One morning I woke up and realized that I was moving a little slower and my joints were needing a little WD40. Retirement is sounding real good. After all, some of my friends are already retired. What do they say? When in roam do what the Romans do? Well it isn’t that easy. See all this time I was thinking that I will just give my 2 week’s notice and move on to retirement. In my world that is as simple as it is. Now the real world! They say “Make sure you can financial afford to do this. Make sure you have enough money to pay bills. Oh and don’t forget inflation. Will you have enough money 10 years from now? What about Medical? Insurance, do you have insurance? Do you have a plan for your future”? WHAT. Retirement is my future. What are they thinking….
Ok so I have a little more to do before I retire. I have to try to figure out how much money I will need to live, not only for now but for the next ten years and on top of that I have to figure inflation. Now I know that all my friends think I am Einstein cause only he could figure these things out. So where does my brain go? There has to be another way. No one can figure all this out. Even if they could they have no idea what is in store for them. I may not be alive in 10 year, but….. what if I am. I will need a plan. Retiring isn’t so easy. Ok so I don’t have all the answers and if I wait until I get them I will never retire. I will just retire. My friends will think I found Einstein’s theory and I will just have to find my fortune along the way.
My plan. Really is simple, I like to think I am a simple kinda person, We move everything from California out while we are working fly home and finish up all the paper work and then figure how to get the 7 animals out there. Then we start our retirement and explore the Smokey. What fun. All we need to do is pack up everything and rent a truck and drive there. That is as simple as it gets. Let me tell you how simple it is. Let’s start in the garage. Remember 20 years of stuff. We never had a car in the 2 car garage because it was so full. Remember the commercial where the lady opens the garage door and there is so much stuff in the garage you can’t see the car until she pushes the clicker and the car lights goes on? That was our garage One morning I said “matilda lets start packing in the garage today, we can get rid of the things we don’t want. wanna?” Ok. Well not long after getting started in the garage we notices that there wasn’t much things going to good will. Matter of fact we decide to go to the movies instead. What a good ending to a hard day. Another week goes by. Again we are going to get rid of the things we don’t want and start packing. This time we decided to go to the mall and shop instead. Ok so we aren’t so good at getting rid of things. We need help Lets call in the big guns, Daughter-in-law Lori and her husband Big Guy can you help us pack….. little did they know what we were asking. After 2 big trucks to good will and a huge yard sale we had a garage. Not only did we have a garage but we parked the Tundra and the trailer in it. Without the Big Guys and Lori we couldn’t have done it. Oh I forgot one thing. Trauma. See there is a show that is called horder’s. We are not horder’s we just collected everything whether we needed it or not. See Everything we had in the garage had a story behind it and of course as soon as you throw it away you will need it right? Isn’t that the way it is? So maybe we had a little hording going on than we thought. The Trauma was that we couldn’t get rid of anything and the kids saved and packed about 40 boxes of what they thought we would need and got rid of the rest. We left for the week end during all of this. While we had a garage with the cars in it we also felt the loss of the things we had collected for the last 20 year. Now I will say 3 months later I still can’t remember what was sold or given away. Yea we have officially started. Ok maybe we didn’t do the work but we are on our way.
Getting over that Trauma we realize that we have to clean out the attic, the storage unit, (Yes, we had a storage to keep all the crap we accumulated from 20years) the 2 sheds outside and the work shop. We packed up as much as we could and Lori and the Big Guy helped pack. Ok well they did most of it. Exhaustion set in and by that time we didn’t care what was packed or not. Now we got our wits about us and we went through most of the boxes and it was easier to get rid of the things that we really didn’t need. We are packed and ready to go. (So we think) ok so we can only rent a 22 foot truck and all the stuff won’t fit in one truck…. What another truck. After a few weeks of indecisions and $10,000.00 later, we decide to have atlas van lines pack the van and move all the stuff. Believe it or not this was the least expensive. This process was not easy. Retirement is starting to look like work instead of fun.
Time is getting closer and now we have more decisions to make. What month will we be leaving? How do I calculate my time in? How much will the retirement check be? How long will it take for all the paper work go through? Get all my papers filled out. What about medical, what about my 401, what about all the vacation and sick time……..whoo I can’t do all this, no wonder people don’t retire until they at 70, you need to go to retirement 101. All this takes time. This is worth waiting for. See the way I look at it is that I am not retiring I am going on a new adventure. We are old enough to know better and young enough to enjoy it. The best is yet to come.
Last night we went out to dinner with Ethel and Lucy. They said that our story was Saturday night live. Let me tell you why. We are planning on the trip out to North Carolina, 6- 10 hour days, with 4 cats and 3 dogs. That is 2 Min pins, 1 German short hair dogs and 4 cats. Two of the cats are outside semi feral. One inside cat is a real grumpy middle aged man. The other inside cat is so spoiled that she doesn’t want to put up with anything I captured all but the princess.
I found someone that had an animal cage for sale and he lived about 1.5 hours away. This will be our test drive. When I talked to him he asked if where we were going is close to South Carolina. His father died and had a mounted deer head that his brother and father had hunted. He was going to send it to his brother by UPS, but it was costly. He offered us 100.00 plus the cage, if we took it out to his brother in South Carolina. Sounds ok to me but I did said he will have to make sure this deer head is covered and I do not want to see it. Lori and Big Guy are in law enforcement and when they heard what we are going to do they told us that we had to take it down to the police station and have the drug dogs check for drugs and all I can think of is now we are going to jail before we even retire…..why you ask? People have been known to drill out the inside of the animal antlers and fill them with drugs.
So our driving adventure begins. I put the outside semi feral cat in the van. Have you ever heard a peacock scream? That is our Po po. Then we tried to put our spoiled princess in her cage and she almost bit us. She got loose and we ended up leaving her home. All dogs and cats are packed and lift off. Matilda and I were on the road for 5 minutes and I called Lucy. She couldn’t believe the noise. The cats and dogs were all harmonizing. Spunky (min Pin) starts Grexing, (if you don’t know what grexing is like a deep whining) Maggie the other one chimes in, Peacock screeches, all the cats are making sure they are heard. Of course we didn’t really care about what they were saying. We learned a lot on yesterdays trip. We will have to keep the min pins away from all the rest of the animals because as soon as they start grexing everyone starts in.
