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.