Taking Care of Bidness

Numerous times over the past year while on one of my adventures, I’ve met new people and exchanged phone numbers, addresses, etc with them. It’s always inconvenient to find a piece of paper and pencil to record this stuff with.

It was easy in my work a day life. I just traded business cards….so I recently thought, why not have a retired card instead of a business card. I have met several other people that have adopted this idea. About a week ago I went online and found a place where I could design my own retired card and for about $16.00 get 250 of them printed and mailed to me……….on the picture below I blocked out my personal info but you get the idea.

In other news, The Circle had another Circle The Wagons trip this past weekend. We all met Friday evening at Golden Gate Canyon State Park about an hour and a half from here. We had a very relaxed weekend with group dinners and a nice fire every night. Sunday morning we had a late breakfast and then all headed home.

This week is a catch up week doing chores around the house and starting to prepare for my next adventure starting a week from this Saturday.

Thanks for visiting.

In The Doldrums

Adventure has taken a break for a while. The weekend was lazy with nothing to report and this week is mostly composed of getting ready for my Passport In Time project which starts on Sunday. I probably will not have any more posts until I’m back on Monday the 29th. I expect to have a whole lot to report then and hopefully some great pictures too.

Tomorrow I will attend the funeral of a friend I worked with for over 20 years. He left the company just a year or so before I did and went to work for a local distributor of construction products. He was a wonderful man who lived to work. He couldn’t stand to be idle and it seems like when we worked together, he was happy only when he was working 60 hour weeks. After we both left the company we would trade emails a couple of times a year but I was unaware that he had any medical issues.

He was only 66 years old. That’s only 4 years older than I am. If nothing else this makes me more determined to live my life to the fullest and keep the adventures, large and small, keep on coming.

his-self, out.

Another Mile Post of Life

I began paying Social Security Taxes in 1964 and have paid them continuously until December of last year. That's 44 years by my count. Today I became eligible to apply for the return trip...so to speak. Instead of paying in I will start receiving payments in August of this year.

I decided to apply online and had some trepidations about that, but it proved to be a pretty straight forward and easy process. Let's just hope that it's not a black hole on the other side of the process and my application actually gets to where it needs to be!

While this is a milestone of my life, it's a minor one. A much bigger one will be when I receive the first check. At that occasion there will be a real celebration.

Not a whole lot else going on this week until Thursday. On Thursday I'll bring the RV to the house and start preparing it for our trip to Southeastern Colorado on Saturday. Once the RV is here I'll also try my new magic potion to try to remove the graphics from the side of the RV. I hope this works or I'm going to be in a world of hurt!

I searched all over town for the plastic razor blades I referred to in my last post, without any luck. Most of the people I asked looked at me like I was crazy. I finally found a source online and ordered some. I hope they arrive by Thursday.

There are a lot of things in the works for more adventures this summer and the calendar is filling up fast. Right now there are definite plans to go to Moab over Memorial Day. I have volunteered for four different Passport in Time projects between June and September. Each of the projects lasts five days but I won't know if I'm accepted until about a month before the event. One of these projects is an archaeological survey in Southern New Mexico, in September. If I'm accepted for this one it will take me two days of travel to get there. The Circle has also made plans for a Circle The Wagons camping event in a local state park in August. I'm also planning on a couple of fishing expeditions to the mountains in between major trips.

It looks like a busy but fun summer so stay tuned!

Thanks for visiting.

Just One Step Away From A WalMart Greeter

Before I retired my colleagues at work asked me what I would do when I retired. Would I get a consulting job in my old industry? My stock reply was that 35 years of working in the same industry was all I cared to do. If I wanted to do anything like work again, a WalMart greeter was about as stressful as I wanted to get.

I have been retired for a little over one year now. During that time I have seen a lot of new places and done a lot of new things. I have not had the time nor felt the need to consider working. I do however scan the part time job listings on Craigslist just for fun.

A month or so ago I saw an ad that peaked my curiosity. It was for a "demonstrator" at local big box stores. You know what that is... You've seen lots of them in Target, Walmart and your grocery store. Those are the folks behind the card table giving away samples of food.

It turns out that this interested me in several ways. First of all, the weather is not good enough to allow me to go on frequent RV trips locally so my weekends are free. Secondly, the job description indicates that you are a "contractor" for the demonstration company. You get to pick the demonstrations you want to do. There is no pressure to have a regular schedule. The demonstrations are 5 hours long and the pay is $10/hr.

So, for $50 a day I would get to give away someone else's stuff and I only have to do it when I want. That sounded like something I would like to give a whirl so I submitted an "application". Now I wasn't about to do work to get a job so my application said that I was retired and intelligent enough to have had a career in industry for 35 years and I was looking for "pin money" and that was it. No fancy resume.

I'm not sure if I'm exactly the kind of person they were looking for or they were really hard up but they signed me up and I will do my first two demos this weekend. I had been offered several more demos in coming weeks but I told them I wanted to do just the two to begin with to see if it was a "fit" for me. The $100 I get for working this weekend will buy several tanks of gas for the RV on my trip in two weeks so I'm into this thing for now.

This is the type of work that can be fun....I don't need to do it and if I don't like doing it, I'm gone. Too bad my career wasn't that easy!

Thanks for visiting.

Mr. Mom

It's been typical February weather around here. Every few days a storm blows through dumping a couple of inches of snow on the front range and pounding the mountains. This pattern is keeping me from escaping in my trailer, Bivouac, for New Mexico so I have to be content to stick around home for now.

I am managing to do a lot of the little things that I put off doing before I retired. The first of the projects was to repaint and organize our food pantry....I can hear brothers #3 and #4 snickering right now. All I can say to them is I am free to do it or not, and since I have plenty of time, and no other responsibilities, I did it. I even enjoyed doing it. #1 has no room to snicker as he is a relatively new retiree himself. 12 years of hectic living and not a lot of care, made this a poster child for clean and organize. I painted walls and shelves, put padded shelf lining in and added several wall mounted spice racks. It was so much fun I also tackled the rat hole, under sink cabinet, and did the same thing. This is addictive! There are plenty more cabinets in the house that can use some "dress right dress" and "cover down".

I've also been doing a lot of cooking. Still nothing fancy or extravagant yet. It is a learning process after all. My motivations are two fold. I do want to help The Bride now that I have the time, but also on a selfish level, this is a skill set that will be of value to me when I take extended trips in my RV.

This leads me to the next topic of conversation. I mentioned in my last post that I was looking at selling Bivouac and buying a small Class A RV. I located one that I thought fit the bill and looked at it last Sunday. It was everything I was looking for in layout and size. There is one potential mechanical problem that I need to investigate and to that end I will be taking it, with the current owners permission, to be inspected by a mechanic. If there is an issue, hopefully the current owner will resolve it and I will buy the RV from him. The inspection is scheduled for next week. Stay tuned on this one.

Guitar and I were trying to work out a trip next week to Moab, UT to go to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering. It's something that both of us would like to do but between some personal obligations and the uncertainty of being able to get over the mountains this time of year, we decided not to go. I'm going to start looking for some more of these type of events a little later in the year.

Finally, I've been able to adopt and stick to a pretty good exercise routine. I have built a pretty decent home gym over the past few years. I've got an elliptical trainer, recumbent bike, treadmill and a weight machine. A couple of years ago I was pretty good about utilizing them and then life, job and whatever just seemed to get in the way. I realize that as I age I really need to pay attention to staying fit if I'm going to be in an RV doing stuff at 10,000 feet altitude. Let's hope that I can walk my talk!

Thanks for visiting.

That's All Folks!!!!!!

Friday, December 21st dawned clear and cold. I had actually been awake for some time, contemplating the rest of my life, as the sun crept over the horizon. You see, this was the very last day of my chosen (well, stumbled upon might be a better description) profession for the past 35 years.

I got up, showered, dressed, had breakfast and was on my way to the office somewhere about 8 am. The ride to the office wasn't any different than usual, except I had a warm happy feeling that threatened to manifest itself in smiles and raucous laughter if I didn't carefully hold it in check.

This was a far different feeling than at other watershed events in my life. When I graduated from high school I was happy but also a bit concerned. I had no idea if I could succeed with the strict demands of a military college. It was a bit scary.

When I graduated from college I was happy that I had successfully navigated a harsh and demanding four years. I was eagerly looking forward to a life of military service but I was afraid as well because I was a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Vietnam was a certainty for me and surviving this initial challenge was a crap shoot.

When I left the Army three years later, I was happy that I done relatively well and survived to boot. Civilian life however, was not something I had ever thought about growing up, and I felt woefully unprepared to make my way in this alien environment.

I found employment with an international company, in a "quirky" part of the construction industry. No one ever starts out to be in this profession. It doesn't happen that way. I just happened to be in the particular place at the particular time that "dumped" me into it and I survived. Not only did I survive in this industry but I prospered and did well. I did it for 35 years. That's unheard of today. Some of the young people who come to this company now have already had three or four other jobs. I am...was.. a dinosaur.

In spite of all of that, I don't feel any sadness today. I don't think, even after 35 years, I have a real deep emotional attachment to the business. It was good to me but it was a hard taskmaster. It used me and I used it....nothing personal, just business.

The real difference today is that unlike the other watershed events I just described, I don't feel any concern or trepidation about the future. I've survived the worst life could throw my way up to this point and from now on things are pretty simple. Oh, there will be challenges and there will be good times and bad times but I now have a PhD in life. I'll be able to handle it.

I AM RETIRED!


Thanks for visiting.

Slip Slidin Away...

"Slip slidin away,
Slip slidin away,
You know the nearer your destination,
The more you're slip slidin away"

From the Paul Simon song of 1977...and that's what I'm doing this week. In spite of what I posted almost two weeks ago I'm going in to work this week, for the last few times. I had agreed with my boss when we talked about my retirement that I would return to the office for one week to take care of any transitional issues.

If work had been like this for the previous 35 years I never would have retired! It's amazing how stressless work can be when you know it's really over and you're only there to answer a few questions. I've been going in at a little after 8 am (my work-a-day routine was to be in no later than 7am) and leaving at noontime if there are no pressing matters. My face hurts because I've been smiling so much.

The last few days are just "Slip Slidin Away".

On the home front, I have determined that with all this new available time, I should be able to help The Bride with the cooking. I'm not a total klutz as my "On Our Own" series of posts will verify. I decided that perhaps some technology would be helpful in this regard so I started investigating recipe software. After browsing the web some and reading some reviews on various programs I settled on The Big Oven. It was pretty inexpensive and got good reviews....Let's see if technology can "make the man".

I don't have grandiose visions in all of this and I intend to start simple. What could be simpler that a crock pot soup? If I mess it up it will be oh so easy to dump the evidence and no one will be the wiser! So my first attempt to be Chef His-Self will be Barley Beef Soup. That will fit in fine with the weather as it's supposed to turn cold again this weekend.

If all of this works out, I make someone a good husband some day.....and I may get a hall pass for a trip in the trailer right after the new year. Hmmm, New Mexico in January....

Thanks for visiting.

When "Almost" Just Isn't Good Enough!

I have been waiting a very long time to write this post. Thirty-five years and two months to be exact. In spite of this, I'm actually getting to write this 603 days earlier than I thought I would.

Readers know that I have not said anything definitive about my job or my employer in this blog, with one exception. In that post I voiced some misgivings about my employer and my career. Because of my feelings, about a year ago I started a countdown to my official retirement which was scheduled for August of 2009, right after I turned 62 years of age. I even went so far as to include this countdown clock on the left sidebar of this blog. In my profile I described myself as an "Almost" Retired Guy.

The title of this post says it all...."almost" is just not good enough....

The company I work for is closely tied to the construction industry and we all have read about the dismal state of housing starts. This is not really anything new. The construction industry is cyclical. My portion of the industry normally goes in 3 to 4 year cycles. Business cycles down for 3-4 years and up for 3-4 years. We are currently in the second year of a down cycle.

The difference this time is that our current management had no background in this industry and either does not understand or they think they alone can flatten the business cycle out......My good. I won't belabor the issue any more other than to say that we are in a major reorganization/cost cutting mode. One way to cut costs is to eliminate jobs. Jobs can be eliminated without much pain if workers nearing retirement are "induced" to retire.

Oh, Lordy, I have been induced!! I admit it, I am weak. I am a wimp. I let them seduce....I mean induce me. What can I say? Did I want to retire? You betcha....big time you betcha.

If I had planned this I couldn't have come up with a better plan. I will have to pay close financial attention for about 6 months but the situation is very doable. The terms of inducement are very generous and for that I am very grateful. I am a very fortunate person. In the end, my company has acted honorably and in strict accordance with all of their published procedures and policies.

The official date of my retirement is December 31st but for all intents and purposes I am retired as of today. I will return to my office only to pick up some personal belongings and say goodbye to some co-workers.

So, I now have to decide what to do with the countdown clock in the left margin? Do readers have any suggestions? The next major event in my life is the marriage of my oldest daughter. Perhaps I should reset the clock to that event? I guess I also have to change my profile description from "Almost Retired Guy" to something a bit more accurate. Suggestions are welcome.

I have already planned to do many things once I retire and so now I get to begin to do these things. Some of these things have been waiting to be done for 35 years....some not so long but all are worthy of doing. I am very much looking forward to the future. Another door in my life has opened and I plan to take full advantage of what's on the other side!

Thanks for visiting.

You Know It's Time to Retire When....

I had a medical appointment today that precluded my going into work. Just routine stuff but it gave me a chance also to catch up on some chores. One of the items on my list was a haircut.

I come from a military background and have always worn my hair short. I just feel more comfortable that way. It's also way easier to take care of. Right after I got out of the Army I decided to let my hair grow to the fashionable length of the times..1972. I tried it for about six months and just couldn't stand it. It felt creepy. It took time away from more important things. It was definitely not me, so I cut it and have worn it pretty short ever since.

But, I digress. So, this afternoon I went for a hair cut. After describing the type of cut I wanted the barber-ess tried to strike up a conversation. "Do you still work?" she said........................

Now, I could take that statement and launch into an entertaining soliloquy on how deflating that was. I could compare it to some great put downs and just have all kinds of fun with it. As much fun as that might be, I really didn't think of that at all. What I thought was, "Unfortunately yes. For 648 more days, yes I still work." The very next thing I thought is if this person has to ask, I really should be. The third reaction was really a sense of I am where I want to be. I'm looking forward to retirement and sometimes people just confirm that by asking "Do you still work?".

Other odds and ends....The Bride is still in California. Since I have the day off, I was going to take The Emmer out to dinner after she got off work. She called a little while ago to say that she is having to work a double shift again so dinner is out. I think I'll order in some Chinese food that she can have when she gets home. She really likes that, so it will still be a treat of sorts for her.

We had our first snow of the season yesterday. It started at about 8am and continued off and on most of the day. Because the temperature was hovering on freezing we only accumulated about 3 inches. The temperature went up in the afternoon and the streets were dry by sundown. There's only a little left on the lawn right now. Gotta love this Colorado weather.

The weather was a good reason to work some more on my slide scanning project and I spent most of the day doing so. I culled through quite a number of slides and ended up scanning about 75. Not bad work for one day. I still have quite a number to go through.

Among the pictures I scanned are the two ships you see in this post. The first is the General William O. Darby. A converted troop transport ship that took my parents and our family from New York to Livorno, Italy in 1956. The ship had an interesting history as you can see from the link. The accommodations were spartan even for families. No one today would pay for a cruise on this type of ship.

The second ship is the SS Constitution....not "Old Ironsides" but the pride of the American luxury fleet in 1950. This was the ship we returned from Italy to New York City on in 1959. It was still very much the posh way to travel between Europe and the US at the time. In the 1950s it was still not common for families to fly to Europe. The military operated their troop/family transport service but they still had to ship a number of families to and from Europe by private steamship service. We were very lucky, indeed, to be able to experience the last of the American luxury liners on the European run.

Sadly, the SS Constitution went to a watery grave in 1997 when she sank while being towed to an Asian "chop shop" that was to scrap her.

The final picture is one of my mother and father on-board the Constitution. I remember the journey quite clearly even the part in which we sailed through the tail end of a hurricane just before getting to the states. I think I can still feel the pitching and rolling....as luxurious as the ships were in those days they just didn't have the stabilizing gear that modern ships have. It was a rough ride and I stayed sick for days.

Thanks for visiting.

Wild Life---NOT

Saturday night and I'm sittin' here thinking about the wild life...well, maybe not "wild life", that stuff is behind me now, but wildlife. Not only wildlife but just being back out in "The World".

When I was in VietNam, everything outside of that place was referred to as "The World". I kinda have that feeling about my career now. I realize that one phase of my life is rapidly winding down and things in my career that once seemed really important....don't anymore. I'm really looking forward to getting back to "The World". The World is filled with things I have rushed by for 35 years. Things that I wanted to know about and to do. Things that had to be relegated to a very low priority because of the "career" thing. It won't be all that long now, before that ole priority list gets turned upside down!

"What's got into his-self" you say? Ah, I don't know? I think I read too many full-timing RV blogs today. Some of my favorites are "Tioga & George", "Our Odyssey", "Nick's Blog", "Len's Travels", and "RV Boondocking the Good Life". There are tons of others as well but all of them get me to thinkin' and dreamin'.

I doubt if The Bride and I will ever do full-timing, but I can certainly see myself taking extended trips several times a year. Seeing as how The Bride still has that "career" thing she kind of expects me to explore some....as long as it's "wildlife" and not "wild life".....if you catch my drift.

Dang, if this didn't turn into a stream of consciousness thing. I originally intended to post some "fauna" kind of stuff that #4 and I saw on our trip. Well, here they are.















And.....



































And my favorite from this trip.....................

Thanks for visiting.

Tools of the Trade

After considering my last post, the thought occurred to me that readers might think that I was not REALLY serious in describing my training session yesterday? I need to assure you that I was indeed. After all, retirement will hopefully last as long or nearly as long as my working career. I went to high school and college to prepare myself for the working world but unfortunately there is no formal training for retirement. Quite the opposite. I have found that the business community in general has a rather poor view of retirement and certainly doesn't make it easy for the average person to achieve that status much less be knowledgeable about it when the time comes. People who want to succeed in retirement need to take matters into their own hands and self train to be prepared.

Realizing the amount of time that I could devote to the hammock, it is reasonable to make sure that my knowledge level of this apparatus is adequate to serve my needs.....and since it's blistering hot outside and I'm not gonna do any of that "catch up" stuff that was on my list....I thought that I might like to share with you some "Tools of the Trade".

Used to be, I thought a hammock was a hammock. I was young and immature, without a clear vision of the future, so what did it matter to me? As I grew older I began to realize that this was a wonderful device and there were a multitude of different types of hammocks. I certainly didn't want to be a "jack of all and master of none" type so in recent years I have decided to focus my efforts on two basic types. I just don't have time enough to master all of them!

I have narrowed down the types of hammocks that I use to two. The first, is one of the most common of types in North America. It's the one I have used for years and am still training on and is referred to as a Pawley's Island hammock. The name comes from the small coastal island in South Carolina where this design originated. It is constructed of knotted rope and has wooden stretchers on either end to provide a relatively flat and stable bearing surface. While the learning curve is not terribly steep on this model it can still take years of practice to master all of the intricacies of this versatile design.

Some common accessory items are a pillow....and on the really expensive models, an automatic cold beverage delivery device, sometimes referred to as a wife.

Some of the less desirable features are that it is a pretty static platform. That is, it needs a couple of posts or trees or something to support it and the associated hardware to attach to the support devices. The cold beverage delivery device requires a TON of maintenance and is very expensive but that's true for any type of hammock that has this accessory.

The Pawley's Island hammock is not really very portable and for that reason, I employ one other type of hammock. This hammock was designed to travel. It has with it, it's own support system and can be set up in less than a minute. It doesn't have the wooden stretchers and is a little more unstable as a weight distribution platform. That negative is balanced by the fact that it is much lower to the ground and chances of injury due to falling is much less.

One other important point is that the portable hammock has a continuous platform, a piece of fabric, and does not have the integral cooling or drainage holes that the knotted design of the Pawley's Island design offers. This can be a big negative if the user is not able to handle platform manipulation and a beverage at the same time. A spilled hot or cold drink does not drain automatically as on the Pawley's Island design but rather accumulates at the low point of the occupied platform....and you know where that is!

I'll quickly comment on two other hammock designs with which I have some experience..... Fortunately my experience with the jungle hammock is somewhat limited but I could never really get the hang of this device.... I suppose it was the snakes or the bugs or the fact that every time I was in a position to sleep in this contraption there was always someone in the vicinity trying to kill me.

The final hammock is the chair hammock... and the only comment I have on this design is... "What's the point?"

I hope this information is helpful to those who may be in or near the position of retirement. I also hope that my friends and acquaintances can now see why it is that I am so serious about this matter?

Thanks for visiting.

Making The Best Of It

The weekend finds me here at home and not traveling the roads with Bivouac. Since there are still 769 days until complete freedom I guess I can't complain too much....Besides I have another trip planned which I'll tell you about a little later. This day was payback for my Wyoming trip. There was grass to mow, trimming to be done and a lot of general cleanup and maintenance work.
Since I was home, I took The Emmer to work this morning at 6am. The Emmer, by the way, has decided to try for her driver's license once more towards the end of July. She has passed the written test and only needs to pass the actual driving test. We will double up on her practice driving to help her get ready. We all look forward to the freedom she will have once she gets that license!

Even though this was a "payback weekend" I still needed to be vigilant and train for my days of retirement. With this in mind, after a full day of chores, I broke out the hammock for another training session.
Hammocks can be dangerous things and they need to be treated with respect. I have a friend who suffered serious, though gratefully not fatal, grass burns as a result of a lack of respect for this complex weight distribution apparatus. There is a technique to the proper utilization of a hammock that can take years to master. I have vowed to be a master by the time I retire so practice is important.

Look at the picture above. This is the basic "on your back with feet uncrossed" position. Note the tilt of the hammock cross bar....pitiful. I need a lot of work on that one!

After about 45 minutes of practice with this, the most basic of maneuvers, I was able to achieve a respectable orientation. The crossbar is level and the end ropes are uniformly positioned and stretched to the post. I had to experiment with numerous butt to head orientations to finally overcome the list to the left. Being a natural lefty it is much harder to overcome this dip to the left.

Once I had a good handle, or should I say footle, on the most basic of positions, it was time to press the envelope a bit. At the next level of difficulty is the "crossed feet" position and within this position there are two subsets....the "left foot over right foot" and the "right foot over left foot".

As I mentioned, I am a natural lefty so "left foot over right foot" was the place to begin! Alas, I had the same initial problems with this position as I did with the uncrossed position. List to the left. I was really disgusted with myself and almost took the easy way out of quitting and going back to yard work but I didn't work for 35 years to just give up! No sir! I dug deep. I tried every butt to head orientation my body would allow. I was so exhausted that at one point I almost fell asleep but I didn't give up and before you know it....viola...perfecto!

This is akin to learning how to ride a bicycle. You try and try and just can't seem to get it when all of a sudden....you've got it! And just to prove to myself that I indeed "had it", I went for the "right foot over left foot" position and without missing a beat....I aced that one too! Well, to be humble about it maybe I didn't ace the last one but it was pretty darned good.

All these contortions and dangerous butt to head maneuvers really took their toll on me so after this last success I put the hammock away and went inside for a well deserved nap.

Since I'm home tomorrow as well I guess I'll do some more catching up on yard work and then if I can stand the mental strain I might...just might, pull the hammock out again for another training session.

Thanks for visiting.

P.S. I'm so drained, I'll wait till the next post to fill you in on the next road trip...but I'll give you a little tidbit. You're going to get to know #4 a lot better!