Dear Diary is a new feature dedicated to chronicling some of the day-to-day doings of my retirement, here in my self-imposed exile on the isle of Elba. Anything written here should be taken with a grain of salt and a bit of tongue-in-cheek, although most of it is true … except the parts that are made up.
Dear Diary:
ITEM: The year is flying by!
I just had my hair cut the other day and now it’s only three more haircuts until Comic-Con: May, June, and July! I’ve always been interested in alternative ways of measuring time, so haircuts are definitely a calendar item for me, as are milk carton expiration dates (already in June with that method!). Since I am not traveling this year (unless I do a spur of the moment last minute trip somewhere, anywhere, just to get out of Dodge this fall, which I am DEFINITELY not planning to do, which means I’ll probably do it, undoubtedly scheduling it at 4:00 AM when I can’t get back to sleep), Comic-Con in July is the one week where it will almost, sorta, kinda, seem like I’m someplace else, since I’ll travel over to the mainland just about every day that week to meet up with out-of-town friends (yes, I have a few; don’t act so shocked). And of course downtown San Diego becomes much more festive and pleasant, instead of the bleak, post-pandemic landscape that now faces me each time I journey over there. Wow, Dear Diary … what a bummer this first post is! Hang on, it’ll get worse before it gets better!
Shall we all measure time by haircuts? Convince me!
ITEM! I miss my car.
I’m still dealing with the psychological fallout of losing my car in a garage flood back in January. (You can read more about it by clicking here.) While I definitely don’t miss driving or paying jacked-up insurance rates and gas prices, I do miss the car, and what it represented to me: in a word, freedom. I feel at times like I’m confined to my little island home—which, don’t get me wrong, I dearly love; I couldn’t pick a nicer place to be “confined.” A friend offered to take me to Target and a bookstore a few weeks ago, and I am forever in her debt (don’t worry, Dear Diary, I bought her a hearty lunch in a nice restaurant as a thank you. I’m not entirely a curmudgeonly heathen.) So that was nice. And if I’ve been forced into exile—by my own volition, I will admit—I could most certainly opt to buy another car or travel more by Uber or Lyft, besides my regular ferry rides to and from the mainland. But there’s something refreshing in “roughing it,” without a car in Southern California, the land of so very many cars. So don’t cry for me, Argentina … or Coronado.
ITEM! I’m redoing my balcony!
One of the pleasant side effects of the loss of my car was the insurance payout I got, plus the refunding of my 2024 policy, which I paid in full in December. Instead of travel, which, by air, is so unpleasant and tedious these days, I’ve decided to redesign my balcony. I’m lucky to have a nice 6’ x 12’ balcony, which overlooks a very pleasant little courtyard-like area. I can sit out there and read and have a nice beverage, and watch all my neighbors bring their dogs into this area to poop and pee. (Luckily I’m on a higher floor, so I don’t have to smell it and most of them do clean up after themselves, thankfully.) Spring is slow to come to San Diego this year, and I’m anticipating our normal bouts of “Gray May” and “June Gloom,” but just in case, I’m redoing my balcony for a long, hot summer of reading and enjoying in what amounts to pretty much an extra room on my apartment.
This week I stripped the “old” balcony bare. A few years back, I bought these plastic tiles from IKEA (see photos above), which looked real nice for a week or so, and then revealed their true, evil nature: They were epic dirt catchers, both on the surface and below! I “closed” the balcony for the winter season back in November, right before I took off for merry ol’ England for a couple of weeks, and let me tell you, Dear Diary, it became quite the dirty, dusty mess in the ensuing months. The courtyard has both pine and palm trees, and a lot of the stuff that falls from those trees settles on my balcony. I had enough pine needles to craft a nice, thick, medium-sized tumbleweed, if that’s your thing. As you can see, the dust from the palm trees was also thick (that yellowish mess on the tiles). So I pulled up all 72 of those IKEA tiles and found an even bigger mess underneath! The tiles themselves were too messy to salvage, so into the recycling bin they went, proof of another regretful lesson in shopping.
So after a three-hour tour (just like Gilligan!), and lots of hard work, including sweeping, vacuuming, and Swiffering* (*not a product endorsement), I had restored the deck to close to its original, off-white condition. There are some small areas that were hit harder than others, where the paint stripped off a bit, revealing an ugly gray undercoat, but short of repainting the deck, there’s nothing I can do about it. I kicked up a lot of dust, as you can see by my comparison photo of one clean shoe and one dirty shoe. (Don’t worry, Dear Diary, I cleaned the other shoe, too!) I will admit to being very sore the day after I did all this, but I felt such a feeling of accomplishment, it was worth a sore lower back and upper legs.
I’ve decided to replace my seven-year-old chairs—which, truth be told, were always uncomfortable—with a brand new rattan couch, which comes with its very own cover. I’ll post pictures when it’s all together, but the “new” balcony will include said couch, an umbrella for some shade from the sun, and a waterproof outdoor rug. I may even spring for some end tables! Wow, Dear Diary, I’m so excited about my revamped balcony! Now if I can just kill every mosquito that seems to live out there—another reason to get rid of those tiles since I think they lurked beneath—I might just live out there this summer, with a stack of books and magazines, at least when it’s sunny.
That’s about it for this entry, Dear Diary. Thanks for listening. I shall now lock you up and store you safely away from this sometimes troubling world (another reason to stay home this summer and enjoy my balcony), and visit you once again when I have something I’d like to share.
@innocent-bystander.com 
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