How has this been as an experiment in travelling in retirement?

We've been here for not quite half of our total time, but it feels like the time in Duisburg is almost up.  We leave on Friday (a day and a half away) for a weekend in Bruges, Belgium, then the next day (Monday) I go visit a friend in Krakow, Poland for 3 days, return for 2, then we go for 2 days in Dresden, 4 in Berlin, one night in Frankfurt and then home.   So while this isn't the normal type of vacationing we do in Europe, it's going to feel like we are on some sort of tour from now on.

I'm somewhat settled in the apartment, as much as you can be in a place you know is only for a short time.  I know where to get groceries, fresh bread and good produce.  I've been able to get most everything I need to cook/eat here.   I 90% understand the washing machine and dryer available to me. My days are just packed (as Calvin and Hobbes would say) with my German studies, shopping of various types (we just got a printer, so I don't need to go all the way to the Bahnhof twice a week to get train tickets for the next adventure.  Oh, the joys of the internet), and enjoying the local woods.  But because it's routine, it is getting a little old. If I weren't about to end it, I would want to kick it up a notch.

There are two things I would do differently, perhaps for the next trip.  First, I would like to have found some sort of activity that would put me into contact with locals, both to get me to speak more German and to have more human contact.  I'm able to communicate pretty well with the grocer, baker, and cleaning lady, and with random Germans who ask me for directions(!), but that's not really improving my speaking skills.  And it would be nice to have people to talk to.

Second, I would have liked to figure out a way to have done some biking.  There are some nice long distance biking trails around here, I understand.  I could easily have rented a bike, but biking on the local streets just looks boring, biking on the walking trails (some are designated bike paths) would require a mountain bike -- or at least one with fatter tires than I usually use -- and some skills for riding on unpaved roads.  Mostly, I just couldn't find enough information about where to go to be convinced it was worth my time.  Plus it's rained or come close to raining nearly every day we've been here, and riding in the rain is not my thing.  I suspect there may be useful maps at the bike store (they don't seem to exist on the internet), but the rain has de-motivated me from finding out.

But all in all, this idea of spending enough time in a single location in a foreign country is a great one.  I understand differently a non-American way of living (it's not like this is a third-world country, just that we Americans have some pretty unique ways of interacting in the world).  I have and will have visited several "second tier" sightseeing places that I would not have made the effort to go to during one of our regular vacations.  When you are living out of a suitcase, making a detour to some place 'minor' feels like effort, whereas here, where I have some place to go back to, do laundry, research the next trip on the internet, etc., it's more like a weekend away than just another stop on the whirlwind tour.

My goals for "travelling in retirement" are broader than what we have done here, but I've definitely accomplished one of them -- live in a place where I don't feel like a tourist all the time.  And it's got me thinking about how and when to work on some of the other ones.

Shopping

There's always something new to learn about shopping, even in a new city in the same country.  Here in Germany shopping has been an interesting window to the culture.

First, grocery shopping.  Between our tiny, dorm-sized refrigerator and my frequent discovery of things we need to survive (today it was a sponge with a scrubbing surface), I seem to go to the grocery store every day.  My first cultural lesson was about shopping carts.  If you want to use a shopping cart, you need to put a coin -- euro or half euro -- in a slot on the handle.  This pushes out a piece of metal that connects the cart to the next cart.  When you finish with your cart, you replace the metal piece and get your coin back.  That means you always need a supply of coins with you (or only shop for what you can carry in a hand basket). Oh, and when you get to the checkout line, you provide your own bag (or pay for one -- which we have in Palo Alto already) and you bag things yourself.

Initially I thought this was a theft deterrent, but after pondering for a bit, this wouldn't deter the typical homeless person looking for something to hold their belongings.  They can easily find a coin, and if they need the money more than the cart, they can just return the cart and get the money back. (Not that I've seen any homeless looking people here yet)  The point of this device is to get people to return carts to the cart stands, rather than leave them randomly in the parking lot. Seems to work well for that purpose -- there never seems to be a shortage of carts by the door, as there often is in US markets. Interesting use of technology to replace employees (I suspect the Germans think of it as a way to get people to do the socially responsible thing).

The place I have been shopping (an Edeka store) is definitely a well supplied market.  Lots of lovely looking fruit -- not everything I would expect in near-tropical California, but blueberries, strawberries (the baby ones we never get in the US), bananas, apples, plums, figs and more.  My surprise was the selection of vegetables.  Lots of potatoes, onions, garlic, and cabbage.  No surprise there. And a reasonable selection of winter veges -- carrots, rutabagas, tunips, kohlrabi. brusell spouts, cauliflower.  But not the veges I depend on.  No asparagus, snap peas (did find some high priced snow peas), kale or other cookable greens, limited beans and brocolli.  Those are the easy to cook veges that we eat on a daily basis.  Even the salad veges were limited -- much more limited selection of greens (I found the salad mix I typically use in a package under the label "California mix"), plenty of tomatoes, some peppers, found cucumbers once.  Even the mushrooms are just boring button mushrooms (I did score a box of chanterelles, which I think of as the national mushroom of Germany, but they aren't there regularly),  I'm having to rethink how we get our vegetables.

This store has a fresh meat counter, but it's easier for me to deal with the packaged meats, since the fresh ones are still in large pieces and my German isn't good enough to explain how I want them cut.  Chicken seems only to come in packages. There is a larger selection of turkey than chicken.  Lots of processed meats in the fresh meat counter (sort of like an upscale deli).  The store has a fresh fish section; the fish is all very inexpensive (less than $5/pound), but it's perch and farmed salmon, and others that I can't translate, not the tuna, wild salmon, halibut and swordfish we get regularly at home (at much higher prices).

Interesting factoids: they sell wine as in California, but it's all very low end; the candy/cookies section is at least as large as it would be in the US; healthy cereal is on an aisle called 'Cerealen', but the sort of thing we call kids' cereals is on the 'Cornflakes' aisle; frozen pizza is very popular.  As near as I can tell, almost everything is cheaper than it would be in California (discounting the occasional avocado or artichoke that I come across that is probably imported from far away).  Things are somewhat more local, which maybe accounts for what is available.  I do see labels on fruits that say they are from Spain or Turkey, so it's not all from farms down the road

I have also found a separate bakery (Sliced bread in the grocery store is sold as 'toast')  German bread is
too good to waste calories on commercial stuff.  And a fruit and vegetable market, though he has no better selection than the grocery store.  There is also a butcher, who sells only red meat and sausages of various types, but I haven't ventured in there yet.  All of these are on a street of little shops, including jewlery stores, droggeries (for the random stuff you get in drug stores in the US, like tooth paste and makeup), apotheke (for things with medicinal effect, such as aspirin and anti-itch creme), a variety store, etc.

I recently discovered a farmer's market-like setup available most mornings.  I came upon it as it was closing up, so I haven't actually made use of it yet

The wine store is worth a separate mention.  It has wines from reasonable price (5€ on up) to very fancy wines.  The biggest surprise is that you are allowed to taste many of them, at least the mid-priced ones, kind of like a winery tasting.  We go once a week (remember, we are only here 4 days of the week), try 3 or 4 and buy a couple bottles.  It's a great idea and I wonder why US stores don't do this.  I suppose there would be enough freeloaders they would have to charge for it, and that would in some way defeat the purpose.

This place reminds me a lot of when we lived in Pittsburgh (PA).  A similar lifestyle of many small stores with somewhat personal service.  I am loving it, while I hated the setup in Pittsburgh.  To be fair, at the time, I said that if I didn't have an infant to truck around, I'd love this kind of shopping, and now that I am child-free and have more time, I do like it.

Amsterdam

This past weekend was our first mini-vacation on this trip.  We left on Friday morning around 9:30am, were in Amsterdam before noon.  I found a great B&B via TripAdvisor (the Tulipa -- definitely recommend it), which was convenient to everything, and just headed all over town. Unfortunately, while I've figured out how to get pictures off my phone, I took this weekend's pictures with my 'real' camera, not my phone, and I don't have the right cable to pull those off.

We visited the Van Gogh museum (more than I ever wanted to know about his life, and lots of his best paintings), the Rijksmuseum -- full of paintings from the "Dutch Golden Age" (17th century), especially Rembrant, but also Vermeer, Hals, Steen and others.  In that area there is also the Stedelijk museum, Amsterdam's modern art museum.  The impressionists and early 20th century paintings were quite minor and not impressive (a couple of good Mondrians, though), and the design section was quite local and of the sort that makes me think "form over function". Cute but who would ever use those objects?

There is a branch of the Russian Hermitage museum in Amsterdam (which I didn't know before researching this trip), but with all the fantastic stuff they could have sent from the Hermitage, right now there is an exhibit about Peter the Great, who spent quite a bit of time in Amsterdam learning various types of engineering, from shipbuilding to tooth pulling.  Sort of boring artifacts from his life. Not what we were hoping for.  

We did miss probably the best known Amsterdam site -- the Anne Frank House.  I had advance tickets, but I managed to get them for the wrong day, so we couldn't use them.  There's definitely a usability problem with their web site, probably at least in part because I'm not used to reading dates in the European style.

We also hit several old sites, the best of which was the Beguinhof, a courtyard of old houses (leaning, as many Amsterdam houses do) that was originally a place for widowed and unmarried women to live -- they owned their own houses -- and to work as lay sisters with the poor. Eventually, this became less of a desirable option for unmarried women, and in this century, a non-profit bought the courtyard and rents the houses to poor women.  The place is still lived in only by women.  Even though these are private residences, tourists are allowed into the gardens. The courtyard contains the oldest remaining house in Amsterdam -- one of the few wooden houses left standing after a disastrous fire.

We, of course, had to try the local herring from a kiosk.  Tasted about how lightly pickled herring tastes in the US, but much fresher.  We wandered in the Jordaan area, an upscale residential and shopping district.  Overall, we covered enough of the inner city and canals that I think I could give directions to tourists.

We headed back to Duisburg about 4pm Sunday, returning tired but having thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. This coming weekend we visit our host here, whose home is in Köln, 40 minutes away. These trips are definitely the high point of this visit.

Laundry and Hiking

Definitely on a learning adventure.  It's Thursday.  I decided that I needed to do some laundry and I wanted to find time for a hike.  First, the laundry adventure.

There is both a washer and a dryer in the common room of our guest house.  They are each about half the size of an American appliance.  And they are full of incomprehensible options, some that even Google Translate does not understand.  The main choice you get is the temperature, with options of 30°, 40°, and 50° (Celsius, of course).  There are other things like "Automatic", "gentle care", etc that seem to control washing times.  And there are two soap dispensers labeled I and 11 (yes, a capital I, and then eleven, though I think the right interpretation is one and two).  I found a reasonable wash cycle, at least by the second load, and apparently I am pretty close on the amount and selection of soap additions, as the clothes seem to be clean but not overly soapy. However, the clothes come out closer to soaking wet than spun dry.  Some extended work with Google Translate helped me find a 6 minute spin cycle that runs separate from all the other cycles. You wash the clothes on whatever cycle you like, and then reset the dial and run the spin cycle.

There is a drying rack in the common room, and after taking to a Canadian who had more experience than I did with the appliances, I decided to use that for at least the simple things, but I thought our pants and Mr. R-T's polo shirts would look better from the dryer.  Even with them spun dry, I could not find a cycle that would dry them.  It would run for about 25 minutes, declare victory with items too wet even to iron dry.  I did one pair of jeans on the 'jeans' cycle for 5 iterations and now it is hanging up to finish drying.  It being a hot day and the common room having direct sun, I think most of this will dry by nightfall, but just barely.  It's clear that doing laundry is going to require a bit of planning, and we shouldn't launder anything we are going to need to wear in the next 48 hours.  (Maybe more if we get a rainy streak.  I have no idea how that impacts the drying, but it can't help.)

An interesting wrinkle.  German washers and dryers don't turn themselves off at the end of the cycle.  You have to do it manually.

Next the hiking.  It was lovely.  I was worried about my late start, as the high today is predicted to be 86°; but it was easily 10 degrees colder in the woods. What was billed as a 6.6km (4 mile) hike ended up as 6 miles, in part because I found the hike startpoint in a very roundabout way.  I have a page called "Wanderwege in Duisburg" (Hiking paths in Duisburg) where this was very loosely described.  Once I found the path (it sent me to the zoo parking lot, of which there are several. It was the third one I encountered. They don't show up in Google Maps satellite view, because they are all completely tree-lined.)  The trail was on lovely wide tree-filled paths (see picture right), except for when it took bike paths and a few times a sidewalk.  Maybe half of it was close to the highway or railroad tracks.  A few hills (fitbit gives me 200ft of vertical), but mostly just lovely, well marked trails.  This one was called the A2, and every time I was concerned I was on the wrong path, an A2 sign came to my rescue (see below).  There are lots of other paths marked on the trees, so next time I'll try something new, not covered on my sheet.  But I'll bring a peanut butter sandwich or something -- I was relieved to recross my steps about 1pm, as I was getting hungry.

We are heading for Amsterdam in the morning, so no more news till Monday.

(Oh, and as you can see, I have figured out how to get pictures off my phone, but I haven't completely mastered getting them positioned in Blogger yet.)

Observations on German Life

Whew!  What a day.  I just had a few things to do, but between forgetting things, getting lost, and not understanding the culture around me, I ended up walking 10 miles.  I had to go to the train station to get tickets for our visit to Amsterdam this weekend, then to the main shopping district to buy some real coffee mugs (the dainty tea cups we have in our apartment aren't good for anything), then go to the grocery store to get supplies for tonight's dinner.  Despite the very good map I now have, I got lost (including walking through the train tunnel multiple times to find a bathroom and to find my way under the freeway).  It was partly construction, and partly my confusion that I knew I wanted to go west, but I thought the train tunnel was going north.  Ah, some day I will develop a sense of direction.

At least the weather was beautiful.  In the mid 80s, very sunny.  In stark contrast to the earlier weather. Tuesday was overcast all day.  I understand morning fog and incipient rain, but the idea of a day that is just dreary gray all day -- apparently I am too much of a Californian to remember that these days are common in most of the world.

In any case, here are my very random observations about the people here:

• There are a lot of Muslim women (probably Muslim men too, but they aren't as identifiable).  Maybe as many as 1 in 10 of the women I saw were wearing head scarves, more near the university
• Probably related to that -- the vast majority of restaurants around here are Mediterranean or Middle Eastern; Turkish, Lebanese, etc.  I thought Germans liked German food, but apparently they have become more open minded.
• I've seen a few Africans, but other than that and the Middle Easterners, the rest of the people seem to be classic Germans: stout, especially if they are middle aged or older, often blond.
• Lots of cyclists doing errands, very few with helmets, many with babies in carriers
• Bathrooms in train stations cost money (1€)
• Lots more smokers than I am used to.  I thought I would sit outside a Backerei (bakery) and enjoy tea and a pastry, but the seats are full of smokers (they cannot smoke at the tables in the buildings, but I wanted to enjoy the sun).  The smokers mostly seemed older, so I hope the new generation has not taken up nicotine.  Cigarettes are sold from vending machines in the street, so there is less effort to keep them out of the hands of teens, I think.
• Germans apparently don't like vegetables, at least the ones I am used to.  I stopped at several produce stands to get a vege for dinner, and all I could find were cabbage, cauliflower, potatoes and onions.  No broccoli, no green beans, no snap peas, no asparagus (I suspect the last has to do with seasonality, but not the others.  Though I have lost most sense of when vegetables are in season in the temperate climates, since we can get most anything from Mexico)
• Lots of places sell french fries, here called "Hollandischer Pommes" (Dutch potatoes, in a bit of a linguistic hodgepodge).  Again, I didn't think the Germans ate fries
• They have human streetsweepers. When is the last time you saw that in the US?  The people doing it looked ethnically German, from which I infer it is a reasonable paying job, not one that is left to immigrants.
• There must be quite an elderly population in this town.  I counted four hearing aid shops in my travels today
• While lots of people live very densely packed into apartments, at least in the part of town I was in, there is a lot more green space -- small and large parks and hiking areas -- than you would see in a similar town in the US.
• Oh, and it's green  -- looks sort of like California in the dead of winter ::)
• And just like the US, everyone seems to have their head in their mobile device, or at least using it with headphones.  

Yes, This is Going to be an Adventure

Well, we made it to Germany.  The flight was uneventful, as was the train trip.  We even managed to get our Bahn Cards successfully (cards that let us ride the trains for a discount.  The senior rate makes it well worth it.)  We are settled in our new apartment, which is less than a block from Mr. R-T's office (he's not going to get much exercise this month.  I, on the other hand...).  Now come the challenges:

Internet connections.  Everyone at this end believed that we would be able to use the university wireless network.  Afterall, it's "everywhere" on campus.  Turns out that our guesthouse has wired connections, but not wireless, and both of us have computers that only accept wireless connections.  I started the day by calling the university IT support, who asked me to bring my computer to the e-desk in the library.  They set me up so that both my chromebook and my phone work on the wireless, but when I returned to my apartment -- no go.  That led to a number of phone calls by our host's admin to discover that the wireless really doesn't work there.  I spent several hours in the library catching up on email and related things, but am feeling very frustrated that I might only have internet after a morning stroll.

The current plan is for our host to find a wireless accesspoint lying around unused, and we will connect that to the wire.  My fingers are crossed that this will work.

Laundry: we have a communal washer and dryer (and hanging rack).  However, looking at the size of the washer, I'm going to be doing laundry every 3-4 days, not once a week as I expected.  One more way to fill my time (how do working people find time to get all their housework done in this country?)

I'll talk more about the challenges of grocery shopping. how Germans furnish apartments. and cooking in a minimally furnished apartment in later posts.  Tomorrow I hope to find time to visit a bit of the area.

Oh, we did find a lovely wine shop that even lets you sample the wine before you buy.  Anyone experience something similar in the U-S- ?

Taking travel to the next level

I talked about our trip to Germany back in a May post, and now it's just about upon us.  We leave next week for a month in Duisburg, Germany (that's their downtown above). Mr R-T is going to embark on a work-related project , and I am going along just for fun.  We have a nice apartment near the university, and I'm going to try to live like a local for the month.

My German is coming along. In addition to the sites I mentioned last time, I have found Deutsche-Welle, which is a German site devoted to helping people learn the German language (I think it is subsidized by the German government).  I'm working on my B2 level course, which is sort of advanced intermediate.  My vocabulary has grown by leaps and bounds, but without a German speaker to chat with, I don't really feel fluent.  But I'll be jumping in to the deep end of the pool in a few days.

Figuring out what to bring is my next challenge.  I swear that going for a month is harder than either going for a week or going for a year.  In the former case, there are things I would just live without; in the latter case, it would be worth the effort of finding out the equivalent in the local shops.  Luckily, we are allowed a lot of bags on United, so I think we will be able to fit it all.   Whether we will be able to lug that much on and off trains is a different question. And I'm still waking up in the middle of the night thinking of important things to add to the list.

We are going to travel each weekend.  One weekend will be spent with our host, so I don't have do anything for that.  I have discovered that my Nexus tablet is better for reading guidebooks than my Kindle (I have a relatively old, B&W Kindle), because the books are full of hi-res photos.  Current plans have us travelling to Amsterdam, Berlin, and the Cinque Terre region of Italy, but stay tuned to see where we really end up.  I'm also thinking of visiting a friend in Poland for a few days.

There are other logistics too: letting credit cards know not to freeze our account because we are out of the country for so long.  We have credit cards with chip and pin technology (having been unable to pay a road toll once because that was the only way you could pay, we were thrilled to find these), and the same cards don't charge a fee for currency conversion, a big savings.  Finding cheapest way to get cash  -- my bank doesn't charge a fee at its end, but it doesn't seem to have deals with any European bank networks. Finding a gym or Pilates studio, wi-fi access, bike rental to get to places I can't easily walk to, phones and phone data plans.  And more.

Each day I think of one more think I need to look into. The folks at the University have been fantastic -- they are even lending us a printer for things like printing out directions.

Since travelling is (or ought to be) an important part of retirement, at least in the early years, I'm going to post regular updates about our trip on this blog.  Stay tuned.

Retirement -- a time to travel

Photo by Prateek Bahadur

I've been slow in amping up my travelling now that I'm retired.  Mr. R-T and I have a few trips planned (maybe imagined is closer to reality), but since he is still working, he's not as enthusiastic as I am.  However, this past weekend we found ourselves in Chicago.  We have children (a son and daughter-in-law) living there, and we hadn't yet seen their place and how they were faring as a married couple (if either of you are reading this -- we approve.  Not that you asked our opinion.)  It was just a long weekend -- leave Friday morning, return Sunday night.  Probably not the ideal travel plans; if we were both retired, it would make more sense, both financially and airport-chaos-wise, to travel on Thursday and Tuesday, but we are working up to that.

We got "senior citizen" fares from United, but as near as we can tell, they cost the same as regular fares.   We also got to use TSA-Pre for the first time.  This is the special check-in line for pre-approved folks, where you don't have to take of your shoes, take out your laptop, etc.  In our case (not sure this is always true), we didn't have to go through the milliwave detector either.  It was very fast.  We have been using CLEAR, which is one of the private companies that enable you to bypass long lines (they use fingerprint detection to identify you), but you still have to take off shoes, etc., so we found Pre to be faster (and it didn't cost as much as CLEAR, which we probably won't renew).  CLEAR only works in a few cities, of which San Francisco is one. Of course, which is the least hassle can change as more and more people sign up for either service.

We were in Chicago during the Taste of Chicago, but the newlyweds just wanted to hang out around the house, so we missed that.  I figure they will be there for a while, so maybe next year, I'll get to go.  We did go out for a very nice dinner Saturday night, at Spiaggia,  one of Chicago's Michelin 1-star restaurants (our children are definitely foodies).  Other than that, we learned a lot about their local neighborhood and enjoyed their company.

The best part about travelling while retired is after I get home.  No need to rush around trying to squeeze in three days of errands and chores in the cracks before and after work.  Today I did laundry, grocery shopping, garden work, and other things (even writing for this blog) at my leisure. Always before I dreaded travelling because I knew that when I returned, I was going to have 3-4 days of craziness to get caught up.  When you don't have tons of responsibilities, it can be done in one day.  Who knew?

While I love visiting family, my desire to travel is mostly about seeing places as much as people.  I need to spend a week or more in Chicago to see the sites on my list, and that will have to be done without my museum-hating son.  And there are so many other places I want to spend time in.  It's time to leave Mr. R-T in the lurch.  A similarly retired friend and I are talking about going to Santa Fe, and there are several places along the West Coast I want to take short trips to.  Of course, there are also longer trips to Europe, New Zealand and South America on the bucket list (we had a conversation yesterday about going on safari in Africa, so I think that's going on the list too). Now I just need to make time for these, and figure out how best to budget for them.

If I'm retired, why is my professional life haunting me?

While a lot of people want a soft transition from whatever their career was to their retirement life, I don't.  I'm not sure why.  I loved what I did for a career -- all my roles from academic researcher to UX practitioner to programmer.  When I considered retiring eight years ago, the main reason I didn't was that I was having trouble imagining not doing what I did every day (even though at the time, I was sure I wanted to leave the job I had).  I had lots of ideas of how to do things in a pro bono capacity (many of which I am still aware of, though I think that now more of them would actually come up with at least some sort of payment). But this time around, I'm ready to move on.  I have such a long list of things I plan to do, and I'm not making fast enough progress on them (in my mind), but I still get sucked into things that relate to my professional life.

Right now I am: working on a short article about an interesting methodological 'incident', making final changes to a book chapter, reading the reviews of a rejected conference paper and deciding if there is any value in rewriting it for a different conference, advising a couple of colleagues who have come to me asking  what to do in their current job or what to do in their career, writing some code that will go in the mailman3 open source project, and starting a new electronic community.   I just finished doing a review of a new book for the publisher and in the early spring I reviewed a journal article. That doesn't count several projects I have turned down.

Had I not made it clear to people that I wasn't just retiring to work part time or work pro bono, there would be several more projects on my plate, more on the practitioner side than the researchy things that dominate the list above.  I'm sure this varies as a function of what one's area is, but I also think that this would be true of any area where consultants are common.  My father retired 30 years ago as an OSHA safety engineer (about as different as you can get from my career) and had a similar experience.  Of course, unless you really take a consulting career seriously, your expertise decays pretty fast in this day and age, and for him, at least, the opportunities went away in about 3 years (he wasn't trying at all to keep his knowledge up to date).  I hope it's faster for me.

I do enjoy these projects, though they tend to engender more guilt (and more date-driven deadlines) than most of my other projects, which is one of the things I want to get away from.  Maybe I do want this professional identity to stick around more than I publicly admit.  Or maybe I just can't say no....

Keeping Active: Take 2

Now that I've been at this retirement thing for almost four months, let me give you an update on how this exercise thing is working out.  The previous post on this was Taking Better Care of Myself. Overall, I'm pretty happy with being able get in significant exercise every day.  I've lost 20 lbs., so it's doing something.  (Haven't been to my doctor in this time, so I don't have any other numbers.  I have lost 2 pants sizes too.)

I've settled down; I'm no longer so rabid about needing to get in my 10,000 steps a day (lots of what I do doesn't involve things my step counter counts, so I'm using other metrics), and I have also quit tracking food input for a while.  I'll probably have to go back doing to the latter eventually, as the things I was concerned about -- fiber and protein -- have probably not increased enough. But it was beginning to feel a bit OCD when I was tracking things that carefully.

I have settled into an exercise routine.  I spin two days a week, do yoga and pilates each one day a week, work out with a trainer once, hike once a week, do a 3-or-4-hour 40 mile-with-hills bike ride once a week (my  attempt to push myself), and do a more social bike ride once a week.  (Yes, that's eight days a week).  That's kind of the baseline.  This week I'm hiking three different times (the first ended up as an 11.5 mile hike covering 2000 ft of vertical, but some of that was an unplanned detour).  I skipped my serious bike ride this week, in part because I decided that I wanted to bake bread (more on that in a later post), which conflicted with the meeting time for the biking group I was joining, and in part because my muscles were hurting everywhere (so I did an extra yoga session and pilates instead and called it a day).  Other weeks have led to extra bike riding (I did a 100km ride about 3 weeks ago) and a few times my busy social schedule has interfered with all this exercising (it's supposed to be fun, so when it's less fun than something else, out it goes)

This feels really good.  I highly recommend it to all new retirees, whether you retire at 70 or 35.  I figure eventually I won't be able to do this, and the satisfaction of watching myself get stronger -- possibly stronger and more aerobically fit than I have been in my life -- and of making time to do things I enjoy on a regular basis has been immense.  Since I've had to do 3 rounds of recovery in the last 4 years (two ankle surgeries and a round of chemo), feeling healthy and "younger than my age" is very rewarding (18 months ago I was using a walker and cursing it roundly.  Not much makes you feel older than a walker.  You see 20 year olds in wheelchairs, but not using walkers.) So whatever enjoyable exercise means to you, if you haven't done enough of it when you had work as an excuse (and you know whether that means you, I'm sure), DO IT NOW.

I also highly recommend both yoga and pilates for the ageing body.  Yoga I have done on and off for 20 years, but I'm doing it more regularly now, and really reaping the benefits in overall flexibility and lack of aches and pains (other than those I can attribute to a particular exercise session).  It's also done wonders for rehabbing my ankle.  Even physical therapists don't have exercises to strengthen ankles, but the balancing exercises (everything from Eagle Pose to Vasisthasana Pose) have really made my ankle much more stable and stronger. It's important to find a yoga teacher who doesn't push you to do things that are unsafe, but I can't say enough good about (safely done) yoga.

Pilates I am newer to.  I have been wanting to take it up for several years, but couldn't fit it into my schedule.  The first few times I said to the teacher "this really looks and feels like a medieval torture device" (her answer: "everyone says that"), but I've done about a dozen sessions now, and I can feel that it's doing a lot to strengthen my core, which is important for many things that "go south" as we age.   While I'm getting to a level that I find strenuous (Pilates instructors, or at least mine, start you out very gently, and it was only my progress from week to week that convinced me that this was really exercise), it never hurts (or at least isn't supposed to).

I'll keep posting on how this evolves.  Maybe a year from now I'll be a couch potato, but I doubt it. It doesn't hurt that I live in California, where I can do outdoor exercise year round.  And I'm doing my best to stay out of hospitals and other medical facilities -- starting this from near zero was damn hard, and I'd rather avoid doing that again.

Travel adventure: playing Hausfrau in Germany

We are going to spend a month in Germany this fall.  Mr. R-T has a fellowship that will have him working in a lab at the University of Duisberg for a month, and I plan to go along (this is much more interesting than his work trips to Columbus, OH or Schenectady, NY).  I'll be working on becoming a competent German conversationalist, biking and hiking in the local woods, and shopping at Markt's, Bakerei's and the like. And in my spare time, maybe do a little Open Source coding. We expect to be able to spend Friday - Sunday each weekend touristing.

I'm working on building up my German vocabulary and grammar. (I spoke semi-competent German as a child, but with the grammatical skills and vocabulary of an eight year old -- not too useful as an adult.).  I've found two sites on the web: livemocha.com, which enables you to pracice speaking and writing with your work reviewed by native speakers, and duolingo.com, which is a great vocabulary builder (and also teaches a reasonable amount of grammar).  I also went through the entire Rosetta Stone German series.  I'm still not particular competent, and also absolutely freeze when I have to freely generate German sentences, but I'm working on it.

I'm just getting started thinking about these weekends; not sure whether to spend them visiting parts of Germany or to go to Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen and the like.

So here's a shout out to the collective wisdom of those of you who read this blog.

1. Do you know of other sites on the web that are useful for learning a language (specifically German).  I especially could use more speaking and pronunciation practice.
2. If you were living in northwestern Germany, where would you go for a 3-day weekend?  Why?
3. What quintessentially German activities should I make sure I get a chance to do?  I mean more or less everyday things, not go to Okobertfest or the like. 

Why are cars so seductive?

I made a commitment to do as little travel by car as I can (as I described in a previous post). This is, of course, for things like daily errands -- I live in a world where public transportation for long distance travel (other than airplanes, which are arguably worse than cars in terms of greenhouse gases) is just not practical.  It's turning out to be harder than I thought.

Here have been some of my excuses recently:

• I have too much stuff to carry.  This was for weekly grocery shopping (4-5 heavy bags) and for leaving and picking up things at the dry cleaners.  Maybe the first could be somewhat solved with panniers, but I haven't gone that far.  I have no idea how people carry most dry cleaning very far either walking or on a bike.  I suspect the answer is not have clothes that need dry cleaning.  The major grocery shopping trip isn't too bad, as I only go once a week.
• I need to bring home things that need refrigeration, and if I go by bike, they will melt/spoil (this was for a grocery trip that only involved quantities that would fit in my backpack).  I suppose I need to invest in some sort of insulated container, but I'm not yet convinced that these happen often enough to make that worthwhile.
• I don't have time.  This happens more than I thought it would.  My retired life isn't completely non-clock-driven.  Sometimes I really do need to get to the next appointment quickly.  This week it had to do with an appointment with other people (I barely got back from my bike ride in time to drive as it was).  I probably could plan better to not have back-to-back commitments, but my use of other transportation should be enjoyable, not a source of stress, right?
• What, bike/walk to the gym at 5:30am?  Are you crazy?  (Actually, I don't bike to the gym even when I go at other hours).  This is probably my biggest weakness.  It just feels like it makes the exercise take too much time (it would probably add 40 minutes to each session).  OK, I admit it.  I'm a wimp here. 
• It's cold/it's raining/it's too hot.  I haven't used this excuse too much, but that's because we are in the Season of Perfect Weather.  But I expect it to come up.  
• It's dark/it will be dark when I come home.  This hasn't been an issue much because of daylight savings time, but it will be in the winter.  I do not like to bike even on our suburban roads after dark (I have good, but not great, lights on my bike)
• I have a flat tire/bike not working/can't find my helmet.  Hasn't happened yet, but it will, I suppose.

What brings this up is that I realized that I haven't used my bike for errands at all this week (I did use it twice last week -- both times to meet friends).  Why is it so hard to use something other than the car?  I know people -- in the US -- who don't have cars.  I don't think that their surroundings are more "compact" than mine (it's easier to walk or use a bike when the distances are small), but they aren't seduced by the notion that a car is justifiable "this one time", because they don't have that option.  And they have the busy lives typical of non-retired people.  Even though I commuted by bike (part of the time) to my last job, I would never have considered going "car free" when I was a working person.

This is really making me question my commitment to a minimal-car lifestyle.  Has anyone reading this made the switch?  What gave you the inspiration to work through these issues?  Or how did you make these problems go away?

  

Getting back to (the new) normal

OK, I know, I fell off the blogging wagon.  I definitely need more discipline here.

My excuse is that I was gone for a week to my son's wedding (though that doesn't explain why it took me a month to get back to this blog -- procrastination, I guess).  I haven't discussed the wedding here, as a wedding is really not relevant to being retired (unless you think that planning for larger wedding expenses than you predicted should be part of retirement planning :-).  But it was a beautiful wedding and we had a great time. Marrying off a child is an important milestone; it definitely makes you think of your child as an adult more than before.

Before the wedding, which was on the East Coast, we went to New York City to take in a few shows, eat in nice restaurants, and do normal touristy things. This is definitely something we want to do regularly in retirement.  We went to see "Book of Mormon" (which was good, but not as good as the hype) and "Mathilda" (which was excellent -- definitely better than the hype, but then there wasn't much hype around it).  I came away with at least three more shows I want to see this season. (For those wondering which shows caught my eye, they are: "Kinky Boots", which got lots of Tony nominations; "Anne", a one woman show about Anne Richards, the larger than life Democratic governor of Texas;  and "Pippin", which is nominated for Best Revival and apparently is practically a Cirque du Soleil-style show.) We also love museums, walking in Central Park, visiting less well known tourist attractions, and just soaking up the New York ambiance.  I am very glad that I don't live in New York, but it really is a great place to visit.  I hope we can arrange things to visit at least once a year, for a long as I can handle cross country plane trips.

Once we came back, I started getting more seriously retired.  While I still have a large number of things on my "must-do" list, given the time constraints of dealing with the various administrative retirement-y things and the wedding, I wasn't taking on even one-day projects.  I now have more of a routine (I have a hiking day and a biking day, and I've moved a bunch of my regular errands into the weekday to free up more weekend time; I go to lunch with someone at least twice a week), but I am also taking on more garden and cooking projects.  I've been making jam and artisan bread (soup is up next); my very small garden is in full flourish -- we are having salads using lettuce from the garden every night, my green onions are just about ready, and I can see small tomatoes on the tomato plants (so maybe cherry tomatoes in July; that would be fantastic).  I didn't plant enough of the sugar snap peas; so far they just generate enough pods that I can snack on peas each afternoon, but not enough for a meal, even for just two of us.

While I think that the specific things I spend my time on will change a lot ----I'm right now exploring things that I haven't had time to do recently; I'm sure I'll get my fill of baking and cooking -- what I am enjoying most is that much of my day is driven by activities I select.  I still have errands to do -- dry cleaners, laundry, bill paying, trying to sell some furniture we are no longer using -- but I am able to make sure that my day is more than 50% things that I am actively looking forward to. That definitely wasn't true of my work life, where a lot of my work was driven by deadlines, but it's my model of an ideal retirement.

One is retired, the other is not

Earlier in this blog I complained about the challenges of having a stay-at-home spouse, when I wasn't expecting one (Mr. R-T was sick the first 2 weeks of my retirement -- sick enough to stay home.)  Now that we are on a more normal schedule, I mostly enjoy my solitude, but there are interesting challenges.

I think it would be a really bad idea for a couple to both retire at the same time.  It might make sense if you immediately moved to a new location, but with part of our lives staying the same, I want to get really used to retirement before Mr. R-T is around all the time, changing his routine every day (as I do now).  Even now, we sometimes trip over each other in the morning making our breakfasts (we had things carefully synchronized to be in the kitchen at slightly different times when I was working).  There is a lot more we need to explicitly communicate, when before, our many years of routine made us aware of the fact that he sleeps in on Mondays when I (used to) get up very early that day (now when I get up "depends", of course).

Mr. R-T has taken to asking me to text him when I return from hikes or bike rides, especially if I am going alone.  That's probably sensible, though he never asked before.  And since I've changed when I do laundry to new days of the week, he's having a hard time remembering when to expect there to be clean laundry to fold.  But mostly, he benefits a lot from this deal -- I'm home during the day to accept packages (last Friday I had to stay home the entire day to deal with deliveries and repair people), and there are fewer days when he is on his own for dinner because I have an evening activity (I can get together with lots of my friends during the day).  And the occasional crisis ("I forgot to pick up my jacket that's at the cleaners, and I need it tonight.  Can you make a trip there?"), is hard to say no to.  I'm trying to make sure that we have the right balance -- that I don't end up feeling exploited.  I think this part would be a lot harder if both of us had made big changes to our routines at once.  And I suspect I would feel micro-managed if he were around to comment on everything I did, though that may still be a problem when/if he does retire.

But a larger issue is that I have chunks of time when I'd love to do things with another person, and he's not available.  I am slowly finding other people for the visits to museums or talks I want to hear, but I'm hoping to do more travelling, and he's not nearly as flexible as I am (I'd like to take advantage of various last minute deals I have seen).  So that's the downside of us not both being retired.

Planning for retirement II: how to tell when you are ready

A friend of mine was recently laid off; it was more or less a surprise (she saw some of it coming, but was a bit in denial about it).  She is only a couple years younger than I am, and her financial advisor told her she could retire now, if she wanted.  Her reaction was that retiring was less effort than looking for another job in her specialized field and at her age, so she might as well retire (not exactly looking forward to retiring, it sounds), and then she mentioned that she would write a (technical) book or do some consulting in her retirement.

I know several people who are doing consulting as a way to "ease into" retirement, and it seems to work well for some and not so well for others (I think the difference is whether you have one or more clients to get you started).  The only people I know who are writing technical books in retirement are people who were writing books before they retired -- I don't know anyone who took this up as a post-worklife activity.  My interpretation here is that my friend is not really ready to retire, but feels pushed out of the nest.  And I think the core resistance to retirement for this friend is not money or boredom, but that her personal identity is tied up in her professional life.

When I first seriously considered retiring, about 7 years ago (I knew I wanted to leave my job -- was it worth hunting for a new one, or should I just move into the next stage of my life?), I kept getting hung up on the fact that I wouldn't see the people I regularly see at conferences, I wouldn't have some of the intellectually challenging conversations I often have at work or with colleagues from other companies (I might have them with different people on different topics, but not the ones I was accustomed to), and when people asked me "what do you do?" I would say 'I'm retired'. (it's a little pretentious to say 'I'm a retired xxx', in my opinion, and besides, all people hear is "blah blah retired blah blah"). That made me recognize that I wasn't ready to be retired, even though I might be ready to retire.   But having that discussion with myself made me take more notice of the upsides of retirement (the opportunities to meet new people and discuss new topics), and to notice that I gradually got less and less invested in my role as a "UX person".  I also had lots of "been there, done that" experiences, where I started to feel like everything I was doing was a minor variant of a previous experience, so I wasn't working because of the unique experiences it brought me.  The need to introduce myself by my professional handle gradually went away, and the idea that I would either not mention a profession (let them think that I sat at home and ate bon-bons for the last 40 years) or identify myself as retired sort of grew on me.  That, more than anything else, made me feel I was ready to retire.

I don't know how to help anyone get to that stage, and it did take me seven years, but I do think it is an important step.  Of course, many people end up in situations like my friend, where they don't get to choose the timing of their retirement.  I'll let you know what I learn from seeing her make the transition (assuming she doesn't look for and find another job).

Getting Back into the Saddle Again

I've learned that once you fall off the blogging wagon, it's hard to get back on.  We had a couple of visitors, back-to-back, lasting a few weeks, and our spare room is also my office, where my desktop machine (with the real keyboard) is.  I'm just not yet able to think (and type fluently) on a tablet, so I didn't blog while they were here, and since then -- well, it's one excuse after another.

I'm not yet feeling like I have my "retired sea legs". I have managed to mostly get more exercise, both hiking and biking. I've done one cycling metric century (the Cinderella ride: 2500 women cyclists) and will do my second next weekend. I'm finding friends to have lunch and do other things with (went to Berkeley with a woman friend to see Tom Stoppard's Shipwrecked last night.  The one sentence review is: a play that has a cast like a Russian novel, has characters who are Russian, and requires you to know a lot of Russian history is going to resemble a Russian novel in many ways. Not the least of which is perceived length.)  I'm also doing vegetable gardening.  We will be eating the beginning of my salad makings starting next week.  So I'm settling in to a set of retiree activities, but not really a routine.

I've also decided to take on a few professional activities.  I've been asked to review a book that a former colleague is writing (this one I actually get paid for), and another colleague is asking for contributions to his blog about "ethnographic war stories".  I'll see whether that makes me feel at all nostalgic for my professional work.  I'm also committed to porting some features to mailman 3.0, which I've been completely ignoring because of all the other things going on.  I'm sure this will be fun, but it will also tell me how much I want to continue coding.  If I do, it should be quite easy to find open source projects that take up as much or as little time as I want to spend.

Starting to think about travelling as part of my retirement.  I think that a bunch of things will keep us from doing a big vacation this summer, but I'd like to see if we can plan some 3-day weekends away.  It's something we never really made work when both Mr. R-T and I were working, but maybe with more time to plan (and to recover), we can do a few of those.

Hanging out with other retired people

I haven't spent much of my time so far with other retired people.  This is mostly because I don't really know many of them -- not many of my peers, especially my local peers, are retired.  Mr. R-T and I bicycle with two couples most weekends, where the male partner of each is retired.  This past week one of them suggested that he and I do a bike ride together during the week.

Let me tell you, hanging out with the seriously retired is hard work!  My biking buddy has been retired for several years and regularly goes on 40+ mile bike rides with serious hills.  He took me on one of his regular routes at a "social pace", and I was exhausted when I got back home (but I did keep up, even on the hills).  I think my cyclometer may have clocked its fastest time ever for a route over 20 miles, and certainly the fastest time I have ever done hills of that steepness.  We are going to do it again, and maybe in another six months I will be good enough to be able to label myself a "retired cyclist".

Are there merit badges for retired people who learn new skills?  I want some sort of credit for this hard work.

Taking better care of myself.

Now that I realize that I might live into old age, I'm determined to start taking care of myself.  I wasn't a completely slug before, but as I am trying to create new health habits as part of my retirement, I realize that 1) I wasn't as virtuous/healthful as I thought and 2) this is harder than it looks.

I have a Fitbit - one of those electronic pedometers - and since I retired I have been recording on their site both my exercise beyond steps and what I eat.  (It's time consuming, even with their huge database of foods and their nutritional values.) I've also signed up for their "premium services", which let me track some additional things.  Things I have learned:

• Even though I go to the gym or get some other form of exercise almost daily, I have discovered that I am not especially active by the measures that count.  After reading articles like this one in the NY Times, I've been trying to increase the number of active minutes in my day (actually, the tracking program I use has "active calories", but they don't exactly explain what it means.  It's some form of intensity weighted minutes, but I don't know the formula)
• I've been trying to get my calories earlier in the day, based on reports like this one .  My Fitbit tells me that if I want to lose weight I should have at most 30% of my calories in the evening.  That's not easy.  
• This article suggests that as people get older, we need more protein (about 25% more a day).  I've discovered that I don't even get the amount needed by younger people, so I need to increase my protein intake a lot.
• Of course, we all need fiber, and I had always believed that my intake of mostly whole grains meant I was getting enough fiber.  Fitbit tells me that I'm typically about 25% low.
• Like almost everyone else, I get too many of my calories from fat.  I suspect that if I would give up butter, I would be OK, but that would be a big sacrifice for me.
• On the good news side, I do pretty well on sodium. I come out barely over the amount allotted a non-hypertensive person. I suspect that Fitbit overestimates my sodium intake, as I often substitute in the tally some prepared item that is similar in composition to a homemade item I made (it's a lot less work than entering all the ingredients one by one), and I think many of those are higher in sodium than the things I make.  
• I also do OK on added sugars, which surprised me a bit.  To the best of my ability to count this (it's harder to count than other things), I'm pretty close to the very low limits of 6 teaspoons/day. 

Now that I know reasonably well what my deficiencies are, I've been trying to move the needle in the right direction.  I'll talk more about exercise in another post.  The food changes are surprisingly difficult.  I'm not sure about how to make any of the changes I need (other than lowering the fat percentage, and maybe that would come as a side effect of making the other changes).  If I get more fiber and protein into my diet, the amount of fat should go down, no? But where does this fiber and protein come from?  I often have yogurt or eggs for breakfast, but that isn't enough (and neither of those has fiber). I have meat for at least one other meal and sometimes two.  Why isn't that enough protein?  Now that it's spring, I will easily eat some more fruit.  Will that be enough more fiber? Why is it that health articles are quick to explain what's wrong with our diets/lifestyles, but never seem to give practical advice about how to change them.  

No wonder so few people meet these "official" health goals.  It's not easy, at least given the diet we are starting from. 

Typical day in my retirement life, so far

Thought I would share what my schedule was like for two days this week -- the variety of what I do surprised me (at least relative to my working life).

Wednesday:

 6:00 spin class

 8:30 meet with gardener over her desire to increase my water bill by adding thirsty plants

10:00 mediation practice

11:00 help friend install "words with friends" game on his phone

11:30 have last minute lunch with friend

 1:00 interview for volunteer position I am considering

 2:30 go to PyCon and work on mailman3 coding sprint till 9pm, including dinner

Thursday:

 5:30 get up, but discover my trainer can't make our 6am session, so do email

 7:00 bake banana bread

 9:30 workout with personal trainer

10:45 discover flood in yard, get gardener to come ASAP and fix irrigation (after I turn off the water)

      research where to get dry ice (I have to ship some frozen food)

12:00 another lunch with a friend (this one planned)

 1:30 communicate with fitbit support about my semi-broken pedometer (involved uploading pictures)

 3:00 gardening, mostly planting plants I bought last week

 5:00 take a walk in the neighborhood

 6:00 dinner, a little TV and email

Two very different, but very enjoyable days.  And today will be different from both of them (though it does include another lunch with friends).

 

I'm not the only midday cyclist

Continuing my attempts to use my car only when I really need to, I decided to bike to the bank and the grocery store the other day.  This was a total trip of about eight miles on the flat.  It worked well, though there seemed to be a shortage of places to lock a bike up to.  But what surprised me most was seeing at least ten people who seemed to be doing errands by bike.  This was about 2pm on a weekday (so I didn't count people I saw on my way home, as that is when school kids get out, and they may have been parents going to pick up kids from school).  The people I saw weren't in spandex or wearing clipon bike shoes, so they didn't look like recreational cyclists to me.  Ten people in about 15 minutes is a lot.

Apparently our town is a hotbed of people who are home during the day (they didn't all look like people who might be retired) and who try to get around by bike at least part of the time.  I'm sure it's a combination of the affluence of the community (so not everyone is at work), reasonable streets for biking, and lovely weather (both that day and most days).  Still, it does portend well that there will be bike routes and a biking constituency in the future when I may need more support for this choice.

Baby Boomers and Senior Discounts

As we creep up in age, there is at least one good thing to look forward to -- some places give discounts to senior citizens.  For example, the play series we go to gives about a 15% discount to people over 62.  (Which seems somewhat backward in this case, as easily 3/4 of their audience looks to be over 60, so it might be in their better interest to give discounts to those under, say, 40. But don't tell them I said this.)

We've just come back from a ski trip to Alta, Utah, and I'm coming to the conclusion that the age for senior discount ski lift tickets is a moving target that is going to move upward faster than we baby boomers can become eligible.  It used to be that there were quite a few ski areas that offered free lift tickets, at least on week days, to those over 65 (I suspect on the assumption that the number of 65+ skiers was so small that this was great PR and of very little cost).  Well, now that 65 is the new 45 (or whatever it is this year), either the senior discount has shrunk to about 10-15% of the adult ticket cost, or the free or very low cost tickets have moved to age 70, or in one area I looked up, to age 82.  At this rate, I'm never going to get low enough rates to fulfill my dream of becoming a superannuated ski bum.

At Alta, while the discount on the day rate was about $10, you can get a senior season ticket for $40 if you are over 70.  And I must have ridden up on the lifts with about 5-6 people who retired to the Salt Lake area (Alta is less than an hour from downtown Salt Lake), and who ski Alta regularly.  It costs them little more than gas to head up to the area for 2-3 hours on a day with new snow (which is most winter days in that part of the world).  Not that I'm thinking of moving to Salt Lake, but what are the odds that this deal will be available when I am 70?  I am not holding my breath.

Bucking the American Car Culture

A couple of distinct threads have made me aware of how dependent on cars we are in the U.S.  I live in California, where good public transportation is all but non-existent, and while we aren't quite Southern California (I'm thinking of the scene in L.A. Story where Steve Martin gets in his car to drive to visit his next door neighbor), cars are the first things we think of when it comes to getting from point A to point B.  I am reminded of when one of my sons came home from a semester in Vienna.  He wanted to visit a friend who lived less than half a mile away, and no one was available to drive him when he wanted to go.  He ended up walking (in a bit of a huff, as I recall, about his cruel parents).  When he came back, he said "That was closer than from my apartment to my subway stop in Vienna.  Why did you ever drive me there?  What were you thinking?"  I have to admit, I had no good answer for him, other than "Wait till you have a teenager trying to wear you down."

The first episode that has me thinking about how dependent we are on our cars is that my trainer had an epileptic episode, and he isn't allowed to drive until everything is resolved.  He, of course, did not choose his apartment with public transportation in mind, and his hours don't mesh well with what little there is.  I believe his brother brings him to work, and he takes the train part way home and walks the last several miles.  Running errands in the middle of the day is now a major challenge.  He's hopeful this is just temporary, but if he does not get his driving privileges back, it's going to impact all of his life -- where he lives, where he works, etc.

The second is that, since I presumably have more time, I've been trying to walk and cycle places. (I will eventually try to become familiar with our local bus system, but I suspect it will be a minor part of my transportation planning).  The first two weeks, I only thought "Oh, I could have biked there" after the fact.  Today has been my first attempt.  It has threatened to rain all day, bringing out the weather wimp in me.  My initial task was to take my car in to get some recall remedies done; the dealer is about 3 miles away (on a very flat route).  I drove there and biked back.  I suspect that it cost me not more than 5 minutes of extra time. I'll bike back there when they call me to pick up the car (assuming the rain isn't too hard and it's not dark. I am also a darkness wimp.).  Then I needed to mail a package.  I could have used the overpriced UPS licensee a block from my house, but I remembered that there is a post office about a mile away.  I decided to walk, since the package was too big and bulky to fit in my bike bag or in a back pack (I may have to invest in panniers, if I do this often).  It was a nice walk; took a little less than an hour, which is probably 45 minutes more than just walking to the UPS store, but it was very enjoyable.  However, I would certainly never have done this if I were working; I would have considered my time too precious, both because I could do more interesting things with it, and because I made a lot more an hour than the $5 I probably saved.

While walking to the post office, I remembered that I need some oranges for a cake I plan to bake tomorrow for my book club.  I made a mental note to walk to the grocery store tomorrow morning (it's less than a quarter mile from my house).  Luckily, I realized on my walk that there is a grocery store next door to the post office.  I'm not used to thinking about what other stores are around and what other errands I need to do, so that I can maximize the value of my trips.

Using alternatives to the car takes more effort, both mental and physical, and more time.  On the other hand, it made me feel like I was living life at a different pace, which is certainly one of my goals for retirement. I think in the end, it's a definite net win.

The Marissa Mayer Kerfuffle

I feel as a woman in tech, I have to comment on the recent kerfuffle over Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, telling all Yahoo employees they can no longer telecommute.

As background, I know Marissa, having worked with her at Google, and I also know the Google culture, which certainly shaped her notions of what makes a company productive.

Google is a culture of hallway conversations, shouting over the cubicle barriers to people, etc.  So far as I can tell, the point of the free food (at least originally) was to ensure that people had lunch with their colleagues, chatted over coffee, etc. When I first came to Google eight years ago, face-to-face meetings were critical.  People traveled to other sites just to make sure their voices were heard in meetings (there were zero constraints on travel in those days).  Today Google, with 40+ engineering sites, lives and dies by the video conference, and management has been known to tell people that they should cut down on travel and use video more often.  But it's still not a culture that believes that telecommuting is a good thing, either for the employee or the company. They don't forbid it, but it's definitely not encouraged.  That's the culture Marissa came from.

As near as I can tell, and it's what I hear from others, this pronouncement is an act of something close to desperation on Marissa's part.  She is trying to make Yahoo more than a me-too, second level company.  She needs sharp people who can do creative things and do them fast.   I applaud her for believing that even if she can't attract many of the best and brightest, she can get results from the employees' collective intelligence, if they work together effectively.  I personally don't think it will work (and I have lots of anecdotes from my experience at other companies to support my view, but this blog post will be long enough without those), but if she's going to play it safe and only do things where the consensus is that she's on the right track, she's never going to succeed.

The thing I didn't understand is why this immediately became a women's issue.  In my experience, men take advantage of telecommuting more than women (of course, there are more men in tech than women, but I think that this probably holds even if you take base rates into account).  If you've ever tried to work with a crying baby in the house, then you'd know that most women with small children would rather go to the office while they are working.  They might want part-time work, but that's a different issue.  There is real value in being able to telecommute part of the day when you have school-age kids, but in my experience, men are as likely to sign up for those roles as women.  It's a sad state of affairs when the pundits immediately assume that only women will want the child-related benefits of telecommuting. And I know several men who telecommute part time who have no children or have grown children.  I suspect this is Marissa's experience too.  I'll bet that even though she expected flak for this approach,  it never occurred to her that she would be called anti-woman because of it.

I'd love to see some real research on whether telecommuting or distributed teams (telecommuting being an extreme form of distributed teaming) harm either individual or team productivity.  The one study that everyone is referring to had to do with call center workers, and there individual productivity is what matters (and what was measured).  Engineering teams work differently, and I wouldn't generalize across those boundaries.  It wouldn't be that hard to do this kind of research -- maybe Marissa's pronouncement will inspire someone to do so.

And, of course, if Marissa manages to turn Yahoo around, getting rid of telecommuting will get part/most of the credit, whether it deserves it or not.

Vacation Hiatus

I'm off on vacation for a week, where I won't have a laptop, so don't expect me to post.  I'll be back next week, possibly with the ways that vacationing is different once you are retired.

The retired person's banking needs

Subtitle: Banks aren't what they used to be

When you retire, you need to think about your banking needs differently.  The first issue is the checking account (I suspect someone reading this in twenty years will be thinking, "Oh, I remember checking accounts.  I gave mine up back in 2015").  I get free checking because: money is regularly direct deposited, or I keep a minimum balance.  Now that I am retired, I don't have a paycheck direct deposited and it will be some time before I start collecting social security.  I didn't want to mess with minimum balance requirements, since I think it will take a while to figure out when to move money from my investment accounts to this account.  Since money will only appear if I am organized enough to push it to the checking account, there is just too much room for error.  Bank of America doesn't have an account that meets this criterion (free with no direct deposit and no minimum balance).  They have some that are close, but not exactly what I wanted.

I've been at Bank of America for 30 years. I generally keep too much money in my checking account.  They've been making a lot on that sloppiness, as my account doesn't collect interest. I thought that perhaps they could make an exception to their rules for a year for me and give me free checking.  I went to the bank.  The manager was very nice; she told me that she couldn't make an exception, but she would write up an escalation and see if the "back office" would accept it.  She also said she would get back to me in 2-3 days.  After a week with no callback, I called the phone number on the escalation paper work, where I was told I had been denied; the reason given was that it was the local branch's decision to make this kind of exception, and she (he told me her name, and it was the same woman I had spoken with) had turned it down.

As you can imagine, my money and Bank of America are soon to be separated.  I've found a nice credit union that doesn't require anything for free checking, will give me free checks (not forever, but I'm not sure I will still be writing checks when I finish this first order :-), and won't charge me any ATM fees or conversion fees on international withdrawals.  That pretty much covers what I need in a bank.  It took a fair amount of research to find the right bank.  Things I would suggest for those treading in these footsteps:

• figure out what you use your account for.  For me it is:
• write checks
• get cash
• do electronic funds transfers
• deposit cash
• very occasionally get things like medallion signatures (for opening investment accounts and other activies)
• get cash internationally
• there are 3 kinds of banks you should be looking at: 'regular' banks, credit unions, and online-only banks.  For me, the online-only didn't have convenient enough ATMs, so that kind of bank didn't make sense as the only checking account.
• also check to see if your investment house will give you a true checking account.  By that I mean one that you can write (small) checks on and get cash from ATMs.  Mine does not.  It will let me write large checks, so it will be handy for some transactions, but not all.  And since it is not a bank, I can't use it to do electronic funds transfers.  
• find out what special things your bank gives you (free checks?) and decide how important those are
• you can research all of this on the internet, though I did have to call a couple of institutions to get some vague language clarified

Now that I have the new account at the credit union, trying to close my Bank of America account is a minor nightmare.  I can't close it till all my checks have cleared, which probably means they will have the use of my money (at least enough to avoid the fee) for another two weeks. I have to go into the bank -- despite their claimed strong security, which will allow me to move money around with impunity over the phone, closing an account means you have to go into the bank.  Grump.  (I know, I'm retired; I'm supposed to have all the time in the world). Then I have to find all the places where I have money taken from this account to make payments.  Luckily, I never do this with recurring payments, so it's just a matter of being vigilant when I pay something to notice that it is a direct transfer from a checking account.  

It seemed like this was going to be so easy.  I have a feeling I'll be saying that several times over the next several months.  

Western Wheelers Ride

Today I tried biking with the Western Wheelers, a cycling group in our area.  They organize lots of rides -- sometimes you can find 3 or 4 in a single day.  Normally, Mr. R-T and I cycle most Sundays, 25-40 miles in our area (well, not in the rain.  We are both rain wimps.) with various subsets of two other couples.  Even though we recently added another couple to our "bike club", none of the seven of them could make it today. I've been thinking that I need to find a group to do weekday rides, so I might as well start with this.

I have a huge amount of inertia around joining groups.  It helped that I had already planned to ride, at about the same time, so getting ready wasn't a big roadblock.  I found the group easily (which doesn't always happen with this sort of thing), and they were very friendly.  Of the nine on the ride, seven were regular Western Wheelers riders, who seemed to know each other, and I and one other guy (a young guy from Google) were the two newbies.  I was worried that the old-timers would stick together, but everyone was cordial and I talked to about half the people over the course of the ride. It was billed as an easy 'social' ride, so it was as much about chatting as it was about making it up the hills. The trip was about 25 miles, plus it took me 15 miles round trip to get to the starting location, making it a nice 40 mile ride.

Definitely much less stressful than I expected, and this will make it easier for me to do next time.  I'd like, in the longer run, to find a small group of women to ride 1-2 times a week, but doing groups of unknowns for a while as I seek out congenial biking partners seems like it will work.

I suspect over the next year, I will end up joining 3-4 such groups: hiking, wine tasting, maybe German conversation, and a few other things I want to explore. This seems like the best way to build up a collection of retired friends who share interests, while my existing friends are still busy with their work lives.

Retirement party, part II

Last night Mr R-T invited several old friends (and I use that advisedly  -- I have known them all from 29 - 36 years) to dinner to celebrate my retirement.  Everyone in the group is still working except me, with one of them just starting a new career.  But I do think that perhaps what to do in retirement is on their minds.  The one who loves to bake gave me a book about baking bread; the one who loves to do puzzles gave me a book of  NY Times crossword puzzles, and the one who likes to do stitchery gave me a stitchery kit!

Of course, these are all things that I enjoy doing and that I hope to do more of in retirement, and I found them to be very thoughtful gifts.  But I'm coming to the conclusion that people who aren't retired yet (and I confess that to some extent I felt this way too), think that there is more time in a 'retired day' than I am finding there to be.  I'm not quite sure why.  Maybe it's just that retirement is still new (and I've been a bit under the weather), so I have a pent up collection of things I have been putting off that I need to catch up on.  Maybe I've slowed down, though I don't think that is true.  I certain am less focused on only doing the most important things -- I make sure I take time out most days to do something purely for pleasure, which hasn't been part of my routine for many years and probably isn't part of my friends' routine, and while those moments don't take up a large part of my day, it's not inconsequential.  Whatever it is, I'm barely staying abreast of the 'must do now' actions on my to-do list, rather than all the ones on my 'someday/maybe' list.  Of course, I have added things like this blog to my routine that weren't there before, and somewhere that nasty limit of the 24 hour day hits us all.

Still, I very much enjoyed reminiscing about the days when we thought we had our entire lives in front of us.  There were many ways that we were innocents; I don't think that any of us had the career we would have described at that point, though I doubt that any of us think that his/her planned career would have been better than the one s/he did have.  We all knew each other B.C. (Before Children), and not only have we seen the trials and tribulations (and joys) of babies, toddlers and teens, we know the joys (and perhaps a few trials) of adult children. Now in retrospect, I wish I had asked everyone to predict where we each would be in another 25 years.  I'm sure that we would be completely wrong, but it would be amusing to look back and see how we are still naive innocents.

Solitude

I'm starting to feel better, so I may be back to more regular blogging (though I'm travelling next week, and I don't think I'm likely to blog then -- my planned activities aren't very retirement relevant).  Today was also Mr.  R-T's first full day back at work (he was hit hard by the illness; we now think he had two separate illnesses back to back).  I really noticed the difference in being retired 'with a companion' vs. 'on my own'.  It's not like we were spending all our hours in cozy communication (otherwise known as 'sharing our germs'); it was more like the parallel-play of two people in different rooms in the same house.  But there is a big difference between being in a house alone and with someone else, even if the other person is not dependent on you.

I am someone who values my solitude.  I equally value time I spend with friends, but I need a minimum amount of solitude or things that would otherwise just roll off my back start to bug me.  On weekends where we get overbooked with social engagements, I am clawing the walls towards the end. I've definitely been looking forward to the idea that retirement == more solitude. Today gave me a hint of that reality, and it was good.

Being alone lets me focus on what I'm doing in the moment (sometimes that's not a good thing, when I look up and see how much time has passed), without worrying that someone will want lunch or suggest a distraction (living with someone who is a bit hypoglycemic means saying "I'll be ready for lunch in a hour or so" is not a viable response).   It lets me wander among my thoughts.  I went for a hike today (alone), and I came up with several ideas for blog posts, when that well had been dry for a few days.  Sometimes I'm enough within myself that I hardly notice my surroundings, sometimes being alone is a chance to really attend to those surroundings without any other things distracting me.

It's pretty likely that I'm going to be alone a significant part of my day, at least until Mr. R-T retires.  Right now, this seems so luxurious, I'm almost reluctant to find things that will break up the day's aloneness.  But while I need solitude, I really enjoy time with friends, so I'm guessing I'll find a way to balance those halves of me.

I suspect that someone for whom solitude is not something to look forward to, it would be important to have activities/connections that would bring other people into your life every day, and it would be important to plan for at least some of those activities before retiring.

News flash: Retirement is bad for your health

OK, I'm only kidding, but I wanted to explain my lack of posting.  The week before I retired, Mr. R-T came home from a business trip with a cold that eventually turned into flu like symptoms.  He's been home from work most of the last two weeks (every time he goes back, he suffers a relapse) and of course, he has passed his germs on to me.  That means that since I retired, I have been either taking care of a sick adult (not particularly high on the "delightful activities" scale) or feeling under the weather (or both).

This was not part of my vision for my retirement.  Of course, there will be 'sick days' (that term has new meaning to me now), but I wasn't planning to start my retirement that way -- in fact, if I had worked another week, I could have gotten paid for this misery :-).  Let me use this as my excuse for a) not posting much and b) for the lack of humor in my posts.  I just don't have enough brain cells for it.

We both have serious hacking coughs, but most of the other symptoms are gone.  Last night we were a veritable symphony in bed -- when one of us would get the coughing under control, the other would start up.  Perhaps I should have recorded us; hit records have been made from less. I'm hoping that I'll feel a bit better soon and can take on some of the retirement topics that I've been ruminating on for months.

Planning your retirement -- Part I

I thought I'd describe a bit about the (many years of) thinking I did that led me to retire now.

My planning for retirement started about 12 years ago, though I would describe it more as "thinking about retirement".  I would run into peers at conferences and elsewhere who would tell me they were thinking about retiring, and I always asked them "what are you going to do in retirement?".  At the time, this was truly a puzzlement to me.  I really couldn't imagine what I would do if I didn't have my career.  Sure, I could imagine sleeping in, doing more gardening, travelling more, even doing the NYTimes crossword, but that clearly wasn't going to satisfy me for 25+ years.  People seemed to fall into two categories: 1) either health or the availability of grandchildren drove them to retire; they wanted to do less of what they were currently doing, but other than the grandchildren, really didn't mention things they would do more of, and 2) people who had some sort of passion (from rails-to-trails advocacy to model train layouts) that they wanted to spend more time on.  I didn't want to retire for the first reason (no one hopes to retire for health reasons, and even now, 12 years later, grandchildren are pretty far in the future for me), and I didn't have that grand, ongoing passion that would drive the second reason.  Notice that no one said "my job is boring/stressful and I want to do something different".  I'm sure that lots of people retire for that reason, but not in my social circle, apparently.

The strongest advice I got from people (none of whom had retired yet, but they had been talking to people who had) was not to retire "from" something but to retire "to" something.  I spent many years trying to figure out what to retire "to".  I don't yet have an answer for that for me.  I think that if you have a hobby/passion that could be a part time job (in terms of how it would fill your days), that's fantastic.  I tried to see if I could turn some things I have always wanted to do into that passion, but my life was busy enough that I could never find the time to get started with more than "dipping my toe in".  I finally made a list of all the things I would like to explore as possible post-retirement activities, and that list is so long that if even half of them pan out, I'll be happily busy for many years.  At that point, I stopped worrying about what I would retire to.

The second part of my thinking was to recognize how much my profession was a part of my identity.  When I was at my penultimate job, about nine years ago,  there were things going on (as in, the company was on a path to self destruction) that I couldn't buy into, so I ended up taking a six month leave of absence to de-stress and decide what I wanted to do.  (My boss's last ditch attempt to keep me was to offer me the LOA, rather than accept my resignation).  During that time, I considered retiring.  The money was there, although it would have been a more frugal retirement than I can enjoy now.  That was when I recognized that a lot of my personal identity was tied up in my profession.  When I thought about not having regular discussions about UI design or User Experience research and methods (or interesting papers I had read or how to attack hard problems) or about how I would introduce myself to people I'd meet, I just couldn't imagine myself as retired.  I did consider consulting, but I think that building up a consulting practice is a full time job plus, not a way to make time for other activities, so that didn't seem like an option.  I ended up leaving that company and moving to Google, where I've had many opportunities to approach new problems, discuss research issues with others, analyze complex data, and all the other things I love about my work. I believe I've done some of the best work of my career during this time.  But as the years went by, the concept of being a User Experience person became less important to me (I started to feel that I had pretty much done all the things I could imagine doing in my career -- doing them another time, with new bright young faces, was fun, but not novel enough to be worth the cost of working full time.)  The notion of introducing myself as 'retired' became less of a feeling of "OK, I admit it, my working life is over" and more of "Look at me, I have so many opportunities.  My life is a lot more varied than yours (if you are still working)".

This happened to me very gradually.  I slowly started noticing how my priorities were changing -- I wasn't as excited about new work opportunities as I had been in the past, much less concerned about 'getting ahead', and more interested in having my evenings and weekends for things other than work. I also had some health problems that led to me being on short term disability and part time work for short periods, and I enjoyed those times more than I had for similar situations in the past.  For a long time I wasn't ready to admit this shift, even to myself.  Next time I'll talk about what happened when I did  admit to this change in attitude.