Dear Blog Reader
I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. If I get this done, I will have been on a roll of three weeks in a row. Alas, I did not get done so I spent a week of lollygagging and you had to read reruns. With regards to blogging, I spent the year lollygagging along. Suddenly the end is near and I try mightily to speed things up a little to save the year of reduced writing. Who knows what will happen next year.
A couple of things are going on here. I have just made the commitment to cut wood until I am 70 or 75. We made the investment of buying an outdoor wood burner 15 years ago. The furnace heats water in a vessel that surrounds the firebox. The water then is pumped under ground in insulated piping. Once inside of the house we use it to heat the house and all of our hot water. I suppose over the course of the 15 years we have saved close to $10,000. That is over and above the cost of the installation. Of course, I have spent a lot of hours during 12 weekends each fall cutting wood. I could have been making a whole $5 an hour. However, I wasn't doing much else that I could make that much money. What else would I have done; spend $40 a weekend to watch Purdue lose football games, write 12 more blogs a year and publish them in a medium where I get no money, or maybe work harder on my pickle ball skills in anticipation of a long career on the seniors tour? No, in each case, cutting wood was the big payday for me.
In the 15 years since we purchased this furnace, the technology has changed. The federal government did not like the fact that 10,000 people across the country were burning inefficient somewhat smoky furnaces. So they said that you shall make your furnaces more efficient. They burn much hotter and route the heated exhaust around the inside of the furnace to let that heat burn up the pollution so the furnace burns clean and extracts more heat from the wood burned. There is no such thing as a free meal. All of that routing of heated gas allows parts of the furnace to be covered with creosote. This causes the steel used inside of the furnace to corrode and start to leak much sooner than 15 years. That is unless you upgrade to the stainless steel model for 2x the cost.
The good news is that with the more expensive option, rather than passing on more cash to Ben and Grace when Bev and I pass, we will be able to pass this furnace down to our children. That is how the sales person on the phone with her Minnesota accent sold it to me. She may have to break the good news to the kids. When I shared the possibility of a bitter inheritance fight, I was a bit underwhelmed. I was hoping that a bit of sibling rivalry would break out and I could turn it into a long term containment facility that provided extra chocolate chip cookies for septuagenarians who no longer care about their borderline diabetes.
This is probably the first major purchase that the lovely Miss Beverly and I have considered the fact that we were getting old and may not be fit enough to use it until the end of its useful life. I remember my grandmother, Nanny making that decision with regards to her last new car, a blue and white two toned and two ton Pontiac Bonneville. I remember a lot of familial debate. The size of the old steel land ships had crested a few years earlier. In fact the car before the last car, was a green Pontiac Bonneville. My grandfather bought it. It happened to be his last car. However, there was no end of life discussions for Pop. His cancerous pancreas snuck up on him. When he drove that big green boat into the driveway, he believed that he would be able to replace that beautiful tilt steering wheeled behemoth with and even bigger tilt steering wheeled behemoth ten years later.
He loved the tilt steering wheel. He went on and on about it. He had a unique body type. Big bellied, short legged, and short armed, he had spent 30 years buying cars with his legs fully extended yet constantly having to mend his bib overalls where the steering wheel rubbed the spot where that belly that produced the nickname "Tubby" was wedged up against the wheel. I had the opportunity 10 years after his death to meet the GM engineer who patented the tilt steering wheel. His eyes lit with delight as I told of my grandfather's 20 minute discourse of "this is the steering wheel up and this is the steering wheel down." Who knew that a couple of strategically placed and engineered U-joints could change the world?
Any who, I remember the debate about the cost of a new car. She didn't drive very much. The green one still had a lot of miles left on it. She could live a long time yet. But in the end, it was going to be the last car she ever drove and it was her money. We all enjoyed riding in that blue and white two toned Bonneville. It did turn out to be the last car she ever owned.
I have friends who are downsizing to the last house that they will own. A few who are concerned about making a long term commitment to a dog or a cat that other family members may not want to inherit. These things are starting to weigh on my mind from time to time. And this is a new sensation. It seems like it was just yesterday that I thought that I was going to live forever. And while I do hold out some hope that I will be the first person to live to 150 years old (because someone will some day), I imagine that my earlier love affair with Big Mac's, in continuing love affair with ice cream and cookies, and my early childhood exposure to certain farm chemicals will leave me somewhat short of the goal. So somewhere out there is a day of reckoning where some of the things that I am currently committing to will be passed on to those who want them or maybe future Craigslist posters.
I know that I am not imaginative enough. Lord knows that there some things that have been brought to my door by the UPS guy that will be the last one of "those" before the sands of my hourglass have passed as the Days of my Life. I will never purchase another pet rock. I think that I am over getting another chia pet. If I lower my expectations, no new toilets will pass my threshold. If I don't get too big of a garden and don't leave them out in the rain, it is a good bet that I have a couple of pretty good hoes that will be available in the year 20??.
Yes, I think that I am entering a different stage of life. A stage with a bit different calculus. Do I want to deal with this in 15 years when I'm (gulp) 70?; will be a question that pops up from time to time. While the possibilities of the never ending have been fun to contemplate and enjoy, the thoughts of ever after are starting to show themselves and they feel a good place to be.
Take care.
Roger
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