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 a scything motion across the hillside and take down weeds and grasses. That’s where your left hand goes while the right hand operates the trigger handle with a safety trigger that requires the thumb and forefinger to work in concert to make it so that a slip of the wrist will not have this string trimmer run roughshod over your leg or body if you should happen to slip. the drawback to all that safety is that your right hand is not exactly at ease for any time during the operation of the tool. As I sit her right now, I note that the two hours of weed-whacking has left my right hand with a noticeable tremble from the unusual hand muscle tensing. This will likely only last for a few hours, but it reminds me that nothing is ever as easy at it seems. If you read the weed-whacking manual, it also says to be sure to put on goggles. I didn’t and I wish I had because inevitably, you kick up some dust and dirt and sure enough, I have a left eye with some sort of grit lodged in it until I can eyewash it out. I managed to wear myself out doing something Joventino does as an afterthought when he needs a break from the heavy work of gardening. The good news is that the look of the hillside below the wildflowers is nicely groomed, which accentuates the loveliness of the tall wildflower stems.
As I headed over to KRC Rock to place an order for some 8-10” “pineapple” sized black river rock to use as a border for the garden against the road, I stopped to see Mike. As suspected, since this was not a game day in his softball league, Mike was out in his yard too with my electric wheelbarrow filled with mulch. I leant him the machine so that he could attack the remainder of last year’s 50 yard mulch delivery that he spent much of last summer spreading and he still has some yet to spread. Mike, like me, chooses to pace himself with yard work and tells me that he will do 3-4 of the cart’s worth of mulch in a day. That equates to about a cubic yard of material and means that if he has a third of a pile left to move, he has perhaps a few weeks worth of paced cart & shovel work to do to get rid of the mulch pile altogether. We spent a moment in our Monday morning yard work weariness to commiserate about how we had come to this. We both agreed that had we asked ourselves ten years ago what we would be doing in retirement, it wasn’t at all clear that either of us had imagined this as our daily activity. Mike ready my blog stories so he already knew what I was thinking and said that he agreed that this form of keeping it simple was not at all a bad thing even if we felt tired and gritty with yard work all over ourselves. There is a satisfaction to it all.
With that I headed to KRC Rock only to run into Hannah Eubanks, daughter of the renowned and none-too-cheap landscape artist Laura. We had a good laugh about how much we we are running into each other these days. She asked to see pictures of my patio projects since I said I had completed them. I sent them to her and her mother, whereupon mother Laura told me that while the cactus knoll looked great, she felt my “paint-by-numbers” garden, which we are calling the Betty Garden, seemed like it could use some help if I wanted to think about commissioning her to do some improvement. I am not in the least bit offended, given that I did the task for about $42,000 less than her initial bid and even in a world gone mad, I’m not sure I have enough aesthetic concern for that small piece of my garden to pay for such an upgrade, which would always be in the eye of the beholder anyway. In fact, since we have decided to call it the Betty Garden to balance it with the Cecil Garden on the other side of the house, Betty is not the thoroughbred that Cecil was. She is a mutt’s mutt, an old gal from the streets of East L.A. who has a snaggle-toothed grin, wispy white fur and a snore that could wake the dead. I think it might be a more fitting remembrance of good ol’ Betty, to leave her garden a bit less than picture perfect.
All of this activity on a Monday morning got me thinking again about how I choose to spend my day these days. I am always drawn to articles about retirement and over the weekend, I stumbled on a piece that covered both the financial dynamics underway in the U.S. retirement market (average retirement savings, average net worth of retirees and average retirement income, to name a few dimensions) as well as the softer side of what people do in retirement. They got at this last bit by parsing the typical retirees day, something I don’t recall ever seeing anyone attempt before.
They broke the day into five categories; Daily Living, Activities, Housework, Caregiving and Other. Daily Living was basically comprised of sleeping, eating and grooming. While I’m a little surprised to see that sleeping is as high as 9 hours, the total of the three at just under 11 hours, 46% of the day, seemed close to being reasonable. Activities were the next biggest component with about another 11.5 hours dedicated mostly to what they call Relaxing and Leisure (6 hours) and Watching TV (4.5 hours). Socializing and reading were in a dead heat with about a half hour for each, leaving only a little for arts and volunteering. Housework got about an hour and gardening only about 20 minutes. Strangely enough, only about fifteen minutes were for caregiving of any sort with pets getting the lion’s share of that. That all left a little less than an hour for work. These stats were from the Department of Labor and slightly exceeded 24 hours since there was some double-counting. Nevertheless, I see more divergence in this profile and our profile than similarities.
Perhaps some of the differences are accountable for the age of the retirees polled. If we assume that retirement begins at 65 and ends at 85 (I am being intentionally generous in terms of longevity) the average age, adjusting for demographics must be about 72 or 73. Kim and my average age is 67, so maybe our profile is skewed accordingly. We sleep less, even accounting for Kim’s naps. We work more (at least I do) and if the average working man works 5 hours per day (40 hour week with 4 weeks vacation), I work an average of 3 hours per day. Kim spends far more time on pet caregiving than what is averaged with 2-3 hours the norm. I suspect that housework may be about right, but garden work is significantly underestimated for me. The activities are harder to judge since I relax and am at leisure most often by watching TV, so there is a definitional distinction that needs to be established.
The point is, we all think more about how we parse our day when we get into retirement day. We think we are free to do as we please, but the reality is somewhat different since the chores of life are still with us and while we have some optionality, t suspect it is less than we think. There comes a time when that reality is OK because we all cross over, sooner or later, from having our day run us to having the ability to parse our own day. And thank God, the less we have to parse the more we are likely to stay happy.