I'm Retired!

Well, it's finally happened! After working all these years, and planning, hoping and saving toward it, I retired the first of the year. Wheeeeeee! As this picture shows, is the strongest emotion I feel, plus a whole heaping bunch of sheer joy.

Now that we're back home from our annual vacation to the beach, I'm rattling around the house, unpacking, laundering and putting away stuff, taking down the Christmas decorations, and testing my feelings to see how I feel about this new status.

It's a strange, unconnected feeling. Not bad in any way, I love it, but I have the feeling, for the first time in my whole entire life, that if I just simply stopped, it'd be ok. I mean, walls wouldn't crash down around us, and clocks wouldn't stop spinning, and it would just be ok! What a luxurious feeling. Kind of a delicious, easy, soft feeling. I like it!

I hope I don't get lazy, or too comfortable, and do nothing, but if I sleep an hour later in the morning, the world won't end, it'll just be . . . . . .ok!

We plan to travel a lot, but for right now, it's kind of nice to just be here, and I'm spending lots of time tidying my office and neatening the world around us, putting things into order that I haven't been able to do-ever. No time before.

What I'm hoping is that once I get things put to rights and organized, all my tools put where I can find them. I'll have this surge of creativity to take advantage of this lovely time I've been given. In the meantime, a nap feels really, delicious.

Life is very good!