221B Recs

The days count down to early retirement.

Naturally, in that countdown I dreamed that I was cleaning dad's place after he died and I found a box of odds and ends in a drawer. His house was full of odds and ends. In the box was a tape cassette and I knew where there was a tape player. On the tape, dad told me he loved me. Isn't that just memory and dreams for for you. I'm retiring with dad's money. I'm thinking about dad a lot. We hadn't planned for this what with expecting him to live till 101, but thank you cassette tape in my dreams.

He retired at age 56 with an excellent pension and the encouragement of LA county to please stop earning more on your pension. I am 54. I was planning to retire in a few years. In fact, houseold CKP was rearranging our finances a bit so I could hit my $ goal in 3 years.

Nope, go now. Time being the one resource we can't get back.

Early retirement is a subject I certainly hadn't researched prior to inheriting money from dad except in a general way + spreadsheet.

I understand the financial planner's affirmative a lot better now. As in the way of things, cookies from clicking on retirement articles has resulted in retirement planning videos salting into my ancient history youtube channels. And so it goes. It's better than obsessing over the news. Which, pinches bridge of nose, not looking away, but putting a lot of my anxiety into I will volunteer a lot this year. I shall even have time to do so.

So, let's see what have I learned about early retirement prior to actually doing it.

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As to the work countdown.

I gave what amounted to two months notice. The timeline being somewhat informed by I was already planning on going on vacation. And because of the weirdness of last year: corporate bankruptcy, new company/old leadership, switch from FTO to PTO, taking a planned vacation when I'd only earned 1-2 days of vacation, has meant that I've been carrying a negative balance for months now. I did the math and if I take my planned vacations, I'll always be just about to get out of the negative balance when it's time to go back into PTO debt. A still working me would have been fine by November. A retiring me isn't going to wait that long.

Somewhat because I also just wanted to wrap things up. I mean, work is a flywheel. There is no wrap up, but there is, "Here's a gradual handover of the things I do." With the next three weeks being more of a, "Got any questions?" period. Plus exciting-looking through some backlog stuff that if I don't finish. Shrug.

Ok, fine, I'm also drawing the cover for the novel that I wrote 2 years ago and has stalled in endless beta-shenannigans. They have shenanned, they will shennanigan. But it is one of the first projects I'll tackle in retirement. And given I'm half drawing this in draw.io because it turns out I have a lot of experience drawing things using geometric shapes, it's easy to stop and start in a way going back to the novel won't be.

Time, it's there on the horizon. Yet to see what I'll do with it.