Practice

Independence Day has just passed. I took extra days on either end of the holiday weekend and made a five day vacation out of it. It has been a nice break and now it’s almost over; back to work.

I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, and I’ve not made any point to mention it, but I’ve been managing my time off such as to increase the occurrence of long weekends like this. I’m ‘practicing’. I’m practicing for that time, in the reasonable future, when I will retire. Now, you may be asking for what there is to practice. Well, as I get closer to the prize I gain more and more friends who have reached retirement. What I have observed from talking with these friends and acquaintances is that, to some degree, preparation and planning are required in order to successfully transition from working stiff to retired curmudgeon.

Planning, it’s not the obvious things. When one says their planning for retirement the natural inclination is to think 401K, 503B, Roth IRA and etcetera. Well, that is an important part. However, by this stage of the game, my stage, one had better be well done with that and merely managing its growth. No, I’m talking about what my day-to-day will be like.

For what will turn out to be about 35 years my day-to-day has been largely determined by someone else, and that’s fine. That’s what I signed up for. However, somewhere after 55 and before 58 I will own my own time (well, most, I’m sure the Lovely Gail has plans to secure some of that). So, on these extended weekends and on days after work, I have been exploring interests that heretofore have been shelved for lack of time. Writing these introspective essays is fun, but one needs to be in the right frame of mind to do it. And, I’m surprisingly good at fixing things that one might otherwise throw out and replace. Not that this saves us any significant money, it’s just fun to see if I can reverse engineer it and effect a repair. I am also considering metal work, small, intricate sheet metal boxes. This would be less of utility and more an artistic/creative thing.



This activity has a lot of potential. A neighbor, Eileen, and I tasting wine a while back at the Kief-Joshua vineyards near Elgin, AZ. Yes, they can actually grow grapes and make wine in Arizona.



Preparation: ready, set, relax! Retirement, by definition, means a more relaxed pace, at least initially. I believe I’m up for it. I suspect I will eventually volunteer my time some place. Currently I sit on the HOA Board of Directors and even with the politics and all that other human interaction stuff, I enjoy it. There are hundreds of organizations here in the valley that can utilize what I can bring, in terms of experience, and that kind of work can keep the grey matter happy with the obvious challenges. Too much relaxation makes me fidgety, or at least my brain fidgety. More book reading, for pleasure, is very relaxing. And, as I alluded to earlier, the Lovely Gail will no doubt insure I do not relax to the degree that I get flabby and soft. As she readily points out, there are always rocks to move.

So, on this last day of my very enjoyable five day weekend, just as my household omnipresence is obviously starting to tax the Lovely Gail’s patience, I look forward to my next ‘practice session’. I think she views these as a practice also (I hope), and the saving grace is that she knows there’s still time to adjust, slowly, to a 24x7x365 Don. I’m headed out the garage now to tear the cover off my $2,000 audiophile CD player and see if I can fix a loose line-level RCA out. Wish me luck!

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