random thoughts – Day 1,946 – (Tuesday) – lost time and ladder

Time is doing it’s freaky flying past thing again and it’s mind-boggling that July is already half over. It’s now into week three of being unemployed and I don’t feel like I’ve caught my breath yet. Someone please make it slow down.

This morning began with heading straight to the computer to take care of some unemployment filing stuff. It was immediately followed by updating/customizing a resume and writing a cover letter for a job posting that three people messaged me about. Those two tasks extracted four hours out of the day and felt harder and more tiring than any day at the most recent job. They also ate up all the shady, cooler morning time that I had intended to spend starting to paint the shed.  

Ghost of a long ago job.

After lunch there was a trip to the bank to deposit some checks that came in yesterday’s mail. I paused in the building's vestibule to make a phone call and realized I was sitting in a branch of my most recent former job and looking at a fire alarm control panel from Simplex, an even earlier former job. It felt kind of weird in a literary, ghostly, haunted kind of way. 

Review files for the Purchase and Sale agreement on my future place came in, and there  was other paperwork to be completed. Around 4:00, the final document of the P&S arrived for signature, which triggers the second deposit on the property, but it was too late to dash out to Chelmsford to hand deliver the check to the realty office. That task is now slated for the morning, and if that imaginative and ambitious plan transpires, I will have one side of the shed painted first thing in the day. We’ll see.

Around 5:00 as I was dashing around to change and head to dance group, there was an unfamiliar vehicle parked out front and a knock at the door. Two people had arrived to measure the property for the buyers which kind of threw me off balance. I changed for dance, then got brain paralyzed by something else that was just one thing too many for the day. The next thing I knew it was too late to get to dance on time without becoming totally spastic and I messaged the group with regrets. A short while later, I was outside in the heat, removing more paint from the shed and fighting with a ladder that has three sets of joints so it can be configured into different arrangements.

The ladder was bought at a yard sale seven or eight years ago and never used. Part of the reason is that I haven’t really needed it. Tonight, I finally needed it and hauled it from the shed. It easily moved into an M shape (or W if viewed from the opposite direction). Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to get the buttons to release at the hinges to allow the parts to move into a shape more immediately useful. I stood in the yard, sweating in the heat, searching the Internet on my phone for help on how operate a ladder with multiple joints (without luck). I couldn’t find my type of ladder online.

Ladder ready for the morning.

The process that finally worked was to lay it on its side and step on a button, then flip it over and step on the button on the opposite side to extend the parts. That is probably not the real process, but it worked. 

Now the ladder is in the pointy shape, positioned next to the shed on the side that will be shaded in the morning. The forecast is for temperatures from 73 to 79 from 7 am to 9am and that will be the target time, after which, it will start climbing into the low 90s.