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.