What did I do this summer? When I was growing up, summer was often a school assignment in September. Even though some really good things took place, it was the summer of my discontent for too long.
The complicating factor of this season was that my wife took eight weeks off from work, mostly unpaid. It was not without some work texts showing up on her phone anyway, even though she had spent weeks preparing for the summer program.
She did not take off any substantial time in the summer of 2023. That was to her detriment and the detriment of our household in general. This summer, we took trips to Chautauqua and Washington, DC. Everything else seemed to fill up the space quickly. We needed to talk to our new financial advisor, which involved preparing documents beforehand.
There were some medical issues to deal with. Also, our cat Midnight died.
Fixing the abode
But mostly, doing some major work on our house was necessary. There have been long-standing issues that needed to be fixed, such as a deficit of lighting in certain areas of the house. I am not handy, which is one of the reasons I had never aspired to be a homeowner.
Most importantly, our back porch desperately needs to be replaced. This became even more problematic when we discovered that the company insuring our home and automobile was experiencing serious financial difficulty. We need a new company to take over the policy by the end of 2024, which will involve a home inspection.
We tried to get our back porch torn down two years ago and replaced with a nice deck. A guy came to our house. Our friends recommended him, for whom he had built a very nice deck. He took the measurements, wrote down the information, and said he’d get back to us by the middle of September. Nope. He didn’t call, so I called him thrice, but nothing. One of my old friends told me that this is a fairly common thing they experience. I found this astonishingly irritating.
Crossing fingers
So now we have contracted with someone else to do a much less rigorous task, just replacing the porch and the steps so that we can get someone to inspect our house and get a new insurance policy by the end of the year. It’s a pain in the buttocks, but we had been in contact with the contractor before we got the word about the house. So we’re crossing our fingers, our toes, and any other digits we have.
Meanwhile, we’re cleaning the house, not just the obvious mopping and vacuuming, but also moving stuff that had taken root. My wife and I have different philosophical vents, so we must do much of it together. Do we want to keep X? Where should we move Y? (She suggested moving something to my office, which is already cluttered, while she had previously indicated that she wants to put items in my office once it becomes less cluttered, which I find… counterintuitive.)
Who has time for other things?
The complicating factor for the home renovation is that it eats up the time I might have been doing something else. It was true when I said at a meeting early in the summer that I didn’t have time for a task because I was “busy;” that said task had suddenly become much more complicated than I originally understood. If I had known about the changes earlier in the process, I could have made it much easier, but it was a bit of a bait and switch. Being told, “We’re all busy,” was unhelpful.
The task became undoable and sent me into more than minor despair. I had so many things on my “to-do” list that I felt paralyzed and could do almost nothing. That, of course, didn’t help the process either. Anything that took longer than it “should” have irritated me; “I don’t have time for that!”
It interfered with my book review at the library because I couldn’t even finish the book until three days before the talk, and it ran short. I vamped, but it ticked me off.
This spiral manifested itself in binge eating, which made me gain weight and made me sadder. I looked at getting help online, most likely Better Help, but I was too conscious that it would eat further into my time. Is that irrational? Yes. What’s your point?
I feel like I’m working out of that melancholy and despair, but this was a pain in the buttocks. It had exhausted me.
This will be revisited.
(Right after I wrote this, I came across a 2021 cartoon by British illustrator Gemma Cornell on Facebook. I can’t find the specific link, but this 2017 item will do. )
What a difference a month makes. Like a lot of people, by the time the Republican National Convention was over, I was thoroughly depressed. When Joe Biden was running, he rightly pointed out the risk to democracy if his opponent were elected. Unfortunately, the Republicans said the same thing if the Democrats won. 
The Chautauqua Institution has a series of lectures based on a theme. For instance, The Evolution of the Modern Presidency was the theme in week 1, June 22–29.