Focus, choices, beekeeping, updates

I am finding it a challenge right now to maintain a proper focus. Not necessarily on required work activities or needed chores at the house or farm, but it the area of planning ahead – setting up processes for meeting our future needs. Mama and I had a long talk earlier about our finances. We are actually in pretty good shape overall, but I do not feel I am ready to meet our current needs with the reduced income we will have available when I retire. I am especially concerned about providing for the costs of ongoing or upcoming medical needs. With the current pressures everyone is feeling due rampant inflation, especially with the rising price of gas and diesel we must purchase to operate our vehicles to keep our lives going, there is no way to avoid the troubling aspect of attempting to predict our financial needs one to two years in advance, i.e., setting up a workable, sufficient budget.  

Two years ago, I would have told Mama I had the numbers worked out. Now, not so much. Fortunately, there is no urgency. I can probably work as long as I desire with my current employer, but that completely aborts the timeline I had fixed just eighteen months ago. Hence, the issue with maintaining a proper, wholesome, Godly focus on our required activities, our planned travel, and those spontaneous moments when Mama and I tend to splurge in order to express our love for each other. So, to capture that expression of devotion for each other we feed our animals, we water our garden, we do our daily puzzles, we steal kisses through the day and evening, we go to church, we connect with our children and grandchildren, etc. to ensure that that love is communicated. Not a bad deal for either of us. Those are the moments when I feel I have a proper focus on life so I have become more focused on those moments.

One of the choices Mama and I must make is choosing between attending the National Conference for Color Street in August or traveling to Honduras later this year. Since we can only spend the money once, it is best to do so in the most productive way possible. Either trip will cost very nearly the same amount of money but trying to choose which of the two excursions would produce the best long-term outcomes is the challenge. One, the conference, is a complete unknown as to the foreseeable outcomes but comes highly recommended by those in the hierarchy of Mama’s team in Color Street. She has been assured that attending the event is “life changing”. But Mama and I do not drink, dance, or party as many of the attendees will, and we do not spend money to be seen spending money. In those types of settings, we appear to be cheap and stuffy. Plus, the general appeal of that sort of gathering does not appeal at all to me, but I will go if it is important to Mama. So, that choice is hers to make. It will be interesting to determine whether we will elect either trip. Perhaps, neither, but definitely not both.

Among the routines we keep in order to maintain the farm, I have redoubled my efforts to tend to our beehives. I began a series of treatments that must be repeated every five days for five consecutive treatments. The second of those treatments was done yesterday evening. It does not take long, but I have to be as specific as possible in the timing. I will fall short of the timing for the last of the five recommended treatments because of travel plans to meet our Honduran family in Florida. So far I have not seen a beneficial outcome to the treatments, but I will continue and test the results after the treatments are done.

As for next week, I cancelled the vacation I had requested. The lab setup at the museum in Glen Rose has not been competed so the simulator development I was to participate in will not happen – at least in the original timeframe. I have tentative permission to take the time off in the future, but I do not know when that opportunity will present itself.

I will be teaching a class tomorrow using presentations that were changed Monday. The changes are not huge, but they are significant in their specific focus of the information the changes cover. Monday of this week, I spent the day at the office participating on ensuring all those required changes were filtered into all the required files, spreadsheets and presentation formats mandated to ensure we track and communicate those updates to anyone that may be affected by those changes. It was a team effort with six of us competing the rework. Yesterday I got to present one of the new presentations and found three mistakes which I have since corrected. Tomorrow, I will present a second of the two updated presentations and will be able to see any needed corrections to our most recent rework.  Friday, I will communicate those changes and we should be up to date for a year or so.

Hopefully.