Even when one knows himself well enough to know what he will do, surprises still aren’t out of the question.

I had just such a surprise from myself last week when I decided to remove a closet in the hallway and add storage space to the bathroom. I had already removed one of the two doors in that room and needed to cover a place in the paneling, but that wasn’t good enough. I had to go ahead with a second remodel of the tiniest room in the house.

I took out the wall sconces that had provided light adequately for years and then installed a new medicine cabinet. The one that came with the house was plastic inside and tiny to boot. Of course, I installed the wall-to-wall version with lights on top and oak sides.

Then I went out to the hallway and removed the door from the linen closet, covered the opening and made that storage area open to the bathroom. After reinstalling the shelving, I replaced all the wall panels and opened the room up to be wallpapered. It is all finished now, my part done in the span of a single Saturday. I worked in the tiny little room from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. without stopping, with the exception of one 15-minute break to eat a nutritious lunch — frozen pizza and a leftover fried hot dog. I loved every moment of it. Now that the wallpapering is done, all that remains is to install a few pieces of baseboard and trim around the new shelving area (the one that used to be the linen closet).

As for the linen closet, it’s going where the furnace is now. The furnace in the house has been in place since I bought the place, but wasn’t vented through the roof. Therefore, I never even turned it on. After all, who needs a furnace when they have a wood stove and an automatic kerosene heater that do just fine?

I plan to remove it Wednesday evening when the fellow from the scrap yard comes over to pick up the two old oil tanks and some other mess that I need to get out of the yard.

So what if the living room still has two walls that need to be Sheetrocked? So what if it still needs to be primed and painted? Cold weather? I’m not scared — even if I do have four more loads of wood laying in the front yard waiting to be split and three or four more that still have yet to be cut. At least I do have about four loads that are ready to go into the stove.

With temperatures in the 60s for the past two weeks, who cares about firewood?

Such are the insensibilities of fall, a time when perfectly good leaves commit suicide en mass and thousands of flat-landers arrive to watch them bleed out and die.

I still have a building to finish, beehives to rework, the aforementioned firewood, painting and so on and so forth.

As I said before, fall is the time when a man feels guilty for all the things he should have gotten done in the summer. A time of battening down the hatches before the cold blasts of winter hiss north across the ridge.

My new old truck is in the shop at the junkyard, getting fitted with some new old parts. Necessary things like an exhaust manifold and air conditioning. “Air conditioning?” You ask. Well, it wouldn’t sell very well without it. A nice old truck should be completely functional and, since this this truck came equipped with it from the factory, air conditioning is no exception. Besides, while it was already at the junk yard, I might as well look for the parts now.

Not that I plan to use it or anything. I much prefer opening the windows and sticking an arm out for the weather we usually have around here. It’s not like we live in Winston-Salem or Charlotte.

Even so, sometimes I think about going to the dealership and just buying a brand new one to get away from the hassle of worrying and working on one all the time.

Then I think about it and realize that I’ve really got it made. I have no payments to deal with and for every day it is in the shop, that’s one less day that I have to be concerned about putting gas in it. I still have three vehicles, two of which are 10 years old or more, but I’m not complaining. I’ve always managed to get wherever I wanted to go. Every time I’ve ever purchased a new vehicle, I’ve lost bucket loads of cash on depreciation alone. I’ll leave the new vehicles to people who care what others think about them more than I do.

I wasn’t able to go over and see my father this past weekend, something that has become somewhat of a tradition on Sunday, because I have been suffering from some sort of a respiratory infection. With his breathing problems, a good dose of a chest cold is the last thing he needs. I have choked, chortled, blown, wiped and coughed up at least half my lungs, so I should be getting better soon. There’ll be nothing left to infect.

Other than missing church on Sunday to try and rest while the house was quiet, I haven’t missed any work despite how I have felt. In fact, I think that is the best way to beat an illness: to deny that it exists to the greatest extent possible. The last time I got a cold, I installed a new fence with a friend. This time, I remodeled the bathroom.

Maybe I’ll get sick again just in time to finish up the living room. I’m sniffling just thinking about it.

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