2009 has been an interesting year.  It’s my first full year of retirement.  There’s still no time for boredom.

We experienced some sadness.  My paternal grandmother died in February — complications of old age.  She was my favorite grandmother when I was younger — she was a kid’s grandmother.  She lived a full and complete life, and I believe she was ready to go.  Grandma had maintained a huge garden until shortly after my grandfather died in 1992.  Before retiring, my grandfather had owned and operated his own masonry company, and he worked on many of the buildings in and around the Madison, Wisconsin, area.  He built many of the shopping malls, a building or two on the University of Wisconsin campus, as well as a church or two.  It’s always a treat to be driving somewhere with my dad and to have him mention that grandpa built one of the buildings we’re driving by.  In addition to being a great cook and needlework pro, Grandma kept the books for the business.

I’m blessed with one remaining grandmother — maternal, of course.  She is of more an adult’s grandmother, and I’ve had many pleasant times with her since I’ve become an adult.  She plays a MEAN, MEAN game of Scrabble.  She just celebrated her 92nd birthday, and she still lives independently (with help from on-line grocery orders and delivery and family and friends who assist her a couple of days a week with transportation and company).  Don’t misunderstand me, I have good memories of both grandmothers from when I was a child, but my mom’s mom was more comfortable with older kids than with younger ones.  Grandma retired from the University of Wisconsin thirty years ago and has been an excellent example of a retirement lived well.  She traveled, learned to cross country ski, and began painting and sewing more.  I have several beautiful original paintings of hers, and I’m very proud of them.  My mom just told me grandma’s thinking about buying a new computer so we can play Lexulous on Facebook.

I also lost my first uncle in March.  I’d seen him at my grandmother’s funeral the month before , and he seemed to be doing well, but he’d had several strokes, and he had more in March that he just couldn’t recover from.  He was my dad’s older sister’s husband, and an Army veteran from the Korean War era.  He was a solid patriot who wasn’t afraid to tell you what he thought.  He was an electrician with his own business until he retired.  He and my aunt raised four fine children.

We lost two pets this year — Pericles to diabetes and Hershey to a driveway accident.  We still have four.  Dazzle is our oldest going on sixteen.  She has an allergy to something that causes her to lose hair in clumps.  We have her on a medication that allows much of it to grow back.   Since that problem has been mitigated, she’s a spry and nimble dog.  We thought she was on death’s doorstep, but since putting her on the medication and adding a daily vitamin and glucosamine to her diet, she’s been acting much younger.  Arthritis still limits her, but it’s not as noticeable.  That and Purina One seems to make a big difference for her.  We added a daily vitamin to Millie’s diet, too.  No reason not to keep her healthier longer.

Ajax and Natasha, the cats, are still getting acquainted (a year and a half after moving in together).  Ajax has adopted a more submissive role while still stalking Tasha.  I know that doesn’t make any sense, but I”m not sure how else to describe it.  Over the last month, Tasha’s range in the San Antonio house has expanded from the garden window in the kitchen augmented by quick trips to the next room for eating, drinking, and eliminating to her eluding the Ajax trap and making her way to the bed between us at night.  She’s been more relaxed.  Both of them enjoy fires in the fireplace — just not usually at the same time.

On the writing front, I’m moving neither forward nor back.  I spent a lot of time attempting a one pass revision on Twilight, but I failed miserably and put the book on the shelf to get some distance from it.  I participated and won NaNo this year, but my attempt at a category romance was pathetic.  About half way in, I knew I didn’t know enough about my characters and wound up doing character development to finish out the words — not a great result, but a result all the same.  Category romance is not, at this time, my genre.

Holly has been building a new course, How to Revise Your Novel, which teaches writers how to employ the One-Pass Revision she advocates.  I am taking the Early Bird version of this class and using it to revise Polar Bear on the Loose — my first novel that’s been on the shelf for four years.  I love my Inuit character, and I hope I can do her justice with the revision.  Several weeks into the class, I’m still actively working on the Week 1 lesson.

In my personal reading efforts, it looks like I’ll complete just 36 books this year.  That’s far short of my goal of 52.  I could blame Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged.  I think it took me two months or more to read that one.

With the political climate of today, I’ve become fascinated with The Gilded Age and the beginning of the Progressive Era.  If you think today’s political climate is a recent development, you’re wrong.  The roots of it lie in the excesses of The Gilded Age (essentially post Civil War Reconstruction) and the resulting Progressive Era (around the beginning of the 20th Century) which bears a strong parallels to what we’re seeing happening today.  I’m not sure if that should be taken as a sign that there is hope or if what we’re seeing today is the culmination and possible realization of the goals of the Progressive Era.  I’m still studying and pondering.  I’m working my way through several non-fiction works on these eras, and I hope to add them to the 2010 completed reading list.

Hubby and I bought a building (yes, another one) in September.  This one began life in the lat 1920s as a Chevrolet dealership.  It was an Oldsmobile dealership in the 1960s.  In the early 1970s, it became a furniture store and remained so until the previous owner retired.  After that, I’m not sure what happened, except he used it as a place to store vehicles and other things until he died last June.  From what we can tell, he used it regularly until sometime in 2007 — that’s the newest calendar we found on the wall.  I suspect he moved to a nursing home near his daughter in Dallas around then.  From 2007 until this year, some friends of his were keeping an eye on the building.  We bought the building with all it’s contents (minus a few vehicles that had been stored there and some household items a friend of his claimed prior to us closing on the property).  We are finding a few treasures and a lot of trash.  We’ve sifted the first wave of approximately 30 contractor bags into our household trash.  That took a few months.  We have at least that many more bags of trash to collect.  Then we have to sort the usable furniture from that which is too damaged (there are some drainage problems which has resulted in water seeping into the building and damaging many items).  We’ll wind up gathering the bulk trash in one place and getting a dump permit from the city to haul it away.  We’re looking for homes for some of the things.  For instance, we know someone interested in the myriad of bedrails we’ve stacked in one corner.  There must be 100 sets of bed rails.  There are several Christmas trees as well as a nice selection of 70s era furniture, which hubby’s daughter in Austin assures us there is a market for.  Same for vintage vacuum cleaners, which we have several of now.  Supposedly the building’s roof had been redone about ten years ago, but it’s in bad shape, so we’ll wind up putting a new roof on it.  The rest of the building is very solid.  It needs some window glass and a new door in back (it’s current covered by plywood).  The back of the place has been neglected for decades.  We’re cleaning the overgrowth out (almost entirely poison ivy, oak, and sumac).  We’ll also wind up removing about a foot of dirt and debris to get the ground level appropriate for the back of the building.  That should assist with some of the drainage problems we’re experiencing.  Lots of work remains to be done.

In October, we embarked on The Great Northeast Adventure.  Last year, I swore I wouldn’t do this again, but we did.  And we’ll probably do it again next year.  Flying would be so much easier, but I detest flying since the implementation of post-2001 security measures.  As a result, if there’s any other alternative, I’ll take it instead of flying.  That’s too bad, because I used to enjoy flying.  The airlines are at the mercy of government regulations, and they are losing in this endeavor, but until the government loosens it stranglehold on the flying public, I won’t fly unless there’s no other way to travel.  I have no desire to spend good money to be publicly felt up and virtually strip searched by strangers (and, for the smart alecs reading this,, I wouldn’t pay good money to have either of those things done if I knew the other party either) because a few idiots choose to attempt to blow up an airplane.  And every time some idiot finds a way to circumvent the process (and, until we’re forced to fly buck naked, I don’t see that stopping, and then we’ll have to submit ourselves to cavity searches before flying, so you can see the madness never ends), they punish the victim in yet more inventive ways.

Just out of curiosity, we checked, and Amtrak is quite economical and reasonably quick from San Antonio to Chicago, so we just might Amtrak it to Wisconsin this summer.

Hubby and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary last October while we were on the road.  We have our ups and downs — I suspect like most couples.  We both have spent many years living alone and are accustomed to doing things our way.  When someone else is involved, they invariably do something a different way, and that can be grounds for disagreement.  We keep trucking along.

We still have a long, long to do list involving painting, paving, refurbishing, rebuilding, and de-cluttering.  That’s a little reflection on 2009.  Next, I’ll ponder what 2010 may hold in store for us.  We were in the credit union today, and someone offered me a business opportunity.  I told him, “No thank you, I have all I can handle right now.”