Back in 2001,when I first switched from working full-time to part-time, I began volunteering with the National Scrabble Association's School Scrabble program. It began with two schools in the 2001-2002 school year but grew over time. I was 38 at the time. I made a visit every week or two to their school's Scrabble club; sometimes it was during the school day, sometimes it was after school.
I also helped out running the regional School Scrabble tournament. In 2005, a few of the schools participating in the tourney got together and wanted to hold their own tourney as a tune-up for the regional one. One of the teacher-coaches in the small group was a school I worked with, so she asked me if I could direct the tourney as an impartial arbiter. I was eager to do this.
In that 2005 tune-up, I began doing something, fairly minor but hardly trivial, which I suggested to the regional tourney's director the following week. He liked it so much we did it there and later on in the national tourney.
Meanwhile, the main sponsor of the regional withdrew its support after the 2005 tourney, ending the largest regional (we had 122 schools participating in 2005). But there was sill a hunger for competitive play. Other schools in our little informal group wanted to play in more tourneys, so several of them began to host them, and I ran nearly all of them, eventually running 3 or 4 every school year.
The teacher-coaches got better at hosting them, and I got better at running them. Using some of the worksheet skills I honed in my career, I created a worksheet which automated most of the tourney pairings and scorekeeping of results, greatly speeding up the start of each round while making the pairings as fair and competitive as possible. Sometimes, it seems like the tourneys run themselves. And the kids love it!
When I began working part-time in 2001, I resurrected an old interest I used to do a lot in the 1980s - square dancing. Working full-time with a longer work day in the 1990s had me too worn out to dance at night any more. But with several weekdays freed from going to work, I was able to find my old clubs and return to this activity.
It took me a year to get back to my old, advanced level. And in 2007, I moved up to the next level, Challenge-1 (C-1). Along the way, in 2003, I began helping out my square dance caller teach a square dance class at a local college. It was tough to attend these classes as often as I wanted to because they met at the same time my school Scrabble classes met. And I was already limited by the weekdays I had to go to work. It was a juggling act which went on for about 5-6 years.
When I retired in 2008, this freed up all my weekdays, pretty much eliminating all of the scheduling conflicts. I was also able to square dance more at night because I rarely danced after working all day - I was too worn out.
My square dance caller stopped teaching his class in 2012, so that gig ended. But I still have my own, evening dancing and the daytime Scrabble stuff.
Another hobby I resurrected was my dormant interest in playing my Strat-o-Matic baseball game, something I began playing as a kid in the early 1970s. I have teams and cards going back to the 1970s and 1980s although I stopped buying new sets in the late 1980s. My collection had some gaps, so I began trying to obtain the missing cards, teams, and season to complete my collection. It took about 10 years from when I began this project in late 2005 until I got the last few cards in 2015. I don't play the PC version of the game although I use a spreadsheet to help with the stats.
Another thing I began doing a lot more when I began working part-time, and especially when I retired, was reading books. Most of them I get from the library, but I have bought some new and used over the years.
