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.

So how's it going?

The business manager I used to work with wrote me a couple of days ago and asked, "So what have you been doing?" I knew she was really asking, "So has it turned out so far like you wanted?" Her question made me stop to assess.

She knew I had been worried about piddling. Well, yes, I piddle. I try to catch myself at it, hence a lecture to self like, "Hey! You've just read two pages of TripAdvisor reviews on that restaurant; you don't need to read two more. That's inertia." Or piddling.

On the other hand, I"ve accomplished some things! We had a great vacation on a white-sand Florida beach. Right now we're on another trip, 200 miles away in another part of the state. Earlier this week I filled my car with surplus household equipment I had painstakingly sorted out, and delivered it to the local Goodwill store. I have started reading some of my set-aside books (take note, Andrei Codrescu!) and have started a photography project. I have made a little progress with Spanish (I can ask, "Puedo pagar de targeta de credito?" and I can count from one to twenty). The pumpkin shrimp soup recipe I tried got a thumbs down but all the new recipes I tried using cilantro got a thumbs up. And I do time on the treadmill nearly every day while watching delightful ten- and twenty-year-old shows of "West Wing" and "Law & Order."

That's not nearly the full vision of what I hope to do in retirement, but it's certainly a start. So, dear Grace, there's your answer. So far, so good!

On learning

Learning! I have just as much learning to do now as when I was working all the time.

The amount that I have to learn hit me again today, as I encountered yet one more thing to add to my “Need to learn soon” list. We’re planning a trip and I want to take my husband’s camcorder, which I have not used in years mostly because it refuses to play nice with my Mac. I can edit the video but I’ll need to re-learn how. It would also be nice to take along the audio recorder I bought last fall, which -- thanks to the busy-ness of the days since then -- I haven’t learned how to use yet. And once I get video and audio, I’ll need to relearn iMovie.  I knew an early version pretty well, but I have a new computer with the latest version and everything is different.

I also need to speed up my Spanish learning, which is proving more challenging than I thought. (When I try to call a Spanish phrase to mind, the French one comes instead.) And Spanish seems as frustratingly non-standard as English is. If only it were like amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant, I could remember it better.

Less urgent but still nagging at me is the recognition I must learn more about Photoshop. Every time I tackle a photo of a grandkid or a beautiful flower, I need to blur or smudge or layer something and too often the result looks amateurish. I’ve got lots of resources to use for learning – and I have lots of time now, right?

Waiting patiently are the Great Courses I ordered from The Teaching Company. One is about jazz, one is about geology, and one is about meteorology. I have been curious about the weather patterns around our house, which have changed in the past decade, diverting most heavy rainfall. Half the time the radar shows the rains swerving north and northwest of us; many other times it shows the rains approaching, then dividing, each fork neatly swinging around our area and rejoining on the other side. It’s baffling. It’s probably a fantasy that I can learn enough from a Great Course on meteorology to explain this phenomenon but I thought I could try.

That’s not even a complete list of the things I plan to learn soon, but it’s a start. I need now to go do a review of the Spanish flashcards I have posted around the house. Chao.

.

Hope?

Last fall before I started this blog, I wrote this:

"When I am retired, I am going to have all my medical, insurance, and financial documents all stored away in perfect order, and I am going to understand all of them. Am I setting myself up for disappointment?"

After a number of weeks of retirement -- in which I have made progress in some areas but none in this -- I am wondering whether any retiree who did not have all their medical, insurance, and financial documents all organized and comprehended prior to retirement has actually gotten all that under control once they had adequate time? Is there hope?

Rest, or not?

Ah, the life of the retired person who's sick. A couple of days ago I came down with a bad cold. So last night I went to bed really early, and today I'm drinking hot tea, eating chicken soup, and just sitting here. My Former Self would have worked late last night, taken cold medicines this morning just like on the ads, and headed off to the office hoping that work would take my mind off the cold miseries.

My Retired Self is feeling a tad lazy just now, though. Granted, I'm doing what doctors recommend, but isn't that a bit wimpy? I soldiered through before and lived to tell about it; why not now? Is sitting here with a latte and my feet up the best thing I should be doing right now?

Here's an item to add to my Retirement To-Do list: "Persuade myself that rest is a legitimate and good use of time." I'm resting, for a day at least, but still working on the guilt.

Preserving a sense of competence

I've started reading Mary Lloyd's book, SuperCharged Retirement, and think it may have enough good content to make it worth giving a sort of progressive book review as I work through the book.

At first I started writing today about what Lloyd had to say on "sorting" -- our need to know what it is we don't want to do, and the need to say No when someone offers an activity in that category. While that's important, there didn't seem to be a lot to say about that.

So I moved on, to where Lloyd suggests we retirees consider whether we need to preserve a sense of competence. She described her experience: "Many of the things that confirmed my value for me internally were in the work setting. There, I was perceived as competent and a resource to others. There, I got to solve complex problems as part of a team of intelligent, fun, enthusiastic peers. There, I knew how to do what needed to be done and got regular feedback … that I was doing it well…. [After leaving], before very long I totally lost my sense of competence in terms of what I thought of myself."

Lloyd said that for her, it was absolutely critical that she find things to do that required what she considered "important" skills. She considered herself competent at cooking and other homemaking skills but for her, excellence there was not sufficient. She finally determined that she would become a writer, a good writer. Getting published gave her a sense of competence that she valued.

This problem will not necessarily present itself to every retiree. However, it has been in the back of my mind because I was in a similar situation some years back. I was a stay-at-home mom when my daughters were preschoolers. I became skilled at all sorts of homemaking skills: not only cooking and baking but also canning, freezing, and preserving food from the garden, sewing and crafts. (Well, with the crafts maybe I never got actually skilled, but I tried.) I had a freezer full of homegrown food; I had shelves full of canned pumpkin and homemade pickles, jellies, and ketchup; and my daughter had a full Laura Ingalls Wilder costume complete with bonnet for Halloween dressup. My family duly appreciated all this. But I never felt really competent until I got into the workforce.

It does not necessarily follow that I will need to return to the workforce now in order to preserve a sense of competence. When I began to consider retirement, my assumption was that I would be able to say "been there, done that." During those long years of work, I proved I could solve complex problems and be a resource to others and I do not necessarily need to continue doing that forever.

Whether that assumption is valid remains to be seen. I haven't been retired very long yet!

Books on retirement

I'm going to make sure that those gloriously empty days of January offer some pleasant hours for reading, and near the top of my stack are the two books I bought last fall about retirement. I've haven't had much time so far to get into them deeply, but I think I will like both of them. One is What Color Is your Parachute? For Retirement, by John E. Nelson and Richard N. Bolles. Back in the early 80s I had bought an book by Bolles entitled simply What Color Is Your Parachute? I found it tremendously helpful. Aimed at people who were considering a career change, it included questions and and instructions for making lists, to help the reader explore their skills and talents and preferences. Although my usual tendency in a book like this is to read the questions but not to put much effort into answering them, with this book I did them all. I still remember many of the questions. "What have you taught yourself how to do in the past year?" was one. I remember being surprised, once I thought about it, that I had actually learned how to do a number of things on my own. "What do people tell you that you are good at?" was another, and "In your perfect job, what sort of tasks would you have to do very seldom?" was another. A final assignment was to write out the specifics of my dream job: What would be the location, the work schedule, the type of supervision, the main duties, the duties that would be required seldom or never, the remuneration, and so forth. After doing all of that, I went out and found a job that was pretty close to the dream job I'd described.

So when I discovered there was a retirement version of the book with Bolles' name on it, I bought it instantly. Bolles seems to have moved on, however, and Nelson is the main writer of this version. Bolles wrote the introduction and said his contribution is "to frame some of the questions and challenges during this period." I hope that Nelson has carried on in the same spirit and that this book will be as valuable to me as the earlier one. Stay tuned and I'll share as I get time to read it.

The other book I bought is called Super-Charged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love, by Mary Lloyd. It also contains questions and instructions for lists. I've done some flipping through the pages and I think I'm going to find it quite valuable, maybe even more so than Parachute. I'll dig into it soon and start passing on whatever nuggets I find.

Finally . . .

Maybe tomorrow is when my retirement actually truly starts.

Finishing up at the office last Dec. 9 simply meant I could plunge headlong into a serious backlog of holiday preparations. In addition, we've brought the grandkids over several times during the holidays for long visits while their parents worked. Tomorrow, their school resumes for the spring semester. I returned them home tonight. Finally, tomorrow there will be no holiday deadlines to meet, no company coming, no kids to watch, no pies to bake. Nothing much coming up next week either. There are a few small things on the calendar and a few must-do items hanging over my head, but for the first time since I finished up my job, the days stretch out before me, gloriously empty. Perhaps my "sabbatical," in the words of my West Coast friend, is finally beginning.

Pluses and minuses redux

I have posted before about the pluses and minuses of retirement. Today the plus is that it's a Wednesday morning and I'm sitting in my living room with my grandson nestled up against me. But a minus has cropped up too.

For more than 15 years -- the entire length of time I have owned my own laptop -- a technical wizard with pertinent advice has been just around the corner. Because I logged hundreds of hours on job-related tasks on each of my personal laptops, the department's computer support wizard was always ready to help solve my problems. I know how to do basic troubleshooting, but when the problems proved intractable, advice was readily available.

Today my laptop is displaying repeated alerts that I ejected an external hard drive improperly. Problem is, I did not eject the drive; it remains securely moored in the port, even though it won't show up on my desktop. In other words, my computer is wacky. Basic troubleshooting and tips from a Google search have failed to solve the problem. A month ago I would have taken my laptop in to see the wizard, and a few minutes later I would have emerged with a fully functional laptop.

Today, I'm retired. I no longer have access to the wizard. My drive won't mount and I'm out of ideas.

So the balance is that I hug the grandson while spending hours on support sites……