News that's endless

A few weeks into the new year -- a few weeks after the time I declared my retirement had actually begun -- I started a new file on my computer entitled "Books I Have Read in Retirement." My idea in making the list was that I would not only keep a list of the books but I would also make brief notes about the most important things I had learned from the books. I started it off with a book I had bought for my husband but which I had skimmed, so it didn't take long and there, I had one book on the list! Then, the list sat there unchanged until yesterday. It took me two months to read another book?? And I'm retired, with "reading" being a prime component of my intended daily schedule?

I AM reading. I'm just not doing very well on the books. I find I'm more inclined to take a moment for the quick stuff -- magazines and newspapers -- but often, "quick" turns into "prolonged." That's because I read most of them online, and news online is literally endless. In addition to the local paper, which sends me a daily digest by e-mail, I can read updated news, plus features, from the Washington Post and New York Times, and I have Slate and Politico and SkyGrid apps on my phone. Every time I check e-mail on my computer, the AOL homepage offers dozens of links. If I follow one of them, the page I end up on offers its own links, which leads to more links, and so on. I can read Time magazine on my phone and online I can read an unlimited number of magazine articles. Meanwhile, I've probably thought of something I need to Google or to research on Amazon.com or TripAdvisor, and I'm off to more links.There is always the lure of "just one more link, it'll only take a minute." At the end of a day I can have read thousands of words and never picked up a book.

But the realization it had taken me two months to complete a book startled me. I also came upon a file on my computer I had started in February called "Books I Want to Read in Retirement." I still want to read those books, and I still have a stack of books waiting that I optimistically bought last fall.

Keeping up with the news is important, and the short articles I read are informational and often fun. But  time must be budgeted even in retirement, it seems, so I am going to allocate my reading time and make sure some gets saved for books. I've already picked out the next one from my stack, and there are some fascinating ones beckoning. And I've got those two books on retirement that I've started on but got sidetracked from. I promised to pass along tips and ideas from them, and I will. I promise. Now that the "just one more link" lure has been identified, it can be conquered!

The value of disconnecting

Disconnecting is part of retirement. Last fall, I was a bit worried about whether I would be able to do that. After all, I had worried over the problems of the department for more than 20 years, and it had been my job to fix as many of them as possible. How was I going to manage to no longer care what happened?

My solution to that has been to remain fairly well uninformed. If I can't do anything about a problem anyway, it's better to not even know about it. I first learned this when my kids were at college. I was not of the helicopter generation of parents, and this was before cellphones and texting. My younger daughter went to college hundreds of miles away in another state and I generally found out about problems and crises after the fact. At 1 a.m. on a Friday night, I did not lie awake worrying about where she was. For all I knew, she was fast asleep in her dorm room. Worrying made no sense when I knew nothing at all. On the other hand, my older daughter lived at home while attending a professional school. When she still hadn't gotten home at 2 a.m. on a Friday night, I knew about it and I worried.

So when I planned my retirement, I determined that I would deliberately remain uninformed about goings-on in the department. For the most part, I have successfully done that. But I still have friends there so last week I went back to campus and visited with some of them. It was a great time, such fun to visit with them and catch up with what is going on with them personally. The students wanted to know my opinions about their work, and of course that is always a great ego-booster! And it was such fun seeing how well they were doing. One of the students, the one who had stood outside my office wailing about what she was going to do when that office was empty, had not only performed admirably in her job but had also applied to two hard-to-get-into grad schools and been accepted into both. For all of my friends, there may have been problems in the department that they were dealing with, but I think they sensed that I didn't want to go there.

So I came away with good warm feelings -- and no worries whatsoever.

Reminisce first, delete later

When I was working, I sometimes got behind on my computer maintenance. Even updates labeled "critical" sometimes got postponed a week, and if it wasn't labeled critical it probably got postponed indefinitely.

So it is nice that retirement allows me the time to keep my computer safer. I will admit, however, that when Google started posting notices about its new privacy policy and added in bold letters, "This is important," I always pushed on past to the page I wanted. Then on Feb. 29, truly last-minute, Twitter and Facebook and e-mail lit up with messages letting people know they should pay attention NOW!

The instructions said that after changing Google account settings to prevent further gathering of my computer usage, I should also delete the "history" files in each browser. I changed the Google setting promptly but I haven't deleted my Firefox history yet because it's been too interesting to prowl through. Have you scrolled through yours lately? If I don't have time for a diary posting on a given day, I should just copy and paste the history from Firefox because it will tell what I was interested in on that day.

My files for February show that I was researching maps and weather and points of interest in south Louisiana and east Texas for a three-day trip we just returned from. I knew I had looked at a lot of options, but the history file told me I had actually viewed hundreds of pages, about restaurants and points of interest I chose, and just as important, ones I didn't choose. I learned where to look to find bluebonnets blooming in Texas now (best spots are on the roadsides between Navasota and Conroe); I learned the history of the Galveston seawall; and I learned which coastal highways had been reopened and which had not, since Hurricane Ike struck in 2008. I also learned about the fires last year that devastated the Lost Pines in Bastrop State Park; and that you have to buy your tickets to the Blue Bell Creamery tours by the day before. Interspersed with the travel sites were recipe sites with "cilantro" in their name, because I had just bought a cilantro plant and wanted to know how to cook with it. I had followed some of our alums through their Facebook pages, looking at photos of their weddings and birthday parties and kids. And every day there were news stories, making it easy to connect all of this with what was going on in the world at the same time.

If you're retired and have time, take a walk down your memory lane and look up the things that were on your mind a month ago, or six or nine months ago. Back in September I was looking up how to adopt a baby African elephant as a birthday gift for our granddaughter, with a Harry Potter LEGO set as a real and present gift. At the same time I was viewing news items about Supreme Court cases and the Republican presidential race.

Since I don't want to cancel my Google account -- I'd have to cancel this blog, among other things -- I suppose I will have to clear my history at some point. But I'm going to finish the reminiscing before I do.

"Take time to stop and smell the roses"

We don't have roses at this time of year but the azaleas are popping out in all their once-a-year beauty and I have spent time photographing them. That's my excuse for not having a real blog post today. There's only a picture (worth a thousand words, right?). Thanks to this butterfly for stopping by at just the right time.

Flowers

At supper last night we were having trouble finding space on the table for the supper dishes because of the array of fresh flowers on the table. There were camellias -- white, pink, and red; there were azaleas -- fuchsia and purple; and there were little white wildflowers my grandson had picked for me. I've posted a picture of them so you can see. The three colors of camellias are all from the same bush. The fuchsia azaleas are from a dwarf variety; the purple ones are from the 10-foot-tall Formosas. While the camellias are some of the last ones we'll get this season, the azalea blooms are just starting to peek out along the ground. Branches cut and brought inside will burst into bloom within a day.

One of the great things about retirement is that there is more time for flowers. I can pick bunches of them, set them up in vases, and then just look at them, following some of them through their life cycle from bud to bloom to decay. Camellia blooms fall intact when they get tired hanging on; so do azalea blooms, but since they are smaller it's less impressive. The little white wildflowers will shrivel on the stem. When it's magnolia season I'll post photos of big white magnolia blooms turning gorgeous shades of tan as they age.

It's time now to go take a walk and pick more azaleas, and camellias if we can still find them. I'll post some more photos here for you.

Grandkids

 A month or so ago I described a "sort of structure to aim for" each day of my new retired life: Exercising, unpacking and rearranging, learning, maintenance, and a healthy dose of reading. I'm doing somewhat well in my daily attempts to keep up with those activities, but today--- well, today, I did hardly any of them. We had the grandkids.

How is it that grandkids can be so all-engrossing? After all, they are 8 and 11, capable of playing by themselves. There is one key reason that makes all the difference. They are old enough to play by themselves -- but they don't want to. They love to play Monopoly and they beg us to play with them. They call my iPhone from upstairs so they can Facetime with me. They find a hilarious video and call us in to watch it with them.

We have little time to ourselves when they are here, but that's okay. This can't last. Soon they will start pulling away from their family and doing more on their own. Maybe they won't want to come here during school vacations anymore. They'll be moving toward independence, and that's what they are supposed to do. So for now we play Monopoly for hours with them, we tramp through muddy ditches with them trailed by a herd of neighborhood cats, and we read books to them ensconced in their blanket fort. The day passes with little exercising, maintenance, learning, or any of the other things on my list, but those can wait. This is a good day!

Hobbies, more about

In my last post I wrote about Sarah Ban Breathnach's book Simple Abundance and what she said about hobbies. One other thing she said about hobbies made me grab my pen and start underlining. "A hobby is a wonderful way to start freeing ourselves creatively," she wrote. "That's because no one expects us to be perfect at a hobby. Hobbies allow us to experiment, to dabble with the paint, the poem, the pot, the plié."



I underlined it because it seemed to be a point I needed to give some thought to. I have started, or am thinking of starting, some hobby projects that will use my media skills. After all, these are things I had been wanting to do but never could find the time for. Given that I now have the time and wherewithal to do some projects, they ought to end up being pretty impressive, right?  It seems only logical. But I have started a photography project that will involve lots and lots of photographs over a year's time and I really am not sure what I am going to do with all the photos once I have them. The project might end up with something to show for all the time and effort, and it might not. My original idea was to just try it and see. But I have been dithering about whether I should even continue with it, given the little voice in the back of my head that says, "This should be good! What will people think if it's not?"



That's why Sarah Ban Breathnach's reminder is welcome -- that hobbies are play, with no expectation, from inside or outside, of perfection.



At work I was always proving myself. That's what one does at work. It can be hard to break that habit, to realize that I don't have to prove my skills anymore. I can do an experiment just because it looks like fun. If nothing comes of it, at least I had fun. Or, some piece of the experiment might turn out to be a delightful surprise -- but it doesn't have to.
 

As I said, I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with the photographs I'm taking. For now, I think I will just post a few here. They are not "Wow, look at these" photos that display my photographic expertise. I just had fun taking them or Photoshopping them. Sometime in 2013 we'll find out if this turns into anything!

About hobbies

As part of my rethinking of our storage system, I'm moving some of my books around. In the process I'm discovering books I had forgotten about, so of course I have to peek inside them. One such book was Simple Abundance, by Sarah Ban Breathnach. I peeked into the middle, as I often do with books. She was writing about hobbies: what they might be and where they might fit into our lives. I set the book aside for immediate perusing, because hobbies are of course on my new daily to-do list.

I already have several hobbies, but I am open to new ones so was intrigued by her set of questions designed to help people who don't already have hobbies find some. First, she said to recall your favorite childhood game or the best time you ever had as a youngster. Then brainstorm questions like "If you could instantly acquire three additional skills, what would they be?" Or "What three outrageous things would you try if no one knew about it?" You might consider the three vacations you would take if all expenses were paid. Might you include something like an archaeological dig?

"There's a fabulous world out there just waiting to be explored," she wrote. "We simply have to be willing to experiment."  I translated this as encouragement to think bigger. First, we home in on activities that truly fit US, and then we free ourselves to think adventurously, to go beyond the safe or time-constricted limits that perhaps confined us during our busy working days.

That's certainly worth mulling over -- or, as Ban Breathnach called it, "moodling." I can moodle, you can moodle, and what will we come up with?

 

A lick and a promise

I saw a retired friend tonight who commented on the fact that I had posted few intriguing photos lately on my Facebook page. I told her I guessed retirement was just keeping me too busy. She said to me what is becoming a familiar refrain: "We are so busy now (that we're retired); it makes you wonder how we ever managed before!"

Retired people provide various explanations for this common phenomenon; one is from Andrei Codrescu, whom I quoted last fall: "Hundreds of jobs that you never did when you had a more or less regular job are waiting patiently for you to retire. And the minute you do, they pounce on you." He also said a job is like a bucketful of excuses, and when you retire you no longer have that bucket.

While what he said is true, I've come up with another explanation.

When I was working, I gave a dreadful number of things a lick and a promise. Correspondence, filing, keeping up friendships, household jobs, and so many other things. I crossed them off my To-Do list as "Done," but they weren't.

Now, my list says I'm doing the same tasks as before, but I'm taking a lot longer to do them. That's not a bad thing.

In my closet, I'm not just sticking things on shelves; I'm rethinking our storage system so that there's a logic behind where things are put. Instead of crossing lost friends off my Christmas card list, I tracked down some of them and wrote them letters. I finally got rid of the dinnerware my husband hated and bought an attractive, functional set.

It is true that some tasks are still getting a lick and a promise (filing!). Some tasks (not filing!) deserve only a lick and a promise. But many tasks are worthy of much more than I have given them for the past twenty years. So I'm trying to do that, and the result is that I look busy even though I haven't added a single task to my list. But that's not bad! When I eventually choose new activities, when I consider adding things to my schedule, I want to factor in this good aspect of retirement.

"Rest" experiment update

Here's an update on the "rest" theory:

On January 13 I posted that I was ailing and was trying out the philosophy that resting when ill is a valid use of time, especially in retirement, when there's lots of time, right? I slept longer, drank hot tea, ate chicken soup, and generally lounged around on a lazy schedule. I was sure I would chase that cold away in a week or less.

A full two weeks later, the cold is almost, but not quite, gone. Two weeks. So much for the idea that rest saves me sick time.

A friend of mine, a pressured professional who sometimes gets sick but who almost never takes a sick day, told me his philosophy of illness: "When germs are chasing me, I try to run as fast as possible so they can't catch me." That's close to how I used to do things when working, and colds, which occurred rarely, almost never lasted more than 10 days.

I might give the rest experiment one more try the next time I come down with something, but so far it looks like the "Run so the germs can't catch you" model may be the one to stay with.