Came home, read and answered comments, watched quizzes on TV, at tea off my lap (which is a habit I keep meaning to break), was shouted at for snoring, read some blogs and now, have settled down to rite my nightly slice of life.
I have just over eighteen months until I retire. It is now becoming real. Julia has a couple of years longer so I may carry on for a little while after that. It is alarmingly close when I think of the work that needs doing on this house to make it look good enough to sell. Then there is finding another place and actually moving. It’s a long time since I last moved. I borrowed a truck from work, got a few friends together and moved a load of books and secondhand furniture 65 miles. It’s going to be a bigger job this time, and I can’t do my own lifting.
It’s time for a decision over what sort of retire I want to be. Do I want to be a genial old codger, or a miserable old curmudgeon? I think we already know the answer to that, so there’s no point wasting time on it.
A friend of mine once suggested that life in a hotel would be an ideal retirement lifestyle – no gardening, no decorating and regular meals. The problem, of course, is cost. And sharing with other people. And having nowhere to put a shed. I’d like a shed in retirement. It would be quite nice to live in a place in a city where you could have a roof garden and have a shed that looked out over a vast display of life. I think I may have left the arrangements a bit late for that. In my next life I will pay more attention to material things and spend less time daydreaming when I should be establishing a property empire. However, for now I’ll settle for a shed.