A New Life Begins

Although I enjoyed my job as the years passed, I began to feel “Oh, I can’t wait until I retire!”  There were so many things that I would rather be doing than sitting in an office doing what I did, so when department changes began in 2012, I had enough and decided to plan my retirement.

I entered a program that allowed me to work as a retired person for up to five years after. At the end of that period, my employment ended. So, although my work retirement began in 2012, I officially retired in December of 2017, finally free to do the things I dreamed of doing. In an ironic turn of events, my husband’s company began downsizing in 2017, and he decided to retire on the same day. Now we are both in this new life together.  Big changes were ahead for us.

The first thing we did was sell our big house and move to a much smaller home in a nice quiet town close to the beach. The new home was great but needed to be updated, and doing much of the work ourselves, we made the work our priority.  Although this was not one of the things I dreamed of doing while I was working, it was exciting to redesign and update the house and see it transformed from its 1996 design, to our newly remodeled 2017, retirement home. After a few months of work, the biggest part of it was done and by March of 2018, we were able to move in.

The fun thing about retirement is not having official deadlines. Well, unless you’re me! Once I start something, I have to finish it as quickly as possible. Because I don’t like clutter or unfinished projects, I set deadlines for myself which sometimes drive my husband crazy. The biggest part of updating the house was complete but there were other projects I had in mind for us so I was about to find out just how annoyed, and how annoying he could be. We would now be together 24/7.

Now on to the things I dreamed of doing.