Weeknote #1
Life updates
I'm almost at 60.... it's looming on the near horizon, 7 days remains of my 50s.
To be honest my 50s hasn't been the best decade of my life, and I'm looking forward to the next chapter with hope that it'll prove to be better than the last one.
I started my 50s with one positive thing - I started diary-keeping again after a break of 20+ years and it's been one of the best things I've done. I also started my 50s with a sense of gloom and a growing moodiness and general meh feeling.
Within 2 years I'd had a heart attack & survived a total cardiac arrest. I recovered (physically) very quickly. Mentally I don't think it's been so complete a recovery.
After recovering from the heart-attack I developed another long-term illness which has proved to be more intrusive and painful and just plain annoying.... and I'm still, 7 years into the journey, struggling with finding the right medical treatment.
So.... I'm looking into the future.
60 approaches.
I'm still working. Still at somebody's beck-and-call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week...
I'm self-employed, and therefore with more notionally free time than a full-time-employee, I still never feel like my down time is really my time, when I'm free to relax. I always need my 'phone. I always need to be contactable. Need to at least respond when called at any time of the day/night/week day/weekend.
It all gets rather a drag.......
I look at my pension savings and wonder "Can I retire?"
I wonder how long my pension can be stretched, how many years before there's nothing left, and then leaving me reliant totally on the State.
I do calculations that say "It'll last 15 years" or if I delay taking it to allow it to increase in value "it might last 20 years"....
But how long will I last?
How long will I be around to enjoy retirement? How much money will be enough to live happily. No point retiring if you end up living like you did as a student.... with no spare cash..... and an open-ended timespan over which to make it last.
So I push on, stay working. Another couple of years....? Then think again.....
I'm conscious that my dad retired at 65, in the month of July. He was dead in the October. He didn't get much of a chance to enjoy his freedom.
But if you retire too early and run out of money.... you live too long.... then you don't enjoy it much either.
.... which all means I need to start ENJOYING my 60s when they arrive, even if I'm unsure of the future...
I've been mulling over stuff like this, this week.
Hobbies & down-time
I have also been mulling over what I do in my me-time. What interests do I actually have. What absorbs me and gives my joy?
I have given up on my one long-time hobby - Radio. I started playing around with radio as a hobby in my teens. I've been doing it on-and-off for 40+ years. I no longer find it enjoyable. Things have changed in the radio hobby itself. Things have changed in my expectations of the radio hobby and what I might get from it. Things have changed. Full Stop.
I've got other interests. Radio was never the only think I was involved in. But what can I have as the one thing that makes me happy? Something to do just for its own sake?
I read, occasionally. In spurts of 3 or so months at a time. Then nothing.... then read-read-read.....
I have an interest in RPN Calculators. Hewlett Packard, Swiss Micros. I can get engrossed in their little worlds. Studying their different behaviours. Writing programs. Experimenting with speed-testing-benchmarks. Using them to calculate stuff. Using them to learn some new aspects of mathematics....
I'm starting (re-starting?) blogging. This time I'll be more active. I've kept blogs before. I had a Blogger account full of radio and electronic and other techy-geeky stuff a few years ago. It even got read by random strangers.... I had a WordPress blog ''Make It Tea" in around 2016 when I first dabbled with quitting drinking. I joined in the "sober-bloggersphere" and enjoyed the practice of writing, and that again, some people actually read it. I went back to drinking in 2017.... and the Blog died and I took it down. I think I've got one old post from there, I'll try and find it.... I gave up drinking again in 2021, this time For Good. I haven't blogged about it. I just did it, because I'd enjoyed the first experiment in 2016 and I felt that I wanted to feel like that again. Free. And it's been one of the best things I've ever done. Diary-writing and Teetotalism. The two things I have started that I'm most pleased with .
....yes, then.... blogging as I cross into a new decade. This can be one of my hobbies now. We need something to look forward to. Something to stretch us. Something to expend time and mental energy on. Something we do just for ourselves. No need to justify it to anyone else. No need to explain it. Just do it. And be happy.
Media I've enjoyed
I'm re-listening to the Boring Talks podcast which I first listened to a couple of years ago. Sadly no new episodes have been made recently.
Particular favourites:
#24 The Taxonomy of Cornflakes
#43 The Sounds of Computer Games Loading
But they're all worth a listen, really.
Books
Today I returned the copy of George Eliot's Middlemarch to the library that I borrowed in December, as my Christmas-Holiday-big-book-read.
I hadn't finished it. I'd renewed the loan twice, in the hope I'd get on and complete it. But I'd got to page 610 and then run-aground. I couldn't motivate myself to plough on any further. It seems odd, to have got so far into it. Not like giving up at page 50 because you know "it's not for me". I made it 3/4 of the way through. I read the equivalent of 3 normal novels. And I stopped at that point. I don't think it's the book's fault. I was actually enjoying it (although it was heavy going, so dense, such long and confusing sentences, such alien concepts to grasp about society and politics of the early 19++th++ century) . I tend to read in cycles. This book was just too long to finish before my current cycle expired. I'd read a few books in succession leading up to Middlemarch and I was on borrowed time. Middlemarch was a book too far, this time.
End of weeknote #1
So, that's a round up of where I think I am on this Friday afternoon.
I have one week of my 50s left. This time next week I'll be 60. I'll be able to apply for my bus pass and get cheap entry to things as a Senior Citizen (is that still a phrase these days?)