My wife and I closed on our retirement nest in April. It’s now August and we still aren’t moved in. A bit of remodeling was needed before we could do that. A bit turned out to be nearly five months.
Note: I am not retiring from The Tribune. That would require a divorce bunker rather than a nest. I am, however, retiring from mowing a square mile of yard. Our new backyard will be the size of a planter box.
We’re moving into a separate apartment in our eldest daughter’s home. It has everything we need, including a lock on the door. Her husband, Scott, is a registered nurse who will be there to take care of me when my mind and bladder finally go.
Here’s the thing. It was only a basement apartment we wanted to remodel. Not the entire house. It didn’t take five months to build the house in 2007 (I checked), so I don’t see why remodeling four rooms should require the same amount of time needed to construct the pyramids.
But, like I always say, that’s just me. I’ve always had trouble forming unrealistic expectations based on what people assure me to be the case.
Builder: “It should only take about a week to put that drain in and then bulletproof the ceiling, Mr. Kirby. After that, it’s just a matter of installing the gun ports.”
Me: “Great. We’ll start packing.”
That was in May. We’re no closer to moving in than we would be if we had paid someone for the privilege of having our feet nailed to the floor.
The thing is that nobody exactly lied to us. It did only take about a week — of actual work. It was the time between the various subcontractors showing up that stretched things out.
As it happened, If the framer finished on Monday, the plumber couldn’t start until the third Wednesday of the following month, but then only the electrician was done the day before that, after which the drywall required two months’ prior notice and the ritual sacrifice of an animal.
Over the weeks that followed, the hammering and pounding downstairs began to sound like the mindless attrition of trench warfare. Something drastic needed to happen.
When I began to arm myself, I was ordered by the queen of our future nest to stay away.
Her: “You’ll go to prison.”
Me: “Not if I only shoot somebody in the foot. Six months county time, if that.”
More likely the county wouldn’t have had enough room to jail me, so I would have ended up doing house arrest. I couldn’t win.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the relativity of time. Specifically, how it’s relative to human expectation. For example, one person’s “in a minute” is another person’s “tomorrow.” It’s never actually a minute.
Differences in defining time can even be limitless, as in “by Wednesday” turning out to be “when I get damn good and ready, or even “never.”
It doesn’t get any better with organization. There’s an entirely different (worse) time formula when dealing with companies and agencies. That’s when, “Oh, we’ll have that out to you by next week” becomes “[derisive laughter].”
On the bright side, our retirement nest has be finished eventually, right? I mean, projects can’t last forever, right?
Wrong. We moved into our current place 13 years ago and I still haven’t fixed something in the kitchen that I told my wife would only take “a couple of hours.”
