Blog 3446 – 04.10.2025

Things To Do List

Some people my age (almost seventy-five) and older are already working on their “Bucket List” things they hope to do before they “kick the bucket.” But, not me I still am adding to my To Do List daily and ticking things off that help me to reach this or that goal. Goals are important to help us feel that our lives are important. For many retirement is the dead end to a career or job that gave their lives meaning and purpose, but for others, myself included, retirement from our day job has only freed us to occupy ourselves doing what we really always wanted to do.

I am fortunate to have discovered what that was before I retired. I had a lot of time to think about it on my last job being a traveling third party welding and utility inspector for oil and gas companies surveilling construction crews installing oil and gas pipelines. It was interesting working that required me to travel and see much of the country even including a couple of overseas assignments, one four week gig in Ravena, Italy and another seven week stint in Aberdeen, Scotland.

What I learned from all that traveling was that I want to spend as much of the life that I have left doing just that – seeing places that I have never been, re-visiting many places that I have already been, meeting new people, and re-visiting family a friends that I have met along the way.

I had hoped to start doing that with my wife when I retired three years ago last December, but as fate would have it, barely a month and a half later after but one week long road trip to South Carolina to visit with her family and bring her mother back to Houston to take turns staying with us and her youngest daughter Sarah, who has a lovely home north of Houston in Spring, my wife Linda experienced a terrible, painful, and scarring bout of shingles. That was just a couple of weeks after we got back to Texas and after finishing up a ten day regimen of powerful antibiotics she had a mental episode that resulted in a week long stay at a local hospital, a two week stint in a Behavioral Hospital, and another week in another hospital for a second evaluation none of which gave us a lot of answers or helped us to really deal with the changes in her mental state or behavior.

The bottom line is that our travel plans have basically been put on hold and the furthest we have ventured from home in the last three years together is to the Houston suburbs of Spring, to see Sarah and Mom, and to Kingwood to visit my son Jay, his wife Lauren, and our amazing twenty-month old granddaughter, Emma Grace. We have on a couple of occasions made the forty or so mile drive to Galveston to see the beach. Linda has always been a beach bunny and still loves to see the sun, the sand, and the waves licking the beach.

I am still hoping to convince my wife to make a days long road trip to see her older sister Esther who lives in Indianapolis next month. Esther and her husband David drove up to Lafayette, Indiana last month and picked up a 20’ pull behind RV Camper trailer that I recently purchased from the daughter of a friend that I had met in Lafayette while working there ten years ago, and pulled it to their house in Indy. The trailer is about the same size and is similarly equipped and laid out as the I lived in while working on the road. My old one was damaged while pulling it back from my last six month work assignment in Nebraska before I retired just before Christmas in 2021. I retired the old trailer then, hoping to replace it, but those plans too were put on hold.

Since November I have had a place to park my used but new to me camper. I bought it about the same time that I bought 15.55 acres of timber, recreational (hunting and fishing) property one mile south of the very small East Texas town of Bon Wier. My son had already purchased 60 acres there and was hoping to acquire forty acres more adjoining his to have a total of one hundred acres. Since he had agreed to let me park a camper on his property and live there someday I asked if I could help him make his dream of a hundred acres wood come true. I bought the 15 plus acres in November and another 15.55 next to it last month so now Jay’s Hundred Acre Wood is only short by about 8.5 acres. He plans to talk his southern neighbor Vincent into selling him a small piece of his property so they can share Vincent’s access road back into their adjourning properties. My son is also quite adept at making and following through with plans and has and maintains a pretty extensive Things To Do list. I wonder where he gets that from?

One of my favorite authors and philosophers, Mark Twain, once spoke of the importance keeping a few bad habits on one’s To Do List. He said a few bad habit might come in handy when bargaining with God. You know as in, “If you spare me this time and let me live, I will give up smoking, drinking, or some other vice not so “nice.”

Your friend, fellow traveler, and very flawed individual with much yet to do,

David James White