Upcoming: A New Series or Two about Taking Off

As you may know if you’ve crossed paths with me here or elsewhere in the last year, I sorta-kinda retired in July, 2018, after 39+ years in computer-related stuff (principally programming)… and then returned to work a few weeks later. The real retirement — this time, one for which The Missus will join me — will take place in March, 2020. We’re moving in the direction of “planning” for this next stage of life, and accordingly I’ve set up a couple of new categories:

• Retirement: a general-purpose umbrella category, for those posts about the subject which don’t fit handily elsewhere (maybe this will need to be renamed — or subsumed into another category named — something like “Old Age,” but I’m not quite ready to cross that bridge).
• Temporarily Expatting (a sub-category of Retirement): for about six months starting sometime (May? June?) in mid-2020, we hope to cross the Atlantic to see some of Europe — a couple of months in the UK, a couple in Northern Europe, and a couple in Southern Europe; I anticipate posts in this category will be scratchpad-type things to help me keep track of what we’ve done so far, what we must do prior to leaving, and of course what we’re up to while over there.

If our plan holds, we’ll return to a (one hopes) considerably saner USA towards the end of 2020, depend upon the kind hospitality of family and friends for a little while, and then head off again for a spell of touring around this country. But no category for this yet: let’s not get ahead of ourselves!
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About the image: this beautiful photo by Aaron Hockley (found on Flickr, where clicking on the photo will take you) is called “Takeoff,” and depicts, well, a takeoff — from Portland International Airport in this case, although I think the picture suits the general theme here. I’m particularly pleased that the airplane is obviously propeller- or turboprop- rather than jet-propelled; this seems to fit our own context much better than one of those high-falutin’ no-moving-parts futuristic thingums.

(Of course, I’m using the photo here under a Creative Commons license, for which thank you very much!)