Musings
About retirement… and random other things!
These blogs first appear as weekly columns in the Red Deer Advocate
A writer’s lament
'I hand-delivered one of my manuscripts to Penguin Random House Ireland when my sister and I were in Dublin. No luck of the Irish - it was still rejected.' After last week’s column when I talked about my past fixation to be as accomplished as Margaret Atwood, I’ve had some people ask me about my writing journey. Well, many journalists and...
Be the judge of your own moments
I’m very glad I didn’t feel melancholy when I left my career, because apparently, that can be a common sentiment. I have that feeling about other things from time to time, of course, that homesick kind of pull at the heart that something is missing from a particular moment. I usually only have that sense of nostalgia for a time that has long...
Not missing the seriousness of a career
'Time to deprogram myself. I needed two hands to take my first selfie - hard to believe I came to be so attached to my iPhone.' I don’t take myself very seriously, as you can probably tell by now if you have been following along with this column. But I take my work seriously. I still spend a long time reflecting on my choice of words as I write,...
Permission to change your mind
I fell on my steps the other day. I had just finished an online meeting and had a few minutes before another one began, which was perfect timing because the person repairing my washing machine had finished at just that moment and I would be able to pay him, see him out the door, and get back to my home office before the second meeting started. It...
A generation of ideas
The Mayor of Red Deer read my recent column on volunteering and invited me to his office at City Hall for morning coffee, which is a very nice gesture for a new columnist to receive! He wanted to meet me, to exchange ideas about reaching the age demographic we are both part of, and to give me a letter of appreciation for my focus on volunteers...
Being a senior is subjective
I had a meeting in a town an hour away last week and while I was circling the small Main Street looking for parking, I saw a sign on a building that read: Seniors (45+) Activity Centre. When did 45 year-old people become seniors? Didn’t that used to be middle age? Maybe they needed to widen the net to attract a few more people for their...
Reshaping the meaning of retirement
'Can you spot the ashtray under the rotary phone I'm answering in 1984? But even then I wasn't taking work too seriously.' A recent ‘future retiree survey’ out of Ontario shows that over 35 per cent of more than 1400 respondents have either decided to retire or are considering it – and more than half of them plan to work either full time or part...
Let the right message sink in
I was cleaning my kitchen the other night when a slogan from the bottle of dishwashing liquid caught my eye. ‘Trusted for over 100 years’, it stated. I stood looking at that for a long time. Do you trust the soap you wash dishes with? Do you have to? Like, have you ever been disdainfully untrusting of any dish soap? It’s not like bottles of dish...
Make your retirement make sense to you
I love that I’m starting to receive some feedback about this column! I’m not digging around social media too deeply, mind you, but the verbal and email comments from people around me are encouraging. Okay, so maybe it’s just a couple of friends who have mentioned a few things in passing – but it’s still welcome! My friend Lorraine is an eternally...