How're You Enjoying Retirement?

First, I have an exciting announcement! This year I will be publishing two children’s books--The Parasaurolophus Pizza Parlor and The Christmas Mummy. You can read about them at my new website: LynnWardBooks.com.

I addition, in a few weeks I’m going to stop posting my blog at WordPress. Instead, it will be on my website, on my Facebook page: Facebook.com/oma.spillsbeans, and Twitter: @OmaSpills. I hope you’ll stay with me!

Retirement

Fortunately, my husband and I hear this question less often. We rarely run into people who haven’t asked that question already. Or several times because they think it’s funny.

It’s been three years since he retired from a full-time job with a lot of traveling. So, we are enjoying the change of activities. But it’s nothing like we expected. We expected a little free time that we could use to explore new activities. Relax. Possibly even get bored.

Yes, I often heard retirees say, “I don’t know how I found time to work!” But it’s one of those things you don’t understand until it’s happened to you.

We have more time to spend with our grandkids, which is wonderful.

But we haven’t had time to travel and the projects around the house and yard are never done, no matter how much time we invest in them.

Yesterday we were huddled over the calendar where we track everything from our personal and joint activities and keep track of our kids’ schedules. We decided that that calendar needs to be seriously bigger.

My husband is teaching one week a month and those classes are scheduled six months to a full year in advance. This drives me crazy. Too much changes too quickly to block out a chunk of time that far ahead. Unless it’s a trip to Europe. He made a spread sheet to track his schedule for this year and that somehow feels like over-kill. But it’s useful.

On my side, once we decided to self-publish my books, I’ve been writing and doing social media more than ever. Coordinating with my illustrator and web designer is a time-consuming adventure that I hadn’t anticipated.

Are we enjoying retirement? Yes. Because we spend more time on things we choose to do.

But it’s not the “watching the sunset on an island beach” retirement we imagined. We don’t even watch the sunset from our deck.

Yet.