Articles with retirement transition

Retirement is Killing My Blog

Before I quit my job and headed into the great of unknown of being a Stay At Home Dad (SAHD) I had all kinds of thoughts about how this blog could follow along. First of all, I could be different from other bloggers that hit retirement and then faded into the sunset (and kudo’s to them for pivoting away from the blogging world to live life). That won’t be me, I said, I can write about all this new stuff! There’s so much new stuff it won’t be difficult at all coming up with blog posts each, I said… That’s true! I have a shitload of new and different situations going on with the SSC family. Except that one thing has changed that has made a significant impact on the blog. That one thing is the fact I’m not in front of a computer 8-10 hours a day anymore.

Unlike most bloggers, I did most okay, all of my blogging at the office. Oh yeah! I got to work at 6am and had a solid 2 hrs before the rest of the company showed up to work. If you look back at old comments you’ll notice most come between 6-7am, lol. I also used that time to write posts, edit posts, and tinker with the blog. Nowadays, my computer is upstairs in my music/art/office area. It’s great!

The instruments are right there!

My own little space, nice view out the window. A perfect writing nook. For it to be functional, I need to actually be up there and writing and that just hasn’t been happening. I’ve got too much other stuff going on to head upstairs for 2-4 hours a week and bang out a post, respond to comments, etc… Life is just too damn exciting!

What’s Been Going On

I’ve been staying busy with the house, kids, getting adjusted to the SAHD lifestyle. It’s been pretty great so far! I haven’t been super great at managing time as I wanted to be. My time debts get racked up pretty quickly some weeks and others are smooth sailing. The cold has finally broken here so I’ve been a bit more focused on the outside since things will be green, ticks will be out (wait, they’re already back), snakes and scorpions will be out again, and I can’t willy nilly go grabbing anything off the ground. We’ve gotten a LOT done over the winter and the “backyard” is way more usable than it was when we moved in last summer. Not the fenced in part, but the woods outside of that area. We had someone gather and haul off 120 cubic yards of brush/trees that I’d gathered up or where scattered around the property. I cut down over 30 trees and hauled at least 20-30 cubic yards of mostly decomposed wood into an old ravine on our property. I figured I could use it to make a hugelkultur of sorts and fill it with wood. The guy with the skid steer squashed it down once, then I mounded it up again and he squashed more and then topped it with dirt from around the yard. At least some of the trees will go back into the ground, right?

School and CASA

School volunteering is moving along, but it hasn’t been as consistent as I expected. Mostly from my own doing, but I’m getting back to at least once a week being a Watchdog. Prior to that, I’ve been volunteering for every other thing like, field trip chaperone, state testing monitor (OMG, so dull…), PT librarian, and more. That’s been fun and it’s great getting to see the kiddo’s during the school day.

CASA training is nearly complete! Woohoo!! 8 weeks of training is coming to a close and we’ll have our swearing in this Friday. It’s been difficult as it has been 3 hrs a week of training, but mostly difficult because it occurs at the same time as my DBSA group meetings. DBSA is the Depression Bi-polar Support Alliance and the have group meetings for people dealing with those issues or anxiety or anything else they want to come and talk about.  Those have been super helpful for me and I’ll be glad to get back to my Thursday meetings. It’s just nice having a place to share and be open with people dealing with same/similar issues. It’s been rough missing those, but that’s almost over.

Hobbies

I previously thought I’d be doing exercising/training a lot and putting in time to all my different hobbies with all this free time and that hasn’t quite worked out how I thought. Everyone is always saying “retire TO something…” not away from things. Well, I have a shitload of stuff I retired to, but like my last posts have pointed out it doesn’t mean that your hobbies are now your new default time killer.

Yep, whatever habits you had before retiring don’t magically change with more free time. If you wasted a lot of time on phone games, that won’t change until you break that habit. Same with TV, naps, procrastination, etc… Like Maggie at Northern Expenditure said, “Retired you is still you.” That is SO true. I’ve struggled with this even though I’ve also been doing hobbies and tackling the yard/woods/house like crazy. I finished building my banjo and it actually plays! Yay! I put together 2 adirondack chairs and stools that my FIL brought up for us. I’ve got the plans picked out for the cedar woodstrip canoe I’m starting on, and have been scouting spots for a garden for next year or this fall. I’m putting in a compost pile today and have the front flower beds I’ve been transplanting bushes out of and making a plan for them.

Inside, I have a lot of painting to do, an attic exhaust fan to rebalance, one last horrid push of adding insulation before it gets really warm and the attic comes to life with spiders, scorpions and god knows what else. They’re already moving around as I saw a spider in our shed yesterday, so sooner is better than later… Also, it’s a really, really tight spot, just to get into another really tight spot. Shudder…

Exercise

Triathlons and that kind of exercise have disappeared lately. I let the Texasman tri and OKC Memorial Marathon (half-marathon for me) sneak up on me and won’t be ready for either of them. Mainly because I haven’t been running consistently or swimming at all since we moved. Unless it’s open water swimming, my only other option is joining the university pool or the Y. Both are a little spendy considering when the kids get out of school in another month or 2 I won’t have free time to bike, run, or swim as I’ll be full-time babysitter. Yipe!!

Also, the meds I’m taking are not helping with my motivation. In short, if I could nap 2-3 hrs a day I would. I sleep from about 10-10:30 pm – 5:50 am so it’s not like I’m getting too little or too much sleep. Regardless, I feel like I have zero energy constantly, zero motivation, and a massive amount of apathy towards exercise in general. That’s led to putting on about 8-10 lbs though, so I need to get over it and get back into exercising, drop some weight, and be a better health role model for the kids.

Time for New Habits  

In short, I’ve designated April as the month to break bad habits and work on new ones. Starting with this blog post! Sure, it’s a day late from my usual Tuesday posts, but it’s also a month behind my last one, so… You gotta start somewhere right? Secondly, I deleted a couple of phone games as I realized they’re way too much of a timesuck. I’m going back to my previous google calendar schedule of exercise, playing music, painting, woodworking, CASA, school volunteering, etc… This will just have to be a slower approach to some of these, but as long as it’s consistent I think it will work. Finally, I’m getting back to blogging consistently, well more consistently than once a month, lol. There is a TON to write about with how things have changed with our budget, lifestyle, routines, spending, just everything. I need to be better at putting it out there and writing about how things change post-work life and every other thing I’m now dealing with, like grocery shopping (I found our ALDI and had good $$ wins there), being default parent (kids dr’s, dentists, summer programs, homework, laundry, etc…), and taking care of this property. There’s so much I want to do, but it just takes time. Like bees! I wanted to get a couple of hives, but will have to wait until next year due to budget issues – mainly my allowance is at $0.

Summary

I let life run my schedule and didn’t fight back when important things got pushed out of it. It’s easy to get so “busy” living life, cleaning house, doing your thing that you realize it’s been 2 months since you’ve done the stuff you thought you’d be doing all the time. It’s time to be more mindful of my time. I mean, I’ve been mindful of it, it just hasn’t been spent the way I would’ve thought. Now to redirect it back to the things I’d rather be doing, and the blog is one of them. Yay! It will continue! I realized when I was working I had limited time so I made the most of my free time and tried to fit as much stuff in there as possible. Now that I have loads of free time, the drive isn’t there because – I can do that tomorrow – and guess what? Tomorrow never comes… That changes this month.

Have you experienced this or am I the only one?

Transitions Can Be Rough – Stay Flexible

“I told Althea I was feeling lost – lacking in some direction.” This lyric by the Grateful Dead has been bouncing around my brain the last 6 months. Why the last 6 months? That’s been the amount of time since I moved from Houston to Oklahoma. The plan was that I would transition to Stay at Home Dad (SAHD)/default parent and Mrs. SSC would continue working. Why do I get to quit work and she doesn’t? Well, in short, she wants to continue teaching because she loves it, it’s her passion and it does a lot to invigorate her soul. It’s the main reason we switched from pursuing Early Retirement and started working to create our Lifestyle Change. While I loved what I did for work, I’ve written about many times before that there are always things that I’d rather be doing than working.

If you read any FIRE (Financially Independent Retire Early) blogs, eventually you’ll read, “You should retire TO something, not AWAY from something” and it’s a valid point. You don’t want to wake up retired and ask yourself, “what now?” There should be some plan in place for what you want to do with the amazing gift of free time that you just gave yourself. I had one in place, and much like our own FFLC (Fully Funded Lifestyle Change) plans, it needed to be flexible because it too has morphed quite a bit.

The Original Transition Plan

My original plans with my “free time” seemed to be pretty simple. I wanted to do more exercising/training for triathlons, more yard work/gardening, play more music, volunteer at the kids school, volunteer as a CASA, fish more, do woodworking, and homebrew more.  Oh… And keep the house clean, laundry done, weekly menu planned, groceries stocked, kids bathed, dogs vet appt’s and medicines on schedule, and stay on top of home maintenance duties. Easy Peasy, right? I figured I would set up a similar schedule as Justin at Root of Good and see, there’s time for everything I want to do right there, including video games!

Here’s the thing. Major life transitions and schedule changes don’t come easily. Also, I had the first 3 months of relocating feeling chained to the house with the remote assignment I got with my company. Loved the money, hated the feeling of limbo. That threw things out of whack for a while because I felt like I wasn’t fully committed to anything. Eesh… Also, it seemed that whenever I’d start to get in a routine, something would happen and throw it out of whack. You know, life.

What Actually Happened

I think it’s easier to start with what didn’t happen with those above mentioned “wants”.

  • The triathlon training/exercising went out the window pretty quickly. I started running when we first moved here, but after a month or so, it dropped off.
  • Playing more music and learning the dobro. That is also not where I’d like it. Maybe it’s that the instruments are upstairs, but mainly, it’s just not as much of a priority as I expected it to be.
  • Homebrewing started okay, but I’ve only brewed 1 batch since I got here and have 1 batch on deck. Maybe I’ll do that today.
  • Volunteer at the kids school. They have a program called WATCH Dogs and I applied to that before school started. It took until mid-December to hear anything back and be able to start volunteering, so I say that’s a 50/50 as planned. Regardless, I couldn’t do much with it until mid-December, so it didn’t go as I planned.
  • Weekly menu planning. Sweet Jesus, did this crash and burn spectacularly… It’s only been this past month that I’ve been doing that more and staying on top of it. Whoopsies!
  • Fishing more. I did more fishing with my oldest in the last 5 months than we did most years in Houston. He’s started asking to go fishing more often and we live right by a lake. We also used to live right by a lake, but he didn’t want to go much back then.
  • Woodworking… Ugh, I didn’t get my bandsaw setup and put a blade on it until January. I’ll call that a fail.
  • Video games. Even with Red Dead Redemption 2, and Battlefield V coming out, I’ve played less than I did in Houston. Maybe less need to zone out in a game and unwind? IDK…

I did get sucked into a LOT more yard work and home maintenance than I thought. I’ve created another massive pile of brush and trees, similar to that first massive set of brush piles when we first moved in.

There’s 1 more pile of brush not pictured. SO much work…

As mentioned before, I installed 264 batts of insulation, replaced multiple electrical outlets, replaced the guts to 3 sinks and 1 toilet, vacuumed the walls, ceilings, and cabinets of the house due to the massive amount of dust present when we first moved in.

The treadmill gets used!! So much insulation, not all pictured here.

I unpacked and organized some rooms, but so many more to go (organizing, not unpacking, lol), scheduled and met with 4 different AC guys to replace furnace and AC, same with insulation peeps, carpet installers, and multiple various repairmen for things like the septic system or water softener that I won’t tackle myself. Yet… I know there are way more I didn’t mention, but you get the idea.

“I’m becoming less defined as days go by,
Fading away…
Well you might say I’m losing focus,
Kinda drifting into the abstract
In terms of how I see myself”

— NIN

In short, I didn’t know who I was, who I was supposed to be, what role I was supposed to be filling and I felt like I was doing a poor job at all of them…

Health – Don’t Forget Your Brain!

I also spent a LOT of time at Dr’s appointments it seemed. A main focus was to get my mental health in check, something I’ve wholly neglected the last 5 years and have been treating ineffectively the last 10-20 years. Exercise and occasional Serotonin boosts don’t do shit to a chemical imbalance. You know what’s made a 180 difference in my life and my families lives this past 6 months? Depression meds. Funny, how that correlation works. I wish I’d done it decades sooner but am more glad I didn’t wait decades later. Don’t be like me. It’s not a failure to admit you need to see a psychiatrist. I know it felt like it to me, but that’s just the depression talking. Trust me, that’s the single best thing I’ve done for myself and my family since I’ve had a family.

I also went to a general physician because my last full checkup was ~7 yrs ago. Turns out I’m still healthy, but follow-ups on a couple of minor issues took way more visits and time than expected because… doctors.

Essentially, even though I had a lot of “free time” it was all focused on my health and getting the house and yard where we want it. But, every time I felt that I had some things under control I’d get reminded that I was letting other things slip. D’oh!

The Current Schedule

I had a lot of calendar reminders setup to help me with everything I mentioned above that I didn’t end up actually doing, and eventually, I deleted all but a couple of those. It was just something else to dismiss when it popped up on my phone or watch.

In January, I had another lightbulb moment!

I realized that I’m the only one in charge of my time and why not focus towards things I want to focus on? Simple, but brilliant!

I get up before 6am each day, and get the kids up, their lunches packed and ready for school, that’s the same.

I have coffee and time to slowly sip it, while I watch deer in the backyard, or check out news, or new blog posts from PF peeps.

Cold day for hiking!

Then, I do one of a few things that are “for me” things. This can be going hiking, I’ve gotten into getting out there 2-3 days a week, playing music, painting, or woodworking.

Liberal Arts

Mrs. SSC and I are also taking an oil painting class, and man, I’m digging it. I’ve never painted with oil before, but it’s fun. Very Zen and relaxing and I can see continuing that after our class ends. Plus, I keep finding cool old oak trees while I’m hiking that I take pictures of and think, “Oh, that would be a cool painting, especially in spring when the leaves are just starting to come out…”

This will be fun to paint!
Looks dead but it isn’t yet. Can’t wait to see leaves on it.

Playing music hasn’t progressed as much as I’d have thought, but again, it’s just not as much a priority as I thought it would be. Things go in cycles, and it’s on an off cycle evidently. I do still play more than between Aug. – Dec. but not as much as I would’ve thought. Oh well.

Woodworking

I got my bay of the garage set up to where it’s a functioning shop now. I hung 2 new LED shop lights, a dust filter, and have it where it’s workable. I need to build a router table for my next project but have an old desktop I think I can repurpose well for that.

This was such a chore to do solo. 2’x3’x1′ thick and 60 lbs…

I’m currently finishing a banjo I began building from scratch ~7 yrs ago. I got it to the point of connecting the neck and pot and then our son was born and I let it fall by the wayside. I’m almost finished with it and hope to have it done by the weekend. So exciting!!

The dowel being fitted to the pot. It holds the neck on.
Drilling the hole for the dowel. Lining it up correctly is tricky.

I got the approval from Mrs. SSC to build a shoe cubby for our entry way, so that will be the next small project and my next big project is building a wood-strip canoe. Oh yeah! Starting from scratch again with that one! Of course, I need a planer now, but that’s kind of how these things go. I can use it when I build the stand-up paddle boards next. Yeah, I found plans for those and can build my own lighter and cheaper than commercial ones. Good stuff!

SAHD Life

I’m embracing the SAHD role more and more. I’ve gotten my own schedule for groceries, Mrs. SSC and I tag team the weekly menu some weeks, others I just do it, no big whoop. I’ve gotten into a better routine for kids’ laundry, cleaning, and you know, house hold stuff.

CASA training started last week and will go another 7 weeks, so that is coming to fruition.

Volunteering at school has been great! I’ve been doing at least 1 day a week at school as a WATCH Dog and it’s been awesome getting to see the kids there during the day. I cooked some chili for a cookoff that raised $140 for a classroom and I got 2nd place! I also called Bingo for the chili/bingo night. I have been volunteering enough there that I get told, “We were excited to see you were on the schedule, thanks so much for coming in!” So yeah, that’s been great.

Summary

While the transition to SAHD hasn’t gone as planned, life has been pretty good. It could’ve been better and definitely could’ve been worse, but no complaints overall. If you’re looking to make a transition to anything, just remember it will take time to “get it right”. What you think should be “right” might not end up being that at all. Just be flexible and go with it.