photo credit: VinothChandar

Writing that title, I feel kind of silly expecting anything to happen one month in.

Your supportive comments on my last post have helped. This past month I’ve explored my bus route and our local Senior Center, walked a little more, done some crafts, gone to organizing class and worked on organizing at home, spent a lot of time giving my current medication “time to work” on my flare-up (it hasn’t), and being alone.

I’ve discovered that I don’t want to be alone this much, our Senior Center isn’t a place I’d like to hang out, but it has great classes, and I miss my former coworkers terribly. I’m homesick for my job.

When people hear I’ve retired, they get a big smile on their faces and congratulate me. No one seems to know how big a change it is, though.

I didn’t realize how “cold turkey” the separation from coworkers would be. While they all still want to talk to me, they don’t have time. Work has gotten busy, and many of my emails and phone messages don’t get returned.

My friend Steve, the only one who was friends outside of work, continues to email as before. However, he will not get together in person because he’s married and doesn’t want to give people the wrong idea. So I never see him at all.

My other friend, Terri, is someone I got along with really well, enjoyed, and had hoped to see outside of work. We planned for me to visit her on the weekends, but the plans never solidified. They still haven’t.

I miss the others, too. Spending nine years working with a hundred people is a lot of social interaction. Now, most days I see no one. I’ve stopped just “droppng in” at work because it’s too far to travel just for the possibility of seeing people.

So, until June when the new classes start, I’m going through withdrawal, and it’s painful. I’m grateful for my therapist, email, Facebok, and the blogosphere, which haven’t changed.

Things will get better.

                          

photo credit: VinothChandar

For many people, the idea of retirement means complete joy.

When work has had to be your life, when your retirement has been sudden and more due to illness than choice, when you have no spouse or other family, when you have not been able to have a social life outside of work, retiring is a massive and stressful life event.

Suddenly I had no “context.” There was nowhere else where “everybody knows my name.” Nowhere to go every morning. Nowhere to rush home from.

Over the two weeks since retiring, I’ve come to realize that the advice I was given by two people, that I would now have to very deliberately and proactively create my own “contexts,” was going to be a necessity.

On a couple of days, I wanted to go back to work. I missed work and some of my co-workers terribly. So I went to work — to visit.

It helped a lot, though one person chided me for going “backward” instead of forward, and another suggested that along with this drastic change of activity, I ought to make a drastic change to healthier eating habits. Yikes, no! I was trying to make it less drastic, not more so.

Hampered by a flare-up of Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease, I am taking it slowly. My mind has begun to accept that it’s okay to let go of the Puritan work ethic.

I have put phone numbers into my cell phone and email addresses into my email program for all my favorite coworkers. I have joined a monthly support group for decluttering. I’ve found the new post office, bank, drugstore and library that I’ll need.

I am much less scared.

                          

photo credit: KevinLallier

Looking Back

As you look back over your life, what ONE thing are you most proud of? I’m sure you have plenty of things to be proud of, but please restrict it to just one.

photo credit: Tjook

Looking Forward

When you think about the future, what one thing would you most like to accomplish or do in your life? Again, just ONE.

I’ll answer these questions too, after you have all had a chance to contribute.

                          

photo credit: ` TheDreamSky

Let’s play a game. Call it Utopia Now.

The Game

Let’s pretend we’re building a new country, because it seems to me that in America we need to, either now or some time soon. Instead of starting with who we want to elect, or what policies we want to favor, let’s start with the values upon which we want to base our new country. Those of you not living in America have your choice — you can play for the U.S. or for your own country.

These can be values upon which the country was supposed to be based in the first place but wasn’t or isn’t now, or they can be other values. While we may disagree on policies, we may actually agree on values. Or not.

1.  List the top two values you’d like to see in your fellow man and you’d like to live up to yourself.

In my case, my top two values are integrity and fairness. Integrity means I try not to lie to people and I try to present my authentic self as much as I’m able to. It also means that I cringe when I see this happen: A cashier gives a young lady too much change, and her reaction is to say, “Cool!”

Fairness means no discrimination, no animal cruelty, live and let live. Fairness also means trying to identify someone’s best motives for doing something — a practice I’m not very good at.

2.  List the top two values you’d like to see in your government.

In my case, those values would be integrity and fairness again.

Integrity would mean not accepting lobbyist money, not bowing to special interests, doing what’s right because it’s what’s right.

Fairness would mean a flat percentage income tax. It would mean no discrimination. It would mean equal access to government resources and equal opportunity to hold office.

Now it’s your turn. Please write your best values.

                          

photo credit: aroid

Yesterday was the first snow of the year for me. We had one earlier snow, but it didn’t last long enough for me to get home and see it.

Yesterday’s snow floated down as big, fluffy snowflakes. However, they were so warm that they liquefied as they landed, meaning that the effect on people and the ground was exactly the same as rain.

Out popped a whole bunch of umbrellas. This is a DC custom that I keep forgetting to adopt — umbrellas for snow.

Another odd DC accessories-for-weather situation comes up when it rains. The preferred DC items to wear on your feet in the rain? Flipflops. I asked a coworker what people do when they get to work — how do they wash the street grit off their feet? She said, “Puddles.”

Does your town or city have some unusual customs?

                          

photo credit: Patrick Hoesly

A few years ago, I bought a programmable alarm clock that allowed me to set a different alarm for every day of the week. Two days a week, I had to get up an hour earlier and I was tired of resetting my old clock.

The only problem with the new clock was, when the power went out (which happens fairly frequently around here), I had to reset all those alarms. I had a choice of a buzzer or the radio to wake up to. However, that clock eventually broke, and I could only wake up to music. The music put me back to sleep.

Then I bought a talking alarm clock that ran on batteries. I could wake up to a cuckoo, a cheeping bird, or a rooster. Man, I hated that rooster.

Soon this clock began to malfunction, sometimes not sounding an alarm at all because the switch was not quite on the right spot.

Next was a cheap alarm clock that simply sounded a tone. The tone sounded more and more frequently if I let it keep ringing. This clock, too, would occasionally fail to sound if the button wasn’t exactly on the right spot.

Finally, I bought a more expensive alarm clock. It actually sets the time itself and has two alarms. In case of a power failure, it will reset the time and the alarms for you. I tried it for the first time last night, and it kept waking me up with its ticking. Why on earth would an electronic alarm clock need to tick?

The best alarm clock I ever had was an analog wind-up alarm clock. You wound it every night. The alarm bells were a bit too loud. The clock used no power at all (except that of my hand) and never failed to ring, even when the power went out.

I wonder if they still sell those. THAT technology was powerful.

                          

photo credit: virginsuicide photography

We, the manufacturers of the world, hereby make the following resolutions for the New Year, 2012.

1. We will stop having our TV commercials follow the example of the late Billy Mays and scream everything at you.
2. We will stop making products that break the day after the warranty expires.
3. Instead of taking a perfectly good product and making it “New and Improved,” we will continue making that product and create a separate “New and Improved” product, so you can choose.


photo credit: Clean Wal-Mart

4. We will stop making our products needlessly complex.


photo credit: BrickArt!san

5. We will make sure our engineers see the products AFTER the designers, so the the products are practical, not just pretty.
6. We will test our products with real people, not just our own employees.
7. All printing on our products will be easily legible.
8. We software manufacturers will not add features and change commands just to be able to sell a new version.
9. We software manufacturers will not constantly issue updates and bug fixes. We will fix our bugs before selling you our products.
10. We will not outsource our customer support to people who either aren’t completely fluent in English, or don’t understand the problem, or both.

11. If our executives are part of the 99%, they will be required to donate 10% of their income to the poor.

photo credit: babasteve

                          

photo credit: kevin dooley

In no particular order –

1. My old hair color with no gray.
2. A flat stomach.
3. More hair on my head.
4. The ability to eat whatever I want.
5. A comfortable pension to retire on.
6. A kind, sexy man who finds me irresistible.
7. Several great friends who live close by.
8. 20-20 vision.
9. More chocolate.
10. Peace on earth.

 

                          

McPherson Square Structure (photo courtesy of Occupy Wall Street)

Today, December 10, 2011, is Human Rights Day. It is also the day that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has called for its supporters “to stand up for our rights together and to demand the rights we were promised in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed and approved by most of the world’s governments and the basis for many of our constitutions.”

Occupy Wall Street is an international movement with supporters in many nations. What else are they asking for? The group is quite heterogeneous, but their basic goal is to bring about a worldwide revolution through peaceful means, such as civil disobedience. The Occupy movement, according to its website, has no official list of demands, since no consensus has yet been reached.

However, the website displays a proposed list that was posted by an OWS supporter in one of its forums. The llist has made its way into the news media, and contains some common liberal issues, such as much greater funding for environmental protection, election reform, a guaranteed living wage, healthcare reform, racial and gender equality, and the right for all to unionize.

The list also contains some odd things that sound unworkable, unreasonable or perhaps even self-serving, such as free college education, “[i]mmediate across the board debt forgiveness for all,” open borders for all nations, and outlawing credit reporting agencies.

In Washington, D.C., OWS supporters built a wooden structure at Freedom Plaza to shelter them from the weather. Theh police eventually tore it down. On Wednesday, December 7, they built a similar “People’s Pavilion” at McPherson Square (see photo above). This structure, they said, is intended to symbolize all the people who have lost their homes “stolen by banks and corporate greed….” Thus far, it remains standing.

While we might find OWS’s goal of global revolution to be too radical and unnecessary, we can hope that some of its protests will help pressure world governments and corporations to move towards greater democracy and human rights.

                          

photo credit: diskychick

As we enter the holiday season in the U.S., one of the most stressful times of the year, I give you five videos of kids and adults laughing and giggling.

The first 2/3 is bad puns (no, that’s an oxymoron). The giggles are worth the wait.

Psst – This is the best one!

There. Now don’t you feel better?

Redesign: After disliking the minimalist look ever since it became popular with bloggers, I have finally fallen for it. I promised you, Dear Readers, that I wouldn’t change the theme on this blog for a year. It’s almost two years, and now I’m enjoying one of the best things about blogging for me — designing — in hopes it will encourage me to write.