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Oct 28,2025. Things lost.

 As we age and reach the point I find myself, you have time to think,  Not just the normal young person style thinking about something, but instead to tape a meandering distraction from whatever boring and mundane task you were doing. I was reading, some older novel, but not THAT old, and they were talking about typing and notes and such, There was a line about an aspiring journalist always having a pad and pencil…How long until people don’t know what that is? Starting in Middle School, my kids were doing school research and writing school papers, and handing them in, on their phones.  Pencils are for art projects for them.  I remember we were required to have pencils in lower grades and it was one of the signs of approaching adulthood that you were allowed to use INK! Not in math class though.  Will the next generations know what a pencil was? Yeah laugh, but I’m old, but 70 isn’t that old.  For many of us, that was retirement age.  Even so, I remembe...
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I’m back…

 I probably mentioned that I’m bad with blogs and diaries.  It’s 2025, and I rest my case. I’m taking a little different approach to this this time I think.  I don’t know, we’ll see. I’m old.  Average life expectancy of a male in the US at the time I’m writing this is apparently 82 years old.  A lot of folks die young though, so since I’ve made it to 70 my estimated life axpectancy jumps to an ancient 85! But then there is the history of cancer.  There is a lot of numbers bouncing around, but is seems a history of cancer reduces life expectancy by around 5 year.  A history of diabetes seem so have about the same 5 years deduction. 85 years old life expectancy minus 5 year for cancer and 5 years for diabetes..I have 5 years left.   Sitting here at 70 years old and realizing statistically I have 5 years left for everything I didn’t do in the last 70, it could be daunting, if I hadn’t given up.  What is the use of a bucket list.  My wife di...
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Retirement Goals

Retirement goals While Kay was still alive, she was off and at home with her medical retirement, so she did most of the research on possible destinations.  There were things we wanted in our golden years. Legal pot  We both grew up in a time and place where doing drugs were common.  Both of us them spent most of our working life in jobs that had drug testing. With the growing, and way past due, decriminalization and even legalization of pot, we both wanted a pot friendly place.  We both had medical conditions that would qualify us for medical pot in most states with medical, but recreation pot is faster and easier.  You also don't have to worry about moving someplace then being turned down for a medical permit if the state has recreational. This narrowed our choices to 10 states. Alaska California Colorado Maine Michigan Nevada Oregon Vermont Washington Washington D.C. Weather I'm from down south.  I like warm weather, even hot ...
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Boats

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Older ideas part 1 I'm going to talk a little about some older retirement ideas we had while My wife was still alive.  For one reason or another, many (all?) of these were tossed out at the time, but if the situation comes up. I might be willing to revisit some of them.  This might take up a couple posts. Houseboats and Sailboats I love the water.  While rivers, streams, oceans, and creeks, even ponds, have their attractions, my favorite seems to be lakes. Coastal waters have major tides, and storms can bring a surge that can leave a boat in the middle of the interstate, or worse.  Not to mention that salt water, for all of it's benefits, and be terrible corrosive to a boat, or even your skin.   Rivers and streams have major flooding with storms, or even with spring run off.  A broken levee can flood everything for miles.  These days with fertilizer and pesticide use, waste finding it's way into the water, and just the trash so often du...
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Introduction

Like many of us baby boomers, I'm looking at retirement.  I have been for a while. Ironically, a couple years ago, I had it all figured out.  About now, May or June, 2019, I would give my notice, we would fix up and sell the house, and move to either Washington State, or Colorado so my daughter could go to school there with in-state tuition, and my wife and I could get legal pot. We didn't have a huge 401k or savings account, but my wife had a pension from teaching, and I would be getting social security.  We wouldn't be living a luxurious lifestyle, but we would be retired, have a house, our daughter could go to the school she wanted, and there would be enough left for the occasional vacation, trip to see our son (if he didn't move with us), and a trip to the pot shop and all the fishing I could want. Then, April 2018, it all fell apart.  We had gone to Colorado to look at some schools and look at some houses, see if we wanted to live there. While we were ther...
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