Keeping MJ busy

If retirement is when you quit working, we have way too many things for my husband to do for him to retire.
Officially he retired a couple years ago, but in reality, he makes the Energizer Bunny look like a slackard.
I alone have enough “honey dos” to keep him busy for a year. The difficulty is getting him to stay home long enough to work on my list. He spent most of May checking items of our daughter’s “Daddy Do” list.
Her list took seed after she and her husband chose their first house to buy. An overgrown yard testified to the time since the elderly couple had left. An interior done in earth tones screamed ‘out of date’ to the new home owners. The chocolate brown kitchen sink and carpet definitely had to go. Before the young couple closed on the house they began shopping for paint colors and carpet from the 21st century – and talking with my husband about laying ceramic floor tiles and laminated flooring.
He was not only eager to help, he had lots of advice on what to do. My daughter declined his input and plainly told him things would be done their way. He rolled his eyes, sighed and began working his way through her list: Lay the ceramic tile, put in the laminate flooring, install bathroom cabinets, put in a new counter-top and hook-up appliances. Friends and other family members helped with the fresh coat of paint and the installation of new ceiling fans.
Like the Energizer Bunny he never stops. He stayed up late and got up early and worked continually in-between. When I called to remind him of a granddaughter’s graduation in Indiana the last weekend of May, we quibbled about when he should take a break to go with me.
It took a conversation with a son to finalize his departure time. For weeks our son and his wife had filled boxes to load on a rental van to move to Michigan. The date for loading the van fell on the day we planned to begin our trek north to the graduation. I suggested hubby be available to help load with the proviso that we leave on time.
Because they had boxes of household goods lined up at the garage door waiting to be loaded, muscular friends had a good start on loading the truck, when we arrived.
We did not leave on time. First, my husband filled up the spare room on the truck. Then another son and his friends found more boxes that they moved out of the basement. We topped it all off with office equipment and papers before we left with our graduation clock ticking.
After three weeks of remodeling and an afternoon of loading boxes, my chauffeur drove about an hour, yawned, stopped, crawled in the back of our van and turned the driving over to me.
After a short night in a hotel, he took two or three more naps. By the time we pulled into northern Indiana, checked into a hotel and had changed clothes, we had a whole hour to wait for the band to play “Pomp and Circumstance.”
Afterwards, he sat on the hotel bed and sorted out pictures from a spring trip he took with five granddaughters and one son. I nodded sleepily at his lengthy description of the pictures and smiled in the background as he proudly hand-delivered them to the granddaughters after the graduate’s open house.
After a leisurely Sunday in St. Louis doing the tourist thing with our youngest son and his wife, we made it back to Arkansas on Monday in time for him to hook-up the ice maker on our daughter’s refrigerator and tell her she needed another part to connect the stove.
He came home long enough to unload before he left to tackle the rest of the “Daddy Dos” leaving me to dream of the day he retires and has lots of time to act like the Energizer Bunny and tackle my “Honey Do” list.