The To-Do List

Last Monday marked the end of a very uncomfortable week at our home. On the 4th of July our central air conditioner broke, leaving us exposed to the oppressive summer heat. It was a failed weld on the heat exchanger that allowed all the Freon to escape. The part was still under warranty, but a replacement had to be sent from the warehouse and could not be installed until Monday. The house is cool now and everything is back to normal.

Yesterday I was able to access my AP Chemistry scores from the College Board website. Almost all of my students did quite well. Those who did not achieve as I would have liked were no surprise. On a national basis, somewhere between 50 and 60% of students taking the exam get a high enough grade to receive some kind of college credit for taking the class. In my two classes almost 80% scored this well. Every year I invite all my students who score well enough to receive college credit out to dinner sometime during the next school year. There will be 30 students who qualify from this year’s class. Last year 15 out of 24 students who qualified went to dinner with my wife and I in March. I would like to have the dinner earlier this year, maybe as part of the homecoming week celebration in September.

Tomorrow, a new garage door is being installed. I have spent the last three days cleaning out the garage of all the accumulated junk so the door can be installed. Most of the junk in the garage consisted of left over materials from our home remodeling; including 17 interior doors that were replaced. The old doors were solid wood with an oak veneer. They proved too difficult to refinish and we ended up replacing all of them instead. I hate throwing anything away, so they were stored in the garage in the hopes of finding some use for them. I wanted to cut them in half and use them for wainscoting in the finished basement, but my wife said no. I ended up advertising them on Craig’s List and found someone who wanted them to build a privacy fence in his back yard. I kept one, along with the two parts to an old vanity to make a new workbench. After the doors were removed I purged four garbage cans of junk and useless building materials leaving a clean, organized, and almost empty garage. With the instillation of the new garage door tomorrow most of my summer projects will be complete.

My summer routine has slowly evolved. I get up at seven and have coffee and something to eat; on the deck if the weather permits. I work on school related things for next year for about one to two hours on my laptop—on the deck as well—then go for my daily bike ride. When I return I check my blood sugar, eat lunch, and shower. The rest of the afternoon I work on my summer to-do list until dinner. Once a week, usually on Monday, I go out for breakfast, go to school, work for several hours, then run errands. On those days I usually skip the bike ride. My next home project will be to order some mulch and spread it around where needed in the yard, and then make some needed repairs on the storage shed. If all goes well and my wife doesn’t add any new jobs to my list, I should have two or three weeks of complete rest before the grind of a new school year begins.