Jager
Recycles dryer sheets
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2012
- Messages
- 103
Hello all. I found this site a couple weeks ago and, lurking amongst the threads, am enjoying it immensely. There's an awful lot of wisdom here.
I'm a few weeks past 59 1/2. Wife is 61. Kids are grown and out of college and more or less on their own. Our first grandchild is due in early November.
Like many here, I relish the small relief that Friday evenings bring, knowing that the whole weekend stretches out in front of you.
I love getting up on Saturday and Sunday mornings to a quiet handful of hours with my cup of coffee at hand, and a good book in front of me.
I love the hours for whatever willful things I might choose that the shank of Saturday offers up.
I likewise love Sunday, albeit a tinge less, as it is already colored by loss.
I despair at how quickly the weekend flies by. How, in the blink of an eye, Sunday afternoon is upon you, easing into the evening, and the blues cast their shadow like a cloak.
It's not that I hate my job. To the contrary, I consider myself, for the most part, quite blessed.
But I hate the grind. The necessity, every day, with no exception save the 20-odd vacation days and half-dozen holidays I receive every year, to get up at 4:25am so I can leave the house at 5am - all so my morning commute will only take an hour. The evening counterpart usually takes closer to two. And when you add it all up my workday ends up burning the better part of 14 hours.
Doesn't leave much time for anything else.
I try not and complain too much. I was unemployed for fifteen months in 2001-2003 and know all too well how savage that can be. How unremittingly terrifying.
No, there's a karma to our lives. Best to only whisper some things.
Still. Surely there's more? Time to write those books and take those pictures? To climb on my bike and ride to distant lands? To put a fly in front of that brook trout up in the mountains on, say, a Tuesday? To crack open one of my chess books and wonder, slowly, which openings I might employ in the tournament in two weeks? To run my log splitter on a Thursday? To stay up long enough to watch an entire Nats' baseball game? To sit on my deck on a weekday evening, cold beer in hand, and ponder with great deliberation whether I should cut the grass tomorrow, or maybe give it another day? To be able to spend a week at the beach with my wife and not impose upon it the inevitable calculus of how many vacation hours it takes?
If nothing else, those otherwise awful fifteen months gave me a taste of those things. I was smitten.
It comes back to the money, of course. The number. How much do you need? How much is enough?
Someone dies, then. And you put down one pair of glasses and pick up another. You look at things through a different prism. You realize, in looking at both sides of that intriguing, rarely-to-be-answered-completely equation, that the one side, the one that speaks to days, is fixed. Immutable.
Makes you wonder.
I think I'm pretty nearly there. Close enough. I'm looking at next year, when I've extinguished the last of my debts, including my mortgage.
I'll post details later in other threads, where I can pose a question or raise a thought. My views of the economic landscape are a bit unconventional, and that has informed my portfolio - which is distinctly and decidedly undiversified.
More on that anon. In the meantime I just wanted to say hi. And thanks in advance for the advice, wisdom, and counsel...
I'm a few weeks past 59 1/2. Wife is 61. Kids are grown and out of college and more or less on their own. Our first grandchild is due in early November.
Like many here, I relish the small relief that Friday evenings bring, knowing that the whole weekend stretches out in front of you.
I love getting up on Saturday and Sunday mornings to a quiet handful of hours with my cup of coffee at hand, and a good book in front of me.
I love the hours for whatever willful things I might choose that the shank of Saturday offers up.
I likewise love Sunday, albeit a tinge less, as it is already colored by loss.
I despair at how quickly the weekend flies by. How, in the blink of an eye, Sunday afternoon is upon you, easing into the evening, and the blues cast their shadow like a cloak.
It's not that I hate my job. To the contrary, I consider myself, for the most part, quite blessed.
But I hate the grind. The necessity, every day, with no exception save the 20-odd vacation days and half-dozen holidays I receive every year, to get up at 4:25am so I can leave the house at 5am - all so my morning commute will only take an hour. The evening counterpart usually takes closer to two. And when you add it all up my workday ends up burning the better part of 14 hours.
Doesn't leave much time for anything else.
I try not and complain too much. I was unemployed for fifteen months in 2001-2003 and know all too well how savage that can be. How unremittingly terrifying.
No, there's a karma to our lives. Best to only whisper some things.
Still. Surely there's more? Time to write those books and take those pictures? To climb on my bike and ride to distant lands? To put a fly in front of that brook trout up in the mountains on, say, a Tuesday? To crack open one of my chess books and wonder, slowly, which openings I might employ in the tournament in two weeks? To run my log splitter on a Thursday? To stay up long enough to watch an entire Nats' baseball game? To sit on my deck on a weekday evening, cold beer in hand, and ponder with great deliberation whether I should cut the grass tomorrow, or maybe give it another day? To be able to spend a week at the beach with my wife and not impose upon it the inevitable calculus of how many vacation hours it takes?
If nothing else, those otherwise awful fifteen months gave me a taste of those things. I was smitten.
It comes back to the money, of course. The number. How much do you need? How much is enough?
Someone dies, then. And you put down one pair of glasses and pick up another. You look at things through a different prism. You realize, in looking at both sides of that intriguing, rarely-to-be-answered-completely equation, that the one side, the one that speaks to days, is fixed. Immutable.
Makes you wonder.
I think I'm pretty nearly there. Close enough. I'm looking at next year, when I've extinguished the last of my debts, including my mortgage.
I'll post details later in other threads, where I can pose a question or raise a thought. My views of the economic landscape are a bit unconventional, and that has informed my portfolio - which is distinctly and decidedly undiversified.
More on that anon. In the meantime I just wanted to say hi. And thanks in advance for the advice, wisdom, and counsel...
