Well I know its been a while since I wrote anything here. This is not due to the usual reasons (that there has been absolutely nothing of any interest, however meager, happening in any area of my pathetic excuse for a life) but actually for the exact opposite reason: I've been just too busy. No, seriously.

At work, I've got the new kids to train, and of course I've got to write all the programs for them to use and actually have everything work, a process which is not exactly sped up by having management or the surveyors changing their requirements, field codes etc. on an almost hourly basis. And with the onset of spring my own regular work is starting to pick up.

And of course, there's all the usual springtime boat-related work to do, in fact more than the usual amount, because not satisfied with cleaning varnishing waxing painting scrubbing one boat I went and got me another. Cookie is a little rough around the edges, but with a little sandpaper, epoxy and wood-filler she's shaping up pretty sharp indeed. She has the nicest lines and rows like a champ (Cookie's a little mouse pram I bought off Rich Craft a few years ago, brought back to Columbus, and never figured out how to get back to the lake) .

But I've spent even more time trying to be useful to my parents. They had made the decision a year or so ago that the house was just getting to be too much and it was time to find a retirement community. After much looking they finally found a place they liked. Brand new, still under construction in fact, all kinds of programs specially designed for old fogies, it was everything and more. They had a well-thumbed but still shiny brochure, chock full of pictures of happy oldsters wandering sun-dappled trails. It's mostly my mother who wants to go, of course, in fact my Dad doesn't really want to go at all, but they are both getting excited about the coming move. No more cooking! No more stairs!

There's a world of work to do before that could happen, of course. There's forty years accumulation of crap to deal with in the house- the detritus of a lifetime- boxes of pictures, books, clothes that were possibly fashionable in the seventies, Christmas gifts which, never fully appreciated, still couldn't be decently thrown out and sat in the closet for decades. No less than seven umbrellas.

All this stuff has got to go.

So they've been cleaning and sorting away, ruthlessly disposing of everything- all the garden tools, perfectly good stuff, sold on Craigslist for peanuts. All the pictures off the walls, because nobody buys houses with pictures these days, apparently, and so all the nail holes have to be spackled and the walls painted. This is a lot of work for old-timers like my folks, so I've been trying to help out in odd hours in the afternoon and evenings when I can. Marty and I painted the garage. After all this, the house (a "project" house, a "fixer-upper" or "handyman's delight", which is to say a "dump" when my folks bought it) a house that my parents had been working on almost continually for forty odd years, was finally finished, finally the way they had always envisioned it. They signed the papers and put it on the market on Monday.

On Wednesday they got a call- their retirement community had gone belly-up.