Fiction/Humor Memoir Retirement

Washing Windows

The phrase “I don’t do windows” is well entrenched in Americana whether you consider it just a saying or an outright meme. The etymology of the phrase is cloudy, with most people wanting to attribute it to the sitcom maids of the 60’s and 70’s like Hazel or Florence (from the Jeffersons), but some recognizing that it goes back into the movies of the 30’s and 40’s as well. It’s in the same category as…

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Memoir Retirement

Wildflowers on the Loose

American Meadows is my wildflower seed purveyor of choice. They are a company that is located in Shelburne, Vermont on the banks of Lake Champlain and they have become a dominant purveyor of wildflower seeds in the country. Now let’s get serious here, among seed companies, Bayer (as in the aspirin people that bought Monsanto a few years ago) is still the 800 pound gorilla of seeds, but that is mostly general seeds for commercial…

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Business Advice Fiction/Humor Retirement

The Sole with Soul

I used to be a Crocs guy. They were my casual shoe of choice for a long time. By the time I moved out here to this hilltop for retirement, coming on five years ago now, my shoe wardrobe consisted of a whole array of $450 Allen Edmonds work shoes of all kinds. I would say I was 70% into black with the others all oxblood maroon. I found those colors were the most appealing…

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Memoir Retirement

Now You Feel It, Now You Don’t

Now You Feel It, Now You Don’t When I was about nine years old and already living in a twelve-year-old’s body, I was playing street football in our crackerbox development in Madison, Wisconsin. Those were lean graduate school days for my mother and family, and I either didn’t have a proper pair of sneakers or was too lazy to go home and put them on, so I was wearing leather-soled tie shoes when I went…

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Memoir Retirement

The Basic Basics

The Basic Basics This morning while showering, i started thinking about the difference between things we need and things we want. Let’s start by admitting that we all in this country are blessed by abundance and have pretty much all that we need at all times. It was Abraham Maslow, who in his now famous 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”, established what we now know as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It may just…

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Fiction/Humor Memoir Retirement

Getting Hosed

Getting Hosed When you retire, certain things you have taken for granted for many years suddenly come to the fore and take on a much higher level of importance. I’m sure this varies based on where one lives and what interests you are likely to pursue in retirement. But I think its fair to say that retirement has an aspect to it that involves trying to spend more time with nature and for most people…

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Love Retirement

Western Dreams

Western Dreams Like many men my age, I grew up during the cowboy era with the likes of The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Have Gun will Travel, The Rifleman, Bonanza, The Big Valley, Rawhide, Zorro, Maverick, Wagon Train, The Virginian, and even F Troop. If we had dreams in those heady days of the 50s and 60s, they were about being either astronauts or cowboys. I didn’t really think too much about either in a vocational…

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