Boredom at Sea Back in early 2019, what seems like two lifetimes ago, one for retirement and another for COVID, Kim and I went on a two-week cruise around New Zealand and Eastern Australia, including Tasmania. We had done a similar two-week cruise through the Baltics the year before, visiting nine countries, and had thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The bottom line on our Southern Hemisphere jaunt was that we found that we were more bored…
Parsing the Day Today I went out early and took the string trimmer down to the lower hillside below the wildflower garden and weed-whacked myself into oblivion. Operating an electric power-pack string trimmer does not look like particularly hard work until you do it for a while. These tools are well constructed and properly balanced so that the handle is pretty much in the right spot so that its as easy as possible to make…
Beyond the Blue Horizon That song from Rain Man is repeating in my head for some reason this morning. The 1974 Lou Christie song has a twangy melody that feels somehow soothing. It’s lyrics are simple and its about how your life has only begun when you look out into the blue horizon and watch the rising sun. At this very moment, I am sitting in my office and looking east over my cactus knoll…
Experimental Gardening I have pretty much worn my shorts every day this week, which means that summer is finally upon us. Technically its still spring, both by the calendar and the temperature, but after a long cool (I can’t bring myself to say cold) and wet few months, I am ready to shift back into warm weather gear. During the past week and a bit, I have been in the garden every day for some…
Humping Mulch If you read my stories every day you can’t help but notice that one day I may talk about cerebral issues that seem important to me, whether they are psychological, economic, social or political. The next day I may well write about my aching back and how I injured myself trying to do something on my hillside that was beyond my natural abilities, as they exist in my advancing age. It was Rene…
The Demographic Dividend I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about demographics. That stems from my writing of Global Pension Crisis in 2013, because you cannot talk about pensions and retirement dynamics without getting into demographics. I wrote that book on the back of a course I taught about pensions at Cornell’s business school from 2008 until 2017. In fact, I found the demographics that I kept seeing and tallying every year when I…
Aging Out I am finding myself using that term, aging out, more and more often these days. The term requires no definition as it is pretty self-explanatory, it simply means that you are getting too old to do something that you have done for a long time and that you presumably like to do, but can no longer do either easily or in a way that you prefer. It can also mean that you are…
A Sunday Selection In retirement, one day of the week wanders into the next with barely a care. My pal Mike and I have made a point of keeping track of each other’s minimalist schedules, almost as though our prior working lives, so governed by scheduling, require some outlet. Mike plays formal senior softball games on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and usually a pick-up game on Monday morning. He does home shores like vacuuming and…
Trash Talk Today is Wednesday, which means it is trash day here in Hidden Meadows, or at least on our little hilltop within Hidden Meadows. I don’t make it my business to know the trash pick-up schedule of the local surroundings, though the very visible trash cans at the curb are a dead giveaway, so I suppose I could figure it out if I cared to. In actuality, Thursday is the pick-up day, but Wednesday…
A Stuffed Generation I was speaking with my youngest son Tom today and he was discussing the day he spent yesterday helping his mother empty and mostly discard a NYC storage room that had been cluttered with miscellaneous junk accumulated over the years. He described the struggle of getting concurrence from his mother that this stuff was no longer needed in her life. While I have always eschewed storage rooms for the exact reason he…