Weekly Round Up: Since We Last Talked

A semi-weekly round up: early retirement life, eats, workouts, watches, and reads.

Well friends, since we last talked, everything came to pass.  My last day of work was October 31st, and the only snag to my plan to walk my laptop down to FedEx at 3:00 is that my boss scheduled our exit interview for 3:30.  So I walked it down at 3:50!

I am now two weeks into early retirement, and two things have happened: I feel so much better, both physically and mentally, and I've been hella busy.

My first priority was to squeeze in a trip, so I spent the first week of November in Ottawa and Toronto.  It was a great way to relax and to get material for the Canadian versions of this post and this post.

The highlight of Ottawa was urban leaf peeping and being able to walk from Ontario to Quebec.

The highlight of Toronto was...everything.  I used to go to Toronto very frequently for work, but that was 20 years ago and it was all work and no play.  I was more than overdue for a refresh of the city.

[I started working on a trip recap post but found myself with an epic case of blogger's block, so I skipped it.  TBD if I'll get back to it or just let it go.]

Then I came home and got to work!  No, not that kind of work.  I've been living my predicted schedule of learning things in the morning and doing things in the afternoons.

• I'm almost done with my required CPE to maintain my CPA license (yawn).
• I've started working on Spanish, which means a Duolingo lesson and then a Pimsleur lesson.  My intention is to keep this pattern up on weekdays.  I have no expectation of ever becoming fluent in another language, it's just a general interest/"let's see what happens" thing.  Right now my plan is to keep at the Spanish for three months, then switch to French, and then to German, and rinse and repeat.
• I started on a deep clean of the house in the afternoons, but by day two I decided that this was a highly overrated activity.  My goal is to deep clean one room per week, and we don't have that many rooms in our house so this is not a long term project.

I don't have any other trips scheduled as of right now, but that's subject to change at any moment.

Eats

Nothing notable to report.

Workouts

The normal treadmill stuff for cardio, and I've been able to stick to a routine of body weight exercises to kick things off in the strength department.  The main impediment to doing strength before was partly time and mostly because of the tension in my shoulders that would set in by 9:15 every weekday morning.  Now that I don't have those roadblocks, it's very easy/natural to take strength breaks in my morning routine.  I feel stronger, so we'll see where this goes.

So far I've done one group hike on a weekday and this weekend I went to Mohican State Park to start knocking back the trails.  It's a bit of a haul from where I live, but a very beautiful place.

Watching

Lol, Alfred Hitchcock movies.  Plus season two of The Gilded Age.

Reading

Surprisingly, I haven't been reading very much, so this is a shorter list than you would think.

First up is a book I've been hearing about on the Sarah's Bookshelves podcast for a while and I finally bit the bullet and read it.  I Might Be in Trouble by Daniel Aleman is about a writer who wakes up with a dead man in his bed.  Is he in trouble or did he just find the inspo for his next book?  Or both?  It was an enjoyable, not too deep read.

Next up: I rewatched the movie, so of course I had to reread the book.  That would be Strangers on a Train by Patrica Highsmith.  As the title suggests, two strangers get to chatting on a train and find out that they each have a person in their life who they would be better off without.  One of the strangers suggests a simple solution, which is the perfect murder: each man could murder the other person's problem person and that way neither would be suspected.  The only problems with the plan are that the other stranger isn't on board and the first stranger won't take no for an answer.  I need to finish the book to give a definite opinion, but so far my vote is that the movie is better than the book - and there's nothing wrong with the book.

Finally: I've been listening to the Best of Both Worlds podcast for a while, so it was only a matter of time before I started reading Laura Vanderkam's books.  I'm listening to 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think.  I was expecting the message to be "you have more time than you think if you will get up at 4 AM and stop watching TV" but that's not it at all.  It's very interesting.

Peace out!