Chapter 2

My first full day away from the Job I spent installing some pull up bars in the bathroom. That little chore meant I didn’t have to take the footed cane with me to use the toilet, or to get in and out of the shower. Not only that it was safer as well.

While I was at it, I installed new door locks in addition to the ones already on the doors. They were heavy duty bolts. I, frankly didn’t figure I owned anything worth protecting with extra security. I did think my life was worth protecting. As usual, I bought everything from the Walmart Super store, a couple of miles from my house.

Before I did anything I made coffee. I mixed three cups of cold water with three heaping soup spoons of coffee. Then I brought it to a boil in a percolator with the works removed. After the coffee boiled thirty seconds, more or less, I strained it. My strainer was made from a coffee can with the top and bottom removed. It had a piece of fine fiberglass screen wire stretched over the bottom. I allowed it to cool in a large ceramic two cup sized mug. It didn’t need to cool any longer than it took my toaster to pop up.

Usually my breakfast was a hard boiled egg that I had boiled days before. Since I boiled half a dozen at a time, they usually came from the refrigerator. Once on my bread plate, I sliced them for the top of my toasted hamburger bun. That and the coffee made a filling breakfast for only two hundred calories. Yes, I had to watch my weight. I never said that I wasn’t a tad vain. I tried to consume no more than one thousand and eight hundred calories a day. That usually kept me from starving. I couldn’t burn off calories as easily with my bad hip joint.

Since I had the parts waiting for me, the days chores were accomplished before I left the house for the first time that day. I even straightened the house. Most days when I had worked, I just fell into bed at night. House cleaning was left for my days off. While looking at the pile of dirty dishes, during breakfast, I decided that the first day of my new life would be a good day to clean house. New beginnings and all that you know.

So after my breakfast, first thing was to work on my chore list, then clean the house. Without any real plan, I sort of staggered through the chores. Since as a cop employee, I always had to look clean, and be sweet smelling, so my clothes went to the laundry for a professional cleaning.

I decided that it was time to do my own wash, so after all the house cleaning, I went shopping online. I purchased a tiny portable automatic clothes washer from Walmart, they had it shipped to my house free. It came to under one hundred and fifty bucks. I might still have to take my sheets to the laundry but that was doable.

I just had to wait for the machine to arrive. While I waited I decided to build a portable clothes drying rack. I had to buy tools, since in the future I didn’t want to hire Juan to so such small jobs. For the portable clothes line, I made a list of purchases necessary.

After I figured them all into the price, I found it cheaper to just to buy two ¼ inch hooks. I could just screw one into the door frame, and another into a scrap piece of 2x4. It had been left over from the deck, which had been built recently by Juan. I added the 2x4 it to the deck’s hand rail to get the height I needed.

Since I did own a claw hammer, I used it and a left over nail to make the pilot holes for the hooks. A few #8 common nails held the 2x4 extension in place. The close line wasn’t completely level, but it was close enough. After me building it, I had to just wait for the arrival of the portable washer, at which time I would be ready to go.

The day wasn’t finished until I completed the cleaning. Since I purchased them slightly after I bought the house, I had the cleaning tools I needed. I swept the vinyl floor tiles. They were glued to the plywood sub flooring. I knew that because I had watched Juan repair the termite damage. Some of it was to the sub floor. There was a 4’x8’ patch in a bedroom, which was covered with mismatched tile.

After I cleaned and mopped the other floors, I was forced to sit in the kitchen with my coffee pot. I made another pot of cowboy coffee even though it was 4PM. I knew that true coffee lovers would cringe at my coffee. Which is why I never explained the process, I simply kept it to myself and enjoyed it.

I didn’t stop for lunch, so I was entitled to a big meal for dinner. My idea of a big meal was a big mac with fries. I poured a large plastic go cup of lemonade from my refrigerator jug before driving to the one McDonald’s restaurant in town. After a short wait in the drive through, I drove all the way to one of the many Grenada lake overlooks to have my dinner.

Then home again to finish my work for the day. I had to wash the coffee pot and mix more lemonade. I kept two large soft drink bottles filled with lemonade at all times. I kept them in my second cheap apartment sized refrigerator. I ordered the I used at the time from Walmart. After the first one I purchased from Lowe’s died after only five years. I figured the one from Walmart couldn’t be any worse than that one.

Before I settled into a chair for the evening. I fixed myself a lemonade first. I used a 24oz cup thermos cup with a lid. That son of bitch when full had to weigh close to five pounds. Before I left the kitchen, I made exactly six cookies. They were my own concoction of a generic Ritz cracker. With a thick layer of generic peanut butter, that was topped with a very thin plain butter cookie. The butter cookie had a hole in the center. I placed a single M&M inside the hole. I could carry them all from the kitchen to my bedroom inside a wrapper made from a single half page of the Sunday newspaper. I noted that I had just about use all of the last week’s paper. The timing was almost perfect.

I went into my second and smaller bedroom to open my computer. I had bought the computer, with no hard drive, at a state government employees auction. I paid one hundred and fifty dollars for it. I spent another ten bucks for a compatible 160meg hard drive including shipping. A few minutes after the hard drive arrived, I had it up and running. That is after I included a puppy Linux operating system. The computer itself was well used before I bought it, which was seven year earlier than the first day of my retirement. The system was purchased by the state new in the year 2000. So it was seventeen years old.

I spent a couple of hours watching old TV shows, then went to bed. I attached my cheap cell phone to the charger. I had to do that since it was my only telephone. I did have a land line DSL for the computer, but no land line phone service. It wasn’t really a high speed provider, so I usually did something else while the TV shows filled the buffer.

I usually did image editing on one of the Linux programs. I had downloaded three of them. Pinta was by far my favorite for a light editing job. I worked on the images until the buffer filled, then I watch ten minutes of the TV show before the buffer ran out again. I gave up in frustration around midnight and went to bed.

My bed of choice for the house had been a single bed with a frame to turn it into a sofa. I even used the two big pillows that went on the back as bed pillows. I covered the mattress with two sheets and a light weight blanket. I also had a light weight foam insulated quilt thing for the really cold weather.

So my first day as an unemployed man, wasn’t much different from any other non work day. For the last 30 years my weekend had been whenever days I wasn’t working. So that day was a pretty typical weekend day.

The next day was Sunday, so I slept until 8AM, as I had done the day before. Okay I laid in bed the last two hours. I was hoping that I could fall back to sleep after the 6AM bathroom call, no such luck.

When I gave up, I switch on the small electric ceramic heater in the bathroom. It was the one with the big red warning tag ‘Do no use in the bathroom or near any water source’.

I left it running while I went to take my morning pills and fix coffee. After about ten minutes I returned with my big red coffee mug. I drank the coffee while I decided that I was not going to shave or cut my hair anytime soon.

I did take a shower. I did that mostly so I wouldn’t waste the heat from the ceramic heater. Even on it’s lowest setting, it made the bathroom very warm after the twenty minutes it ran.

After turning off the heater, I left the bathroom door open to help heat the house during the morning chill. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving, so it was the unofficial first days of winter. In which case the chill was to be expected.

My little house’s real heat source was an LP gas floor furnace. It was set under the floor with a grill through the hall floor outside the bathroom. That furnace didn’t have a thermostat. It had a three setting switch on the wall. I turned it down to it’s lowest setting at night. Unless it was below freezing, I also closed the bathroom door to get more head to the bedrooms. I didn’t want to raise the setting until it really was needed. Yeah, that was me trying to be cheap, when I didn’t have to be.

I spent the balance of the morning at the Hugh White State Park. That park was attached to Grenada Lake. The park was full of things to do, and it was just a few miles from my door step. In the seven years I had lived in Grenada, I had never taken time to visited it. I figured I would hang around until night fall and see if anything peaked my interest.

It wasn’t the best time of the year for my interest. Most of the time mine was the only car in the parking lot. I went out for a tale out lunch from McDonald’s, then drove to the public boat launch in the park to watch and shoot images with my Nikon D700 professional digital camera. I had well over two grand invested in the camera and lenses.

Since I hadn’t been a professional photographer when I bought it, I didn’t have any backup equipment. That is one of the reasons I was interested in shooting the Panasonic camera with the Leica lens. Most likely it would convince me to break down and buy another Nikon. I shot a picture of the landing. And one of a tree trunk with an orange paint mark on it. I also shot a picture of a duck swimming near the dock. I shot ten test images in all. Actually I shot several copies of the ten images.

I had to spend the day to shoot images with different amounts of light as it varied with the time of day. I framed the images as close to the perfect crop as possible. I figured that is where the Nikon would excel. I stayed until the light began to seriously fail, then I called the Deacon. After a very brief conversation I drove home quickly.

When I arrived home, I was hungry, bored, and even a little chilled. I turned the floor furnace up from it lowest setting to the middle setting. I planned to run it there until I went to bed.

“Since you are going to put out a few bucks to bringing the cameras back to life, I have decided to buy your breakfast,” Deacon said over the phone.

“It’s 6AM, are you at the diner this early?” I asked.

“No, I’ll probably be there about seven though,” he informed me.

“Well I can’t make it until seven thirty,” I said.

“Fair enough, I’ll have the cameras,” he said just before he shut down the connection with no warning at all.

I dressed and then made coffee. As always I wore the tan cotton fatigue pants from my old uniform. The real cop’s were blue or black. Blue was for patrolmen, black was for the tactical unit and the SWAT team.

I wore a thermal tee shirt under a black sweat shirt. Over it all I wore a lightweight tan puffer vest. I drove to the restaurant in my three year old Hyundai. I had bought it brand new, but I chose the cheapest model.

When I arrived at the restaurant Deacon was waiting for me. “Have you been waiting long?” I asked.

“Half a cup of coffee is all. So how you liking retirement?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t had time to think about it yet,” I answered. “I did chores Saturday. I had been putting them off for months. I spent most of yesterday making test shots with my Nikon. Today I have to get your cameras checked out.”

“Well maybe you can catch up on your rest tomorrow,” he said.

“Maybe,” I agreed.

When I opened the black back pack, I was standing at the counter of Walmart with their so called resident electronics expert. There were three moisture sucker uppers in the bag of cameras. The cameras and their straps showed no signs of mold. The gel packs must have worked, I thought.

Since the batteries had been removed from the cameras, I bought one new battery. I found both batteries in the side pocket of the backpack. The person who packed the cameras didn’t use the moisture preventive on the batteries. It was at least good that the batteries weren’t stored inside the cameras. Both of them were ruined. I hooked up the new battery to a camera at random. The display came to life instantly. I ran the lens in and out checking the movement. It ran easily with no noticeable friction. I made the same test on the second camera which seemed to be of a slightly less quality, but still the same brand. It might have been a year older I couldn’t tell.

I used one of the SD cards to shoot a couple of imagines inside the store. The cameras seemed to work flawlessly. Aside from being surprised that they worked at all, I made no other judgments. They needed to be thoroughly tested. I paid over ten bucks for the one battery, then left the store.