I might say, time yet if I were being super-optimistic.
That’s the list and pretty un-inspirational it is right now. Then along quite unbidden came another project. Not one I wanted at all. It concerns The Vineyard Years podcast. We haven’t posted an episode since December, I think, because my chum who takes care of all the technical side has not been well. He’s still not well and not unreasonably doesn’t feel he can carry on with his side of the deal.
I confess I haven’t a clue how podcasts are put together and put out there but, as I have nobody else to help me, it’s either down to me or down the tubes. The latter would be a shame after all the effort my chum and I have put into getting it up and running. So this week I started very tentatively to try and upskill myself (is that still the correct descriptor?) vis a vis podcasts.
Once again the words hurdle, fell at and first came into play. This involved taking an iPad audio file and turning it into the kind of file Audacity (a software programme) can work with. I have now managed to do this, all I have to do now is put all the files together to make the podcast and then the simple job of putting them on to Blubrry (as the host). So far I’ve failed miserably with the latter two tasks. As that’s my 1,000 words I’ll leave any report of progress or lack of it until future retirement blogs.
So there we are, as I’ve written before, projects are good and healthy parts of a person’s retirement – when they are successful, otherwise they’re a pain in the bum.