My favorite job so far – Retirement Confidential

I’m coming up on my eight-year retirement anniversary. Knowing what I know now, would I do anything different?

Hard to say. What I know now isn’t any better than what I knew then. I just have more time to ruminate on it. Occasionally I wonder if I have it in me to work again. Part of me says yes. I’m certainly capable, and I wouldn’t mind putting on real clothes, but I don’t see how I could sustain my lifestyle.

Unless I have a tee time, it takes me a couple of hours to get going in the morning. I revel in the slow start. Breakfast, coffee, news, constitutionals, puzzles. Of course, it takes time to get my blood pressure back to normal after reading the paper, so there’s that.

Although I was minimally fit during my working years, I’m in way better shape now. But it’s a commitment, and I find it easier to stick with the program when I don’t have to make decisions that interfere with happy hour.

I try to get all my exercise in before lunch because … well, lunch.

Dinner is just one more meal away. It creeps up fast, and you’ve got to be ready. I like to be involved in that whole business. I suppose my husband, Dale, could go back to being the primary for meal planning, but the older he gets, the more he eats like a 10-year-old boy. The man needs supervision.

It’s true I’ve gotten a little older in eight years. Haven’t we all? It now takes a village to maintain my aesthetic standards. Facials, massages, pedicures, haircuts. While I would have benefitted from all that when I was working … looking sharp for all those high-level personal interactions … there was no time for such indulgences. In my career, they didn’t hand out prizes for most chilled.

Now I have the time, except these days I’m talking to the cat. And seriously, he’s not interested in anything I have to say. Unless I’m coated in kibble, I don’t think he cares what I look like. It’s just me and the mirror. My steady date.

Finally, there’s the problem of my inside voice. As it is with so many retirees, what used to be my inside voice is now my outside voice, and it does not always reveal my best side. However, I think it’s like toothpaste. No going back.

All in all, I don’t see how it would be possible to go back to work. Which means I will continue to focus on the simple pleasures of retirement, which is my favorite job so far.

In other news, it turns out the goo in my car was probably my fault. The dude at the dealership said I must have spilled a soda down into the console. I said I haven’t had a soda in 20 years, but I did not mention my PBJ burritos. Apparently, the culprit was marionberry jam. That will teach me for being a food snob. Grape jelly wouldn’t pull a stunt like that.

Messy eating cost me $200. They had to clean it all up and replace a switch, because the goo apparently went everywhere. No more eating in the car. And there you have it, another pro tip from Retirement Confidential.

I will leave you with Number 45. The wood was tough to burn, and I got fed up with it. By coincidence, it occurred to me that pallet scraps are probably treated with chemicals and shouldn’t be burned anyway. I wear a mask, but still.

While I found the rustic pallets charming, and I liked the idea of transforming them into something unique, they can be frustrating to burn when I’m working on small, detailed designs. My skills have improved over the past few years, and better wood will give me an opportunity to try new things.

So, yay. Farewell my pallet friends. You had a good run.