Rant #2,767: Get Ready

Finally.

This past weekend gave me two days to literally chill out and not do very much of anything.
 
Sure, there were things that I had to do—such as accompany my son to his basketball and bowling activities—but they were pleasurable and kind of relaxing.
 
No, I still have not received the material for my son from Social Security so that he can get his health insurance in order, but I did get a letter from that office about how much they will be taking out of his monthly payment to pay for this stuff … nice how they put the cart before the horse like they did, but I do feel that the material is coming …
 
So is Christmas.
 
Thus, if I do not get the material—namely his new Part A and Part B cards—by about Wednesday, I am going to have to call the legislator who assisted me in my quest and tell them, as they instructed me to do.
 
But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
 
Anyway, this past weekend was the first in many, many weeks where I could just basically do what I wanted to do, so beginning on Friday—when I still had stuff to do that had to be done—I took an hour off and went to my local record store, which I have found to be a relaxing exercise.

 
I find it almost therapeutic to go through the bins and look at all the records the store has for sale, and yes, I bought a couple and have added them to my collection, including the one pictured.
 
More about my record collection later.
 
As the weekend came, I was able to prepare even more for the party that we are having this coming weekend for my wife, a combination birthday party and retirement party all in one.
 
I got a couple of more things for it—meaning presents—and we will be all stocked and ready to go by Sunday afternoon, when it is being held in a local Italian restaurant.
 
I still have some more things to get, but most of it is done—and happily, I had the opportuni8ty to get it all done this weekend.
 
I also had the opportunity to speak to a friend I hadn’t spoken to in some time, and our phone conversation on Sunday afternoon basically ate up the entire afternoon, and it was nice to catch up with him.
 
And in the evening—both on Saturday and on Sunday—I was able to take in a movie on HBO Max, catch up on a few TV shows, and just really relax and recharge my batteries.
 
To close out the weekend, I decided to do something that I hadn’t had the time to do but had wanted to do for several weeks, which was to rearrange by record collection—namely my LP collection—from the back end.
 
This encompassed three shelves of records on the back end, which I wanted to swap places with those records on my revolving record stand, so the revolving record stand would now house the back end of my collection and the shelves would hold a middle part of my collection.

 
The plan was to take them all out of their places and move them in bulk to their new spots, and the logistics challenges of doing that were enormous, but I felt a burst of energy after watching some TV on Sunday night—namely, an old “Perry Mason” episode that I had never seen before—so I decided the time was right to do this.
 
It literally took an hour and a half to make the swap, but now, the records are in the right place, and let me tell you, this was not an easy task, as we are talking about many, many LPs that had to be swapped.
 
So now, the back end of my collection is on the revolving record stand—beginning at a mid-point in my “S” section and my Soundtrack collection, which I have all together in one section, through the remainder of the “S” section, through the T, U, V, W, X and Y sections, through the last section, the “Z” section ending with the Zombies at the tail end of all of it.

 
The shelves now begin with the “R” section, and the Rascals, and pretty much end in the middle of the Soundtrack section, with the last one on the shelves being the soundtrack to the film “Shaft.”

 
I did have to move a few records to the other side of my record collection, so there are a handful of Qs—mainly Queen—and R—the beginning of the Rascals section—that had to be moved to a space on my shelves on the other side of the room, and I also had to relocate some CDs that I had in a box on that side of the room to accommodate the Q section and a couple of the R records—the Rascals LPs—but it all worked out fine, in my estimation.
 
As you can imagine, after this 90 minutes of moving all of these records from one place to another, I was tired. My shirt was sweaty, and I felt like I needed to take a bath, but I was tired and decided to crawl into bed.
 
I was out in about five minutes or maybe not even that long, and except for waking up a bit early and dozing right back off to sleep, I slept until about 6:15 a.m. today, which is an accomplishment in itself for me, since I have not been sleeping too well lately with everything hitting me from all sides.
 
And now here I am, typing out today’s rant ... and I get back on the hamster wheel again today, with things to do and with little time to take it easy.
 
I guess it was nice to escape, even briefly, for the two weekend days, but it is back to the daily grind now.
 
Lots of stuff to do, little time to relax, and I guess I am ready to go.
 
I actually felt like I was retired this weekend.
 
But it is time to go back to work.