Today marks the last of my vacation days from work. I go back next week. So far, this has been an unusually busy vacation, and when I go back to (paid) work, I'll have a feeling that I accomplished a lot, even if it isn't terribly visible.

Each day, as I promised myself I would, I've sorted out a box of "stuff" and put it away or given it away. What boxes, you ask (I know you didn't, but let's pretend). Answer: those boxes that accumulate every time you move, but never get opened and the contents' fate decided. Oh, that box, you say, and it gets shoved into a corner of the garage, to comfort the mice who nest behind it.

Those boxes are being opened, one by one, and decisions made about the fate of what's inside. I've done one a day and I should finish with this batch the day before I go back to work. I have a good feeling of pride about this.

Then there's the issue of insurance. I expect to be an old lady alone and I've prepared as best I can for the possible exigencies, by buying long term care (old age) insurance and by visiting various nearby skilled nursing and residential living facilities. They seem to be clean and well-run. When (if) I have to trust my care to some such place, I'll hope to find room in one like them.

Of course, if our country had proper medical insurance for all its citizens, I wouldn't be out, doing this on my own and paying premium prices for it. But the United States, of all the industrialized western countries, is the most shortsighted when it comes to health care for all its citizens. If you have health insurance of your own, great; if you don't, suffer.

Last on my list of vacation accomplishments has been the completion of various projects around the house--replacing gaskets in leaky faucets, repairing the patio cover (just before the first rain of the season), installing a fan upstairs (for the hot season next year) and so forth. Nice to have all those things done. No one warned me when I bought a house that I was buying a lifetime supply of fix-it projects!

Not much time for reading and knitting and activities of that sort, though the payoff in satisfaction for getting necessary repairs and cleanup done has more than offset the vague desire to sit on my lower extremities and vegetate. Some other time.

Off to clean up the patio and, if there's daylight left, to turn the soil in my garden (thinking ahead to spring planting).