Changes

Last week was my first week of retirement.  Since Monday was Labor Day, it was only a four-day week, which is always good.  As it happened, I had engagements of one sort or another planned during each of the four days (ooh, I don't have to compete for those scarce evening haircut appointments anymore!!).  Thus I got out of bed each morning, albeit later than during my working days, got dressed, and actually got any number of things done most of the days.

Today is Wednesday of week two.  Monday went great because I had plans.  Plans for some errands, then plans for trying a new dinner recipe--an attempt to create a favorite restaurant meal featuring exotic new (to me) spices.  I did miss a massage appointment that had failed to register in my brain as being on that same Monday with those other things, but otherwise a perfectly executed Monday.

Other than that, week two features no daytime engagements.  I have things going on in the evenings, but my days are free.  So yesterday and today I have failed utterly at the very first task, getting out of bed.  I am having breakfast now at 11:27 am, which is about when I made it to breakfast yesterday.  Yesterday I managed to go for a walk, and that's it.  I excused this as a deserved "day off".

I thought about the realities of being retired for a year or more before I actually retired.  In the weeks prior to retiring I began making lists.  I have categories of daily activity: cleaning/gardening, working out, creative pursuits, volunteering, house projects.  Each category has bullets of all the things I haven't managed to do up to the present, but imagine I will do now.  What I discovered in the days of week one is that even if I assign an hour a day here, two hours there, I need roughly 18 wakeful pre-dinner hours per day to fit everything in.

So as of this morning, here are the things I have learned.  Before I go to bed each night, I need a plan for the next day to bribe/cajole myself out of bed.  Planning is not my favorite thing, but it looks like maybe one of my first tasks needs to be: plan the rest of the tasks.  It will help to schedule at least one fun thing each day (fortunately my bar for fun is pretty low).  I am considering getting myself a big bag of gummy bears and telling myself I can't have any unless I've finished doing something.  Ooh, first task: get bag of gummy bears...

A Good Day's Walk

Today was a puppy dog's dream day of camping. Well true, it did not begin with pancakes or even french toast, but there were a couple bites of blueberry muffin. Then we got in the truck and headed off to Lake Wissota State Park. We drove in, parked the truck, and started walking.

There were lots of trails, and they were largely vacant so the dogs got to run around with no leashes and sniff things at will. At one point we lost Tucker who must have seen a chipmunk or something and took off into the woods after it. We had to call him and wait a minute while he crashed his way back to us.

We are camping very close to this lake, but it is one of those lakes that is pretty much visible only by boat. The shoreline is fairly steep and quite wooded. We did find some stairs down to the lake itself, but the edge of the lake was muddy and rocky and fairly covered with algae. (Of course the dogs walked in it.)

The trails went through woods and also wildflower prairie. There were loads of mushrooms, lots of wildflowers, little Charlie Brown baby pine trees, and some really green groundcover that looked like moss with little juniper fronds. Some really pretty pine trees we are unfamiliar with.

We started out more in the woods and shade, but on our way back we were more in the sun and prairie. The dogs were pretty tired, and they started running ahead about 15 yards, finding a tree they could stand or lay in the shade of with their tongues hanging out, and wait for us to catch up. When we came alongside they would run ahead to scout out another patch of shade. We think they'll be comatose the rest of the day.

Of course Scarlett, who had found something noxious at home yesterday to roll in and was already fairly smelly, came across a dead skunk in the path and immediately rolled in it. So she was banished to the floor of the truck on the way home, which she would normally fight tooth and nail, but she just curled up on my bag and went to sleep instead. (I just looked up--both dogs are asleep under the picnic table and Tom is sleeping in his lawn chair!)

It turned out that we happened to visit a place that Tom has been before. We used to work with a guy from Eau Claire who fishes constantly, and Tom went fishing with him once. Yesterday when we drove to the campground, Tom recognized the lake and thought it was the same one they fished. Then today at the state park we drove down to the boat ramp and he said that was where they had put the boat in. That was a trip where they caught 50 crappies, so you can bet your sweet bippie that we'll be coming back with fishing licenses and a boat of some sort. (Mmm, crappie dinner...)

Old Dog, New Tricks

I don't mean to keep harping on this, but I turned 50 last October. Fifty is a weird age. I loosely belong to a group of people from our church, the Pacem Singers. Some of the Pacem Singers are also choir members, and some are not. We are available to sing for people who are homebound, or in a nursing home or the hospital, and we generally sing a selection of hymns and other favorites. Depending on the situation and people's availability, maybe just a few members go, or maybe a larger group goes--it is a different collection of folks each time. Many of these folks are, ahem, "mature". So this afternoon we're singing (at a nursing home just minutes from where I work), and the lady next to me commented that she was grateful I was there with my young voice. At first I didn't think much of her comment, because you spend the whole first part of your life being a younger person, and you get used to hearing such things. But after about a minute I thought, "Hey, wait a minute."

I keep being surprised by the things a person can learn essentially for the first time in middle age. This has occurred to me on a number of occasions, so I know there are several examples I could cite here to flesh this idea out, but since my brain is 50, I don't remember what they are. (Sorry.) These are things that could just have easily been learned earlier, but for one reason or another I just didn't learn them until now. (I just bought my first eyelash curler, but I'm not sure that counts.)

I am still trying, after all these years, to figure out how to get myself to clean house. I keep coming up with new strategies that don't work. I have improved over time, but there are still tasks that get put off for weeks or months that are really supposed to get done on a regular basis. Or seem like they would be simpler if done more regularly. Or at least would make daily life more pleasant if things were cleaned as opposed to not cleaned.

(I have considered that the most obvious strategy is to get a cleaning lady. We have had cleaning ladies at various points in the past, usually when the house is for sale, although for one stretch we had one just because, and that was great until she got pregnant and took a break. And in general, I would just as soon have a cleaning lady. That would just take some initiative and research and something like $200 a month. It's on my list of things to do, which should be enough said right there.)

My biggest bane is the bathrooms. I did discover the flylady (www.flylady.net) a few years back while I was unemployed. She advocates a daily "swish and swipe" of the bathroom counters and toilets, but I am going to venture a guess that the flylady does not live in a house with four bathrooms. I did try that for awhile, and while it was OK when I was unemployed and had more time in the mornings, when your counter and toilet are still practically spotless from yesterday, it's hard to convince yourself you really must do this extra step when you're running sort of late.

Our house was built in 1992, during the period in which the "master suite" was considered very important, and thus we have a gargantuan master bathroom complete with n-person whirlpool tub, shower, and his-and-hers vanities. So my most recently conceived cleaning strategy is that I ought to assign certain days of the week for certain parts of the bathroom. Wednesdays, I thought, I could clean the toilets. I'm thinking maybe Monday would be the shower, and Tuesday could be the floor (ugh), and Thursday or Friday could be the counters (this one is a putzy job because of all the stuff on the counters).

There is nothing particularly novel about this strategy, since for generations it seemed "Monday is wash day," but my generation seemed to think that all such folklore was outdated and silly, so some of us are only now rediscovering old wisdom. There's that saying about how those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it, or at least waste 50 years reinventing the wheel.

So, it's January, first week of the new year, and it's Wednesday. To start off, I have to be at the dentist at 8AM, which means I have to be up quite a bit earlier than I have been getting up lately. At least it is so cold out I don't have to walk the dogs. But we have choir practice tonight, so it's going to be a late one, and I usually am pretty much done by the time we get home at 10PM. (I could point out that the result of the dentist appointment is that next Wednesday I'm having my first root canal, but that isn't until 9AM, which ought to leave plenty of time to clean the toilets next Wednesday in the morning.)

Anyway we get home, and I let myself off the hook--you can just goof off. You don't have to clean the toilets. And that's just the trick! I thought, hey, I can do this, it will only take a few minutes. So, I not only cleaned the toilets, I did a couple counters and put a load of laundry in! (Now if I can only figure out which day I'm going to run the vacuum cleaner.)

I've also been opening the mail each day or two instead of letting it pile up. But check back with me in February and see how well my new strategy is holding up. No promises.

"America Spends a Lot on Defense"

In lieu of writing a post myself today, I'm just going to cut and paste one out of Matt Yglesias' blog from today. These are numbers that deserve more play:

Yesterday, congress appropriated a $680 billion for the Department of Defense in FY 2010. Chris Preble observes that, shockingly enough, this $680 billion isn’t even the whole bill:

The defense bill represents only part of our military spending. The appropriations bill moving through Congress governing veterans affairs, military construction and other agencies totals $133 billion, while the massive Department of Homeland Security budget weighs in at $42.8 billion. This comprises the visible balance of what Americans spend on our national security, loosely defined. Then there is the approximately $16 billion tucked away in the Energy Department’s budget, money dedicated to the care and maintenance of the country’s huge nuclear arsenal.

All told, every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on these programs and agencies next year. By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China’s per capita spending is less than $100.

Preble says that this enormous expenditure “flows directly from our foreign policy.” But it’s worth also saying that our foreign policy flows from the vast scope of our defense spending. My biggest concern about the war in Afghanistan isn’t overblown feasibility concerns, but the failure to take seriously David Obey’s point that we should put this in some kind of cost-benefit framework. Arne Duncan doesn’t have a $700 billion per year budget to play with as he tries to help American kids learn. Jay Rockefeller doesn’t get to say “I could make this health plan really good by kicking the ten year cost up to $7 trillion.” People are starving in Ethiopia for want of a fraction of the DOD’s daily budget in food aid.

Tidbits

I might really be done with the writing project now. Today I actually worked on something else for an hour and a half. I have a feeling I'm going to be working on the leftover grunt work for awhile, but I'm not sure I care. My sense of fulfillment and reward has been so ground down that I'd do pretty much anything if it wasn't writing that document.

I was sick yesterday--I'm not sure with what--but the upshot seems to be that my neck and back are all messed up again. My next visit with Sunshine may come sooner rather than later.

We went in on Saturday and put a down payment on the new kitchen countertops. New sink, new faucet, Tom's planning to tile the wall for the backsplash. He started working on running the gas line for the new stove. We also decided to get a new dishwasher "while we're at it" (they have to drill holes for it in the countertop), but we haven't picked that out yet. Pretty exciting. But we have to clean out the kitchen before they do it, and cover everything or put plastic over it because of the dust. Sounds like a big mess. Also an opportunity to toss stuff that is in the cupboards that we never use, but I know we won't do it. You never know when you might want that.

On a lighter note

Since I was grumpy in the last post, I'll try to be more upbeat. (That was Thursday night, the end of my week; today is the first day of a three-day weekend!)

Several nice things have happened lately. Last week I took my car in to have the interior "detailed." Now it is all clean and shiny inside. No more dog nose prints on the windows. The seats and carpets are clean. There is no dust, no schmutz, no ground cereal in every crevice. Even the scratches on the dash from Tucker's toenails seem much less noticeable. It's like having a new car! Which is nice for a little Corolla that just rolled over 100,000 miles (in less than five years!).

The other thing was that my daughters and son-in-law gave me a gift certificate for my birthday for massages at a local spa. I went in for the first one on Sunday afternoon. The gift was well-timed because my back had really been hurting lately. I've only ever had a few massages, and they were all the Swedish style. I've never had any Shiatsu, except perhaps for a 10-minute chair massage. This place does "fusion" massage, which means they combine the two styles. I'm no massage expert, but I believe Shiatsu is the sort of massage where they find the little balls of muscle tension and work them slowly toward a bone, where they press on them while you ponder just how long you can tolerate whatever level of pain this is called. My masseuse's name was Sunshine. She was quiet, a little shy, but she has arms and fingers of steel. The room was toasty warm and dark, and they had a CD of ocean waves playing. The massage was great, especially after it was over. Sunshine says I should not be feeling "discomfort" during the massage, so I guess next time I'll have to have her back off a bit, but I thought this was one of those no-pain-no-gain instances. Want to get my money's worth and all that. I could go for another one right about now.

Update: I wrote the first part of this post yesterday at the beauty salon while getting a perm. Then I published it hastily last night before bed, tired and with an aching head. Thus I forgot to mention the outcome of the massage. My neck, shoulders, and back, which had been a mat of knots and taut muscles, was all relaxed and supple again. For the next couple days I was afraid to make any quick movements, or sit funny, or sleep for fear I would screw it all back up again. It still feels pretty good, but I'm going to be looking forward to my next one in a few weeks.

Cold and Mostly Gloomy

You're not supposed to talk about the weather, I know, but I can't help it. I really like to talk about the weather. We lived in California for three years, and it was very difficult for me because there is really no weather to talk about. Which doesn't mean I didn't try, because talking about the weather is what I do. Understanding Midwestern transplants humored me, which was nice. (Our church had co-pastors, a couple, and she told me she'd lived there for 10 years and so far, every year, the weather had been atypical. Whatever the weather was doing, it was not normal. We were there during a dry patch. Tom's older brother was there earlier, during a wet patch.)

Anyway, I just did a little online research, to help bolster my grumblings about our recent weather. On September 24th our high temperature was 80. It was 72 on September 27 (that *was* 19 days ago). Since then, we've hit 60 twice (we're supposed to be nearly 60 on Sunday--I can't wait!--but you can't get your hopes up, they announce these expected highs just to mess with you). It was 41 at 1am this morning, and I can't report on yesterday because I can't find it on the internet, but except for 1am this morning and maybe yesterday we haven't been over 40 since last Thursday.

I've put away my shorts and gotten out my turtlenecks, sweaters, leather coat, and scarves. Our leaves never turned colors, except for a few drought-stressed trees. (It may not have been a good color year anyway, since we had long stretches of cool, or dry, or rain all summer.) The ash trees dumped thick piles of green leaves on the ground just in time to get snowed on, and the other trees are still wearing their leaves. I don't think I've ever seen a winter where the leaves are still on the trees. It will be interesting to see how that plays out--if we wind up with a mix of leaves and snow on the ground, or if there is no snow and we just wind up outside raking in 38-degree November weather. (There's something to look forward to.)

So, between the rain, gloom, cold weather, and shortening days, and the fact that I am still winding up the dreaded writing project at work, it is really feeling like winter. We really might be almost done with the document though. I have certainly given up all caring. I wrote one more new section today and gave it to my boss to "improve," and honestly I don't care what he does to it. Not in the slightest. As long as I can point our last batch of unassigned requirements to it and call it a day, I'm happy. I'm going to make one last pass making sure that "hidden paragraphs" wound up hidden or not hidden appropriately, and I'm good. I cannot be persuaded to care about anything else.