To get this started I will tell you a little about myself. I worked at colleges and universities for most of my career in the IT field. In the early days I worked for Ithaca College managing the telephone system. From there I moved to the University of Rochester and was their cable-plant designer. My last job was Cornell university where I started as a cable-plant engineer then managed the phone system. I then moved to managing the cable-plant engineers. My last and most interesting job was wireless network engineer. Its probably a lot of blah blah blah if you aren't in that field but it paid the bills and put some money in my retirement account.
In the spring of 2009 Cornell was getting cash strapped so they were looking for ways to cut costs without looking like the bad guy and laying off a few hundred people. They offered a buyout to anyone that had been there 10 or more years. Hmm I had just been there eleven years. They gave us a years salary, health benefits to age 65, three years added to our retirement, and paid for all unused vacation. Ok I am in just to good to pass up. So now what??
I have a 30 foot sailboat, a 35 foot motor home, a big yard to maintain, and an old farmhouse that always needs fixing, that should keep me busy.
As I retired in June I spent much of the first summer on the boat, did some yard work, and tried to set up a schedule that filled my days. Geeze I never knew I would have to look for things to do. I tried to keep in touch with guys from work but they were too busy trying not to get fired by Cornell.
The first winter was awful, although I do some ham radio in the winter it was not enough. I think I was driving my wife crazy cause she was still working.
By the second year I was starting to get the hang of it and had a new group of friends at the marina and sailed and hung all summer.
In August my good friend Tom asked if I would go on his boat with another guy from Ithaca NY to the Bahamas. Well it took about 5 minutes to answer, yep I was going. Then I remembered I was married and maybe I should talk to my wife about being gone for 6 months on a sailing adventure. You can see the adventure on my other blog A Trip South. If you read the bog you can see that I got tired of sleeping in a space the size of a coffin and freezing my but off and not eating much so I jumped off in Melbourne Florida. The upside of the trip other than the experience was I lost about forty pounds. My IT days had left me tipping the scales at about 317 pounds (how did that happen)
So now it's winter in upstate NY and I am getting antsy again. My daughter managed a low income apartment complex and both of the maintenance guys had quit ( this should have been a warning). I said sure I will jump in and do maintenance how hard can it be. Well the fixing stuff was a breeze..but no one told me that maintenance guys shoveled, plowed, and salted snow. Wow, for an old fat IT guy that was sure a wake up call. Finally after it snowed for 18 straight days of my three months of employment I said ok I am done...
Somehow I made it through the rest of the winter without going stir crazy.
Spring brought new hope that I would keep busy enough to really start enjoying my retirement more.
No comments:
Post a Comment