Dear Tyler

      I remember a while back asking a fellow retiree how she was coming with one of her hobby projects.  She said it was languishing as she undertook more pressing tasks.  I expressed some disbelief that she hadn’t enough time now that she was not working.

     She said she could not believe how busy she was now, even compared to before she retired.  “I’m wondering how I ever had the time to work back then,” she stated.

      Very strange, but I’m finding it true.  Yes, I raised a family, kept a 40-hour job not including lunch and drive-time, shepherded the kids to all kinds of extracurricular activities, and helped keep up a house and yard.  Yet I feel the demands on my time now make me feel almost as busy.

       Most of it involves pasttimes, true.  My garden produced a bounty of vegetables including a number of beautiful ghost peppers.

        They’re supposed to be the hottest pepper on the planet.  My dad volunteered to take one and later cut just a tiny sliver of it to touch to his moistened lips to try.  He spit it out when he began feeling the intense heat which continued to radiate through his mouth even after he’d spit it out.  He sat down in his chair in the living room making such a face that my mother thought she might have to call 9-1-1.

       So I harvested a few of these peppers, intending to save them for later somehow.  That’s on my to-do list.

      We also have three cars parked in our driveway right now, one of them passed down to us from a son who bought a truck.  We don’t need three cars and are going to sell the oldest vehicle.  Selling a car is something I haven’t done in a decade or so.  It’s on my to-do list.

      This past summer I received a message from a distant relative of my wife asking if we could convert Wendy’s ancestry DNA file to a GEDCOM file and upload it to an ancestry site which would allow her and other folks to better trace their own ancestry.  Not sure what a GEDCOM file is and, since it sounded complicated, I promised to do it in the fall when I thought I would have more time.  It’s fall now.  It’s on my to-do list.

     I’ve also been tasked with wrangling with an attorney to change the deed on a cabin I share ownership with my brothers so that the cabin can remain in our family for all our heirs to enjoy.  Also . . . on my to-do list.

     The calendar this month already includes a vacation for a week out east that I’d been looking forward to this spring.  We’ll be heading out of town the same day that we take our youngest grandson to a local pumpkin hunt which has been a yearly tradition for us.   I still need make hotel reservations, do a packing list, figure drive times, etc.

      Then during the summer I thought I should give back somehow to the community so I volunteered to be a reader to young five-year-olds at a local elementary school as well as being a pen pal to a second grader at the same school.  That’s Tyler.  Hmmmm, maybe I could kill a few birds with a single stone here.  Combine a letter to Tyler with this blog, and maybe he could help me with my to-do list as well.

Dear Tyler,

     How are you?  I am fine.  Do you know how to preserve ghost peppers?  Have you ever sold a car or anything on Craigslist?  Is your mother or father perhaps a lawyer who specializes in real estate?  Has Ancestry.com tested your DNA yet?

     I hope you enjoy your year in the second grade.  Write back soon.

Sincerely,

Big Dave