I wanted to start the New Year by concentrating on redoing my estate, as well as (of course) paying attention to my health, losing weight, all those things. I did well on the weight thing for a while, then, with no obvious cause, threw all that over and am now eating and drinking the way I want and regained the weight. Again. I know there are really basic issues that probably need to be addressed before I can successfully change my lifestyle – the sort of issues that a therapist could help me with – and it’s on the list to find one. As it has been for years. I need to pick that up.

But I have been moving forward in other ways. The winter is a nice time to do household organization and I have now gone through all the bookcases in the office, dusting, reorganizing and boxing books to donate. Also finally getting rid of some stuff that C would never let me dump before, like the Italian lessons on cassette.

I have binders of CDs and DVDs, removed from their cases and only the inserts retained – but I also have a whole ‘CD bookcase’ and also cardboard boxes of large CD classical sets and stuff. When I bought a new computer a couple of years ago, my Itunes library got somewhat screwed up – lots of albums have completely wrong album art, there are missing tracks and a lot of the files were in multiple locations. So I’ve been:

• Doing a phased sweep of the tracks in the ‘wrong’ location to make sure they get moved/copied ot the right location, then deleting the ‘wrong’ directories after doing a quick check of some of the albums involved. (a large enough project that I’m doing this one starting letter at a time – all the ‘D’s’, for instance). This is cleaning up a lot of space on my media drive.
• Going through the CDs to check against Itunes, and ‘repairing’ any issues with reloads, or at least deleting the wrong album art. I’ve done the boxes, now almost done with the bookcase.

Once finished, I will:

• Add a lot of those CDs to binders.
• Fill up the empty space on the CD bookcase with stuff from the cardboard boxes, and
• Probably put the large boxed sets on one of the empty book-bookcase shelves, emptied from my book dusting/reorg.

All this warms my organizational heart and is a lot of fun. At least, fun for me.

I have a ton more organizational stuff to do – various little bags of “I need to deal with this specific thing at some point”, and an entire other room that’s been used as a random dumping ground for stuff. I’m hoping to get this basically done by spring.

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I’m trying to get out of town once a month or so, so I went up to Rhinebeck to visit Patti and Peter over the long weekend. This was lovely and relaxing – they have a mother-in-law extension on the house which is a great guest room. They are surrounded by woods and nature, and it snowed prettily on Saturday morning, but not enough to get in the way of travel.

I took Friday off to do laundry in the morning, then travel up on the train in the afternoon. Patti picked me up, then that night we met Peter in Tivoli (he works out of town during the week and was on his way back for the weekend) and had dinner at Santa Fe, which was excellent.

My dear friend Vikki, who passed away two Octobers ago, had retired upstate with her husband Jack, not far away from Rhinebeck, so I’d reached out to Jack and we met for breakfast in Red Hook on Saturday. This became a minor adventure. Jack had said to meet him “at the Red Hook Diner”, but Patti dropped me off at a different, more historic diner that she was convinced would be the one he meant. No, it wasn’t, as I quickly figured out, but Patti’d already left. I texted Jack, but he didn’t answer. Ended up getting an Uber to the other diner (which was lucky, because this isn’t the sort of place where you can easily get an Uber), and it turned out Jack didn’t have his phone with him. But it all worked out and we had a nice breakfast. We’re both new widowers, a lot of the discussion was about that, but pleasant stuff too. And he drove me back to Rhinebeck. Next time I come up, I’ll probably work out a way to bring up Vikki’s friends Carol and Lesley for a day trip so we can all have lunch with him.

For the afternoon, Patti and I went to antique stores in the neighborhood, mostly in Hyde Park. I wasn’t really looking for anything in particular, although I do have my eye on (eventually) picking up some artwork – but I ended up buying these.

The Waterford clock (which I’m assuming works, but am getting a battery for) will look great on the mantel. The paperweight with the lighthouse is very cool and is 3D in the sense that if you turn it sideways, you still see the lighthouse and clouds, but in a different configuration. (I brought that into the office.) And I don’t know what I’m going to do with the atomizer, but I just loved the color and thought it was beautiful.

We had a late lunch at a cute little burger joint called The Matchbox, really fun. Then Saturday night, we went to a small art show in town, and then Peter made a Thai shrimp dish and blueberry cobbler for dinner, yum. (and then we watched “The Holdovers”, which I hadn’t seen yet. It’s wonderful.)

Sunday, we did much the same – Patti and I went out to some more antique type stores and meals out, but I didn’t buy anything else. I did some work on my taxes, did some reading. (It’s so nice to be elsewhere. You can relax at home, but of course you’re surrounded by projects that you should be doing.) Peter made gumbo for dinner, then we watched three episodes of Resident Alien, which is a hoot and a half and I’m excited to keep watching it.

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Oh yes, forgot to blog about a couple of weeks ago – when Patti came down to help our friend Tessa, who recently had a fall and broke her wrist. The three of us had dinner, then Patti stayed overnight with me. Then I went to drag bingo with Vance (who had a BIG ZERO BIRTHDAY) and Craig, which was a lot of fun.

And I’ve been casually consuming both TV and Oscar movies. I did watch all of True Detective season 4 (the Jodie Foster one), which was great. It takes place in a remote Alaska town just as the ‘long night’ starts. One side effect of this is, because they don’t necessarily tell you, as the story proceeds, you have no idea what time of day it is. It’s always ‘night’, but it could be 10 am or 10 pm, you have no idea. Anyway, it’s intense, but worth it. I’ve been watching Northern Exposure (for the first time, and everyone is delighted because they loved it back in the day), and Succession, which is awesome, but intense. The power of acting, man – seeing a former Mr. Darcy (Matthew McFayden) playing this ineffectual hanger-on is both amusing and cringe. Actually, all the characters are amusing and cringe, as they are all so self-confident and so inept.

Oscarwise, I have now seen (in addition to Barbie), American Fiction, Poor Things and The Holdovers. I’d be happy to see any of these win best picture, although I know Barbie won’t. And I haven’t even seen Oppenheimer yet – will do that before the Oscars.

I did also watch about an hour of Killers of the Flower Moon, which was really good, but not captivating – and when they got to a scene where Leo DiCaprio’s character was clearly going to get punished for something, I decided I didn’t want to watch that and turned it off. I may finish it at some point, but low priority. I got the point.

After Oppenheimer, the only two movies I feel like making an effort to see pre-Oscars are Nyad (on Netflix) and Spider-Man, so I’ll make sure that happens.

Yeah, I feel like I’ve been moving forward, but it’s largely been maintainance or cleanup rather than moving forward. But there’s no effing gradebook. Sometimes getting out of bed is the victory of the day.