How will I fill my days when I retire?

For many years before he passed, my father-in-law Tom liked to point out that he was retired and rarely had significant obligations on his calendar, unlike those of us still working for a living.

It would be a family get-together on a Sunday, and someone would say something like, "I have to work tomorrow." Someone else would chime in, "Me too."

Then Tom would flash that funny little mischievous grin of his and say, "Not me!"

I have often wondered what that life would be like.

Actually, we all get glimpses of it on our days off. Especially our weekday days off.

The stores and the roads are relatively empty. We're free to structure our time however we like.

And sometimes, after that giddy feeling of being unencumbered by job-related responsibilities passes, we're also free to be bored.

I look ahead a decade (or so) hence to my own retirement, Lord willing and the creek don't rise. The possibilities are intriguing and exciting, but I also worry I'll run out of things to do.

I imagine it takes a little while to get the hang of being retired. By the time I call it quits, I anticipate having been in the full-time workforce for 44 years or more.

That's a fur piece, as my dad used to say. Certainly long enough to develop deeply ingrained patterns of behavior necessary to survive and thrive in the world of work.

Changing those patterns can, I assume, be a bit of a challenge, especially when you reach an age when change of any sort is met with skepticism or outright annoyance.

How am I going to deal with that?

Maybe more importantly, how will Terry deal with having me around all the time?

I can't say for sure, but I can tell you something I noticed recently when talking with her.

It was a particularly stressful and busy week, and I sighed and said to her, "Am I retired yet?"

It took her less than half a second to reply with a sharp and emphatic, "No." The message I took away was, "No, you are not, and I would prefer you not be retired for as long as possible so I don't have to share this gloriously empty house seven days a week."

Maybe, if she has her way, I'll never have to worry about how I spend my retirement days because I'll never be allowed to retire in the first place.

So much of my mental wellbeing depends upon a nearly empty inbox

 

Please, as a favor to me, don't do this.

(NOTE: This post was originally published here four years ago on June 18, 2021. As is usually the case with these blog reruns, I have not changed my opinion on this subject.)

You may have heard it said that there are two types of people in this world: Those with zero emails in their inbox, and those with 5,000 emails in their inbox.

I am of the former camp. You can almost always fit my inbox onto one screen. It is stressful for me to have unread emails in any quantity, let alone a list that numbers into the tens, hundreds, or (gulp) thousands.

There have been times when I was watching a presentation by a co-worker sharing his/her screen, and for a brief second you could see Microsoft Outlook with an ungodly blue number like 32,418 next to their inbox, representing the total number of unread messages in there.

I would have a heart attack. Seriously, at that point you need to just start over.

I maintain an orderly folder system for both my personal Gmail and work Outlook accounts. These folders are divided into categories, and I place emails into each upon receiving and reading them. And many I just delete right away.

"What about emails that need to be acted on but I don't have the time to do it right when they come in?" you might ask.

Then have a "To Do" folder or something that tells you these are messages that need to be addressed in short order. Or make good use of a program like Microsoft OneNote or Evernote that allows you to easily create tasks and reminders for yourself.

Just, please, don't allow that blue "unread" number to get into the five digits. Or the three and four digits, for that matter. The aneurysm you save will probably be mine.

I was never a hat guy until long after the hair decided to leave the top of my head

This is me in a golf cart on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles in France, and well, I just think that's a funny sentence.

I think it was the late 80s or early 90s, but at some point, guys in my generation decided they should start wearing baseball caps.

I should say American guys made this decision, as we seem to be the only ones who have done it.

I should also add that other guys besides me started wearing hats, because until the last couple of years, I never embraced the trend.

That was partly a result of my big head. I never felt I looked all that good with a hat on. Plus, there's a certain reality to buying a hat for a large skull. Sometimes even the adjustable ones are uncomfortably tight.

I lived happily this way for decades. At the same time, starting in my mid-20s, I began losing hair on the crown of my head. This is a genetic thing and, hey, it happens.

One result was that, at least five times every spring and summer, I would be outside for an extended period and my bald spot would turn red and uncomfortable.

I've always just lived with this, never quite making the connection that, if I were to start wearing hats in the warmer months, I would not get these sunburns.

It was only when my wife strongly suggested I keep a supply of hats in my car that I started wearing them, and even then it's really just an occasional thing for me.

In fact, I'm recovering from a crown-of-the-head sunburn as I type this in mid-May because I didn't wear a hat recently when announcing a high school baseball game. The temperature was on the cool side, and apparently to my brain, that meant there was no danger of sun damage.

Which is of course silly and wrong. It doesn't have to feel hot for the sun to burn you.

So I'm trying to get myself into the hat habit. I have 3-4 baseball caps and a floppy brimmed hat in the car, all of which make me look exactly like what I am: A middle-aged suburban dad and soon-to-be grandpa trying not so much to be cool but rather to ward off melanoma from the top of my oversized head.

It's an ongoing struggle.

Cable TV taught me never to become a counselor at Camp Crystal Lake

I'm not sure of the exact year, but at some point in the early 80s, I got a cable-equipped TV in my room.

This was like the hitting the jackpot. It included the full package of premium channels like HBO, Showtime and Cinemax.

These channels were great for watching movies that had been in theaters only weeks earlier. It was a big deal when the first of the month rolled around and HBO introduced its new lineup of movies, including the blockbusters that were otherwise only available at, well, Blockbuster.

It was on HBO that I saw the first four (I think) "Friday the 13th" movies.

I remember sitting in my room one very late Friday night watching the first "Friday the 13th." My parents were asleep, the house was quiet, and I was scared stiff.

I wanted to turn it off when Mrs. Voorhees got her head chopped off, but I couldn't look away.

You have to understand, back then we hardly ever saw anything like that in movies or video games. It was terrifying.

With today being Friday the 13th, I think back on how cheesy those movies really were, and how they probably weren't particularly scary compared to some of the things you see today. But believe me, back in the Reagan Administration, Jason and his hockey mask were the height of the horror genre. They made you think twice about ever working at a summer camp.

And you sure as heck knew not to run to the basement when you heard a strange sound down there. That was just common sense.

When you see a number on the bathroom scale you don't like...

One evening a month or so ago, I decided to weigh myself.

This isn't an especially remarkable occurrence except for two things:

1. It would be the first time I had weighed myself in 2025. I hadn't done it at all this calendar year.
2. When I did get on the scale, the number that came back was one I had never seen before.

220 pounds.

Yikes.

Now, to be fair, it was late in the day after I had eaten, which isn't the ideal time to weigh yourself. And the weight I've gained over the last year or so is partially fat and partially muscle from strength training.

There's also the fact that no one would have looked at me and guessed I weighed a lifetime high of 220 pounds.

My face was fuller than it normally might be, and for the first time I ever remember, I had a bit of a belly. But I do carry weight well, and at most you probably would have said I weighed 195 or maybe 200.

No, 220 it was. I was a little stunned.

I knew I hadn't been eating well. And I knew, for the sake of my health, I needed to get back on track when it came to my diet. But I didn't anticipate that particular number on the scale.

Five days later, I found myself sitting in a Weight Watchers workshop for the first time in more than two years.

Weight Watchers has always been the most effective method of weight loss for me. Their point system works well for someone who is goal-oriented and likes clear direction.

I am what's known as a lifetime member of Weight Watchers in that I hit my physician-assigned goal of 185 pounds back in 2013 and maintained it for a period of six weeks.

Once you do that, you no longer have to pay Weight Watchers a fee. You just need to weigh in once a month within 2 pounds of that goal weight and everything remains free.

I did that for a while, and then I thought I could do it on my own without Weight Watchers.

But I couldn't, and of course I gained weight, so I went back to WW in 2016 and lost even more weight than before (getting down to a gaunt 166 pounds at one point...that wasn't good).

I experienced more ups and downs with my weight over the next several years, and now here we are.

I have been following the WW program, and of course I'm losing weight. I always lose weight when I do this.

My goal is to get back to that 185 number, which may be more difficult than it used to be given my age and the muscle I've gained. The latter is a good problem to have, but the fact is that muscle is heavy relative to fat, so getting the number on the scale to drop can be tricky when you're lifting.

The real question, of course, is whether I can maintain it over the long haul. That's the challenge, and it's going to require a change in thinking.

I can't obsess over the number on the scale every week. It has to be about developing daily habits that get to me to my goal.

My high school track coach, the great Al Benz, always taught us to concern ourselves more with the means than the ends. That is, worry about your form, technique and training, and the end result (times/distances) will take care of itself.

I was never very good at that. Before meets, I always worried over whether I would break 20 feet in the long jump or get into the low 11s in the 100-meter dash. I should instead have been thinking about the steps in my long jump approach or perfecting my start in the 100 meters.

In the same way, my focus now should be on a balanced, healthy daily food intake and getting plenty of water, rather than the exact amount of weight I'll have lost by the time my Monday morning weigh-in rolls around.

If I do the first part, long-term success (with some inevitable small bumps in the road) is guaranteed.

So this is as much a mind exercise as it is about meal planning and label reading. It's about long-term health and a more satisfying pattern of eating.

It's about finding ways to feel good that don't involve late-night carbohydrate loading.

So far, so good. I'm making progress, and it doesn't need to be fast.

Maybe this time I'll figure out how to keep on doing the things I've always known I should have been doing in the first place.

Here's what I've noticed about going to the gym: Everything is heavy

"Yeah, that's the idea," you probably said to yourself upon reading the headline of today's post. But hear me out.

I know the point of weightlifting is to move heavy things around in an attempt to build strength. You're supposed to make your muscles fail, thereby breaking them down and allowing them to rebuild themselves bigger and stronger.

And the only way to make them fail is to lift heavy objects.

Yet there's a difference between "heavy" and "HEAVY."

Like, the first set of everything I do is "heavy." By the time I get to the last rep, I'm working hard to get that weight into the air (or out to my side or whatever the movement calls for). But it's not to the point that I've lost the will to live.

That's not the case when I'm dealing with "HEAVY" weights. These are generally the types of weights my trainer Kirk will give me when I'm working out under his tutelage.

We'll be doing, say, a dumbbell incline bench press exercise. He'll walk over to the dumbbell rack and select two that are, for him, not a problem to move, but that are, for me, at least a small problem to move.

He'll hand me the dumbbells, I'll lean back on the bench, and I'll proceed to lift them 10, 12 or 15 times, however many reps he tells me to do. The last few reps are decidedly uncomfortable, and my earnest desire is for the set to end so I can go back to the mostly comfortable lifestyle to which I'm accustomed.

But then we'll proceed to a second set, and this time Kirk will hand me a Volkswagen or a small elephant and tell me to lift it about the same number of times.

I'm not speaking literally, of course, but he inevitably picks large dumbbells of the kind I normally associate with Mr. Universe contestants and that one women I see every day at the gym who is way stronger than me.

Even if/when I successfully complete this new and decidedly unfair task, Kirk will keep handing me larger and larger objects to lift. It's as if he's playing a practical joke of which he and all the rest of the gym-goers are aware, and I'm serving as a source of endless amusement for them.

I know what my face looks like when I'm really struggling to get a weight into the air, and I'm sure it's hilarious if you're just standing there watching. I also start to contort my body in a way that undoubtedly defeats the purpose of the exercise but also makes me feel like I'm making some progress toward lifting the 4-ton anvil Kirk has given me.

When we get to the heaviest weights, I'm quickly beyond caring whether I live or die. All I know is that existence = suffering and the only way I will make it through is to perform the prescribed number of reps, whatever it takes. This is when I know we have reached the level of "HEAVY."

And, if you'll pardon my language, it really sucks.

Then, suddenly, without me realizing it, my 1-hour session with Kirk is over. He gives me a fist bump, tells me I did a good job, and walks with me back into the gym lobby.

I collect my things from the changing room and head out to my car, noting that while my arms are fatigued to the point I simply cannot lift them over my head any longer, I have logged another workout. Victory.

The next day I am sore. And weak. My daily creatine powder helps, but there's a certain level of muscle fiber breakdown my 55-year-old body simply cannot overcome without the passage of at least a few days.

Yet there I am back at the gym soon after, sometimes the very next day to work on another part of my body while the first part tries desperately to repair itself. This cycle of suffering ends only if I die or decide to give up lifting, which in the eyes of the gym rats around me is kind of the same thing.

So back I go. It's hard knowing that while "heavy" is at least manageable, "HEAVY" is the only way I'm going to get better at this.

And worst of all? I'm paying both Kirk and the gym owner Frank for this suffering.

It always bears repeating: No one ever said I was a genius.

The day-to-day stuff that makes a marriage

Today is our 33rd anniversary. We were married on June 6, 1992, nearly one-third of a century and six U.S. presidents ago.

Relationships, particularly marriages, are very much about such milestones, but you only have so many of these big moments along the way.

What you have a lot more of is the stuff of life. You get one honeymoon and several thousand trips to the grocery store. One wedding and countless trash pick-up days. One each of your silver and gold anniversaries, and many hundred times each of cutting the grass and going to your kids' sporting events and school concerts.

This is not at all to take the romance out of marriage. I've just found that the deepest connection comes from the shared experience of late-night newborn feedings, exhausting family vacations in the minivan, sitting together reading quietly in the living room, and working as a team to catch the little mouse your cats have cornered in the basement.

It's worried discussions over finances, small compromises that keep the peace, gently making fun of each others' little faults, and laughing way too hard at the dumb joke you asked Alexa to tell at bedtime, right before you turn out the lights and both fall asleep.

It's kids' drawings on the side of the fridge, dust balls in the corner of the kitchen no one has the energy to clean up, and going together to the vet to put down a beloved old pet who will never be healthy again.

It's all of that and many other things you won't find preserved in a scrapbook but that are the substance of a lifelong commitment.

Today that's what I celebrate. Not so much the fact that it happens to be exactly 33 years, but rather the often-forgotten but deeply valuable, minute-by-minute reality of life spent as a couple.

It's worth celebrating. Every bit of it.