retirement

Upcoming: A New Series or Two about Taking Off

August 12, 2019 by John 2 Comments

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!)

Potpourri, June 18th (2018 edition)

June 18, 2018 by John 1 Comment

[Above: I have had this track playing incessantly in my head for the last couple of weeks… maybe by posting it here I’ll free myself of it, at least for now. The performance is not a particularly famous one to those who haven’t heard it; it came at the tail end of a suite of songs, a sort of “history of jazz” which Goodman et. al. performed that night (particularly for the sake of those unfamiliar with the sound of jazz in such a venue). Billed as a “jam session,” although they’d rehearsed it earlier in the week, it worked out more or less to earn the billing. A series of foreground soloists (some from Count Basie’s and Duke Ellington’s bands as well as Goodman’s) take turns improvising against one another’s themes — all over Gene Krupa’s driven backbeat. Harry James’s trumpet, it seems to me, kind of owns the thing.]

Classic private-eye murder-mystery investigations

Some years past, posting photos here on IG activel

Another year gone by… time for my annual brain dump on no particular theme, for no particular reason other than because I can… It occurs to me now that — except for the word “annual” — that pretty much describes how I started blogging at Running After My Hat in the first place, haha.

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Over there at the right, we have evidence of one highlight of my past year: the two most recent posts from my Instagram feed, most recent one first. And yes, I really mean two most recent: every few hours, the feed as displayed here will be refreshed — the one at the right will be replaced by the one to its left, and a different “most recent” one will shown up in the primo spot. (Obviously, or maybe not, if I haven’t posted anything new on Instagram in the interval, the “refreshment” will have no obvious effect.)

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Irrevocability, Inevitability, and the Line Between Them

June 27, 2013 by John 2 Comments

[No, I don’t know what this represents in the real world. (I found it at a site somehow related to optical engineering, and am too distracted to make sense of it at the moment.) But it feels right: obviously a span of time, with three bright lines each clearly demarcating… something.]

Yesterday I passed a milestone of sorts: I signed the various forms which will, as of July 13, render me officially “retired.” Only… not so retired.

It used to be — although I’m sure it’s a fairly recent development, only in the last 75 years or so — that when someone retired, at least in the US, he parted company not only with his current employer, but with any employer. He stopped working, at least working for pay. Retired life, the retired life of fantasy anyhow, featured white-haired protagonists tending their gardens, writing memoirs, downsizing their homes with wandering RVs, becoming cranks, lovable curmudgeons, and (sometimes bound up in the same soul) chuckling old-timers. Given enough resources, especially retirement savings, they could do pretty much what they wanted with the rest of their days.

Different world now.

Far from staying home and puttering, or taking up new hobbies and so on, I will instead be coming to work five days a week, eight hours a day: to my same office, to perform the same work I’ve been performing for years. I can do this for up to five years, if I’d like. My accumulated pension savings will go into an interest-bearing account meanwhile; otherwise, I’ll continue to draw my salary, have the same benefits, build up and use personal and medical leave, and so on, just the same as always.

So no, as of July 13, I won’t really be retired. Not in the old sense. However, no matter what my official or semi-official status on the job, I will have entered a new life phase…

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