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Retirement, Enlightenment and Stuff
It is about 11:48 PM and I was just getting ready to shut things down for the night and had a few ideas about retirement. I am getting to spend more time at home and with my lovely wife. She has a very busy life. She has something going from the time she gets up till well after dinner. I mean there is always something going on. I am getting exposed to this craziness and it is annoying.
There is always something to fix or buy or replace or change. There are a hundred little things at any given time. This weekend is really special because our daughter Kristin and her hubby Ryan are up at our place in Utah celebrating one year of marriage.
Yay! We get to watch their dogs. Yay! That would be six dogs at the Cronin pound. Oh yeah, and our Chihuahua had kennel cough. We have to segregate her from the rest of the pack.
We also have to segregate their little Cocker Spaniel from the rest of the pack as she is just a baby. So we let out, walk and feed in three shifts. We also have to carry the Chihuahua and the cocker. The Chihuahua is not too hard as she just looks around.
The cocker has these lighting fast paws with hypodermic needles at the end of each paw that rip your skin open. She also has hypodermic teeth that like to grab onto your nose and ear lobes.
But forgetting about the dogs, every time I sat down to do something today, the doorbell would ring or my phone would ring or an e-mail would come in requiring special urgent attention. Then I would see someone in the backyard or behind the house or walking across out lawn. I even had one person, honest to God, come up to the house and say how nice it looks after the flood and what a nice job we did. That was cool, but it was the 16th interruption of the day. I did help her up after I pushed her in the fountain. She swears she will not sue.
Then when Devin got home from one of her many chores and errands, she does lite for a moment on the couch and I will begin to talk to her. I noticed that now that I am home more, she does not listen to me as much as she used to. It is almost like she has a daily limit on listening to me and after about 1:00 PM, she does a catch and release with what I am telling her. Sometimes she acknowledges and others time she just let's it go without even taking a picture of what I am saying.
I also noted that I am getting more organized than ever before. Today we went shopping and we bought food, soaps, and paper goods. I got home and started organizing the Kleenex, paper towel and toilet paper in an orderly fashion so we could store a lot of it but get access to it.
Before retirement I was lucky to the get the packages on the garage floor so the paper goods fairy would put them away. I am now the paper good fairy. But my storage area looks good.
As you are putting this stuff away you being to realize how much paper goods you use in a week. I am pretty judicial and try and do the whole kitchen with one or two paper towels. Devin pulls paper towel off the rack like she is starting a Briggs and Stratton lawn mower. If I could hook up a turbine to our paper towel rack I am confident I could power the house for half of each day.
Really if she splills a piece of cheese or a gallon of milk, spin spin spin, spin spin spin, spin spin spin, the she wads it up like a giant snowball and cleans the mess and gets another go at the rack.
What is scary is I actually have the time to think and worry about this stuff now.
I also noticed that Devin does not look at how much anything costs. We went down one aisle of Target and she threw things in the basket. This was stuff we needed and have used forever. I asked her how much each item cost and she replied, "I don't know?" And I said, "Really?". She said "Really, and I don't really care." I thought about what an arrogant answer that was.
She went on to explain that she has been buying this stuff for thirty years and she has a rough idea of what everything costs, but she is not going to worry about saving 11 cents here or 19 cents there because she is not going to change brands or drive another 20 minutes to save money. She is brilliant. I like that girl.
So if she won't save money I guess I will just have to make money. Let's see how we did today.
Before we do, I have acknowledge one of our readers, Coach Harry Welch. He kindly invited Devin and I to dinner for a special wine dinner at Hanna's. He and his wife Cindy were great hosts and a lot of fun. We discovered that Devin and I had our honeymoon on Club Med, Paradise Island, Bahamas one year after Harry and Cindy were there. What a small world. Thanks again coach and Cindy. Go Eagles.
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Since 7/26/2012
