Retirement

My new office

I’ve been retired, more or less for three months now.  Hard to believe it’s been that long.  It’s time to try and record my thoughts.
Every day seems like a Saturday.  When I was still working that was the day I got things done or went flying.  Now I can fly if the weather is good or do all those things I had meant to do for the last few years. 

For example, we finally updated our wills.  Nothing much changed except we needed to have them done in Oregon and Sarah and Emily are now old enough to act as executors.  

Lots of yard work got done even with the Oregon winter rain. Lawn debris in the back yard was finally put in the container and is now gone.  Red tip fungus treatment applied.  Moss killer on the grass and even up on the roof.  I’m not sure I’ll go up on the roof again.  It’s probably not as dangerous as some of the launches I make with my paraglider but it is certainly a lot scarier.

I also managed to finally work out a retirement budget in detail.  Up to now it’s just been a very macro approach using one of the planning tools in Microsoft Money Plus.  Now we just need to keep to it.  We even managed to visit our Fidelity account executive for the first time. 

There are lots of things we spent money on that we now see we don’t really need.  The telephone land line is now gone.  We both have cell phones.  The premium digital cable channels the extra HD box are history.  There are more shows out there available on Netflix or Amazon prime than we could ever manage to watch. I do confess, though I will miss watching Bill Macy in “Shameless” on the Showtime channel.

We made a start at getting rid of “stuff”.  Emily helped but we have a long way to go.  Eventually we need to move to a smaller house and there is no way we need all the things we have accumulated in in the last 40 years.  We have things we paid to have moved to Portland from our parent’s houses that will probably just need to be donated.  The girls at this point are better than us on keeping their mementos to a minimum.   Several car loads went to the Salvation Army before the end of the year.  We need to do a lot more this coming year.

At first I was very busy taking care of Mary Beth after her knee replacement surgery.  After three weeks she was getting around pretty well.  Now after nearly three months she has most of her flexibility back but still needs to work on endurance.  I have washed a lot of dishes (really just loading and unloading the dishwasher).  That’s something I rarely did when I was working. 

Now I make breakfast every morning and go to the gym.  I’m proud of myself in that I have managed to go and do a short 40 minute workout every day except for Christmas and a couple of days I was out of town.  I need to because there are so many things to eat around the house that are too easy to get to.

The big question is am I really going to be 100 percent retired.  In January I worked three days consulting for one of my old suppliers.  I think there will be some opportunities to do more of that when I come back from Australia.  The question I need to answer is “ Do I really want to?”.  I retired at 63 to do as much paragliding as possible before I am too old for the sport.  Even being a supplier technical rep and coming in only occasionally means there will be good flying days that I will miss.  Stay tuned. 

Life (except for travel has settled into a routine.  Up at 6:15.  Fix breakfast.  Watch news and read E-mail until 7:45.  Go to the gym for the morning workout.  Shower and then check the weather all before 9:30.  Arrange for flying ride or pick one of the household tasks on the list to accomplish.  In the winter more likely than not  it is not a good day to fly.  Fix a sandwich or salad for lunch at 11:45.  Continue with the day’s tasks until 5:30 or 6. Mary Beth cooks dinner and we settle in for a movie or a TV show.  Generally I’m in bed by 10:00.

I miss all those friends from work and some of the challenges that came with the job-- But maybe not all that much.  There are plenty of other things to do out there in retirement—Even if I ever get tired of paragliding.