Weekly Round Up: A Walk in the Park

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

Early Retirement Life

My tentative plan is to alternate weeks at home with weeks of either travel or local adventures.  By rights this should have been an adventure week, but fate had other plans and I got the Cold from Hell instead.

The upside of being sick in retirement is that if I'm tired I can simply get into bed and rest instead of having to power through work.  The downside is that not being able to sleep due to uncontrollable coughing is pretty miserable regardless of your employment status.  I'm feeling nearly back to normal now.

My "early retirement when sick schedule" is to get up when Hubs gets up, have a good long couch rot session, do my morning learning session with breaks for body weight exercises, have lunch and walk the dog, and to pick away at a few tasks in the afternoons.  I'm finding it useful to keep a to do list on my phone which I fill in as things come to me and then I'll pick 2-3 things from the list to work on in the afternoons.  Examples are various house projects, the normal cleaning stuff, replacing batteries in a handful of random items, doing our Thanksgiving shopping...you get the idea.

Eats

Nothing notable to report.  I've been so tired this week that food was the furthest thing from my mind.

Workouts

Doggo and I went to a park about 20 minutes away that I've always meant to explore this weekend and hiked all of the trails (four 1 mile routes, so a very doable project).

She got to pose with her spirit animal.

And enjoyed a little rock climbing.

Watching

As I suspected, retirement is not a time of endless TV watching.  I continue to knock back Alfred Hitchcock movies in the evenings and that's about it.

Reading

Let's talk!

I finished Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith.  I'm going to include a spoiler discussion in my next Hitchcock installment on the differences between the book and the movie, but I'll go ahead and tell you my verdict.  The movie had to change a key plot point to comply with censorship standards, which waters down the message of the book.  However, the movie still wins!  The way that the actors bring the characters to life and the overall fun and zip of the movie is priceless.

I also finished 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam.  I can't think of a better point in my life than the start of retirement to have read this book.  My average experience with self help books is (1) big splashy title, (2) author tells great opening story, and (3) the rest of the book is filler, so I was delighted to see that (3) was quite different for this book.  I had heard of the list of 100 dreams, and I kind of got it but it helped to have more of an explanation and a purpose.  The list of 100 dreams can include things that you've already done, and the purpose is to have a list of "I want to do that" things ready to go to help you direct where you want to spend your time.  She advocates against low value activities such as cooking elaborate meals every single night and having a squeaky clean home.  This jives with my day two retirement experience of realizing that deep cleaning my house was not how I wanted to spend my time.

I read the Hot It book of the moment, which is Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy.  It was very readable, and in that sense I enjoyed it, but was left at the end with a "the world is going to hell so what's the point?" vibe.

I started a new audio book that I am loving, which is This American Woman: A One in a Billion Memoir by Zarna Garg.  The author grew up in India, and watched her dad set up arranged marriages for her older siblings, which was the norm.  However, when her mother died when she was 15, her dad decided that it was time that she got married, which had her heading for the streets and later getting a student visa to live with her sister in the US.

Peace Out!