Month: December 2018

Dead Milk Walking

Cooking is part of our retirement lifestyle – more affordable and overall a healthier and tastier choice. We make some incredible food, but we’ve also experienced epic failures over the years. There might be one in the refrigerator now. I’ll make Dale taste it and see.

He’s used to it. You know when the date on the milk has expired, but you think it’s probably still good? And you don’t really want to be the one to find out? We call that Dead Milk Walking. Dale’s like the medieval taste tester who determines whether we live or die.

Today it isn’t milk. Although I did have two consecutive batches of yogurt fail. I seem to be on a roll. The culprit is chicken liver pâté I made yesterday for our New Year’s Eve spread at home. I have strong suspicions it will be awful. I don’t even want to taste it.

I gently suggested to Dale he ought to check it out first. I think he’ll do it. If he likes it, I’m in. But if he declares it inedible, the pâté is headed for the garbage disposal. I can live with the occasional cooking failure, but I hate wasting food. Chicken livers were cheap, but that would also be nearly a pound of butter down the drain.

For the record, I don’t like innards, including liver. The exception is pâté. Oh, and leberknödel, a liver dumpling we used to eat in Germany.  I tried to make them once, and they count as an epic failure. I have fond memories of kalbsleberwurst, a veal liver sausage we enjoyed in Germany – especially when spread on hearty German bread. That’s it. No hearts, no gizzards, no tripe, no kidneys.

The pâté was easy enough to make. I rinsed and patted dry the livers, and then cooked them in a pile of butter with shallots, parsley, fresh thyme. Ignited some brandy and added that. A bit of red wine. Simmered it for awhile and then let it cool to room temp. Poured it into the blender and slowly added chunks of butter. I divided it into three little tubs, thinking I would freeze two … if they should survive the taste test.

So, here we are. Decision time. The rest of our feast is store-bought for a change and includes smoked salmon, which we purchased at Whole Foods (Ducktrap Kendall Brook got good reviews). A wee bit of sustainable White Sturgeon caviar from Sterling, a runny brie and a good California Blanc de Blancs Champagne. We have some crackers, and we’ll probably buy a baguette today. I make thin buckwheat pancakes for the caviar.

There’s plenty to eat. We don’t really need the pâté. When I gathered the food up for the photo opportunity, it looked like one of those picture puzzles. Which one doesn’t belong? It smells OK, but it looks nasty.

Our ritual is to spread the treats out on the coffee table using fancy dishes and watch a movie. I haven’t seen midnight in years.

THIS JUST IN: Dale tasted the pâté and declared it excellent! Now that the coast was clear, I followed suit, and I agree — it’s actually delicious. Nice firm texture but still creamy. It should be good on the crackers with a little bite of cornichon on the side.

Happy New Year! May things never be worse than they are.

Deconstructing Christmas

Today is the magical day of putting Christmas to rest. I would have jumped on it two days earlier, but golf was calling. This morning I started to deconstruct the tree and will soon begin putting the ornaments to rest. If I could give them a lethal injection, I would.

Oh, stop! Not really.

I will make Dale drag the tree to the driveway, where he will chop it up with a chainsaw and stuff it into the yard waste bin. It’s easier than taking it to the recycling center, and I suppose it’s possible he works out some frustration imagining he’s practicing for the real thing.

Yes, I read too many crime novels.

Perhaps I should deconstruct my perspective on Christmas. I’m not sure there’s any there, there. I just don’t like it much and can’t wait for it to be over. Nothing bad happened on Christmas when I was a child … no dead Santa Dads in the chimney. My sister is beside herself with joy during the holidays, and Dale is his usual jolly self, so obviously I missed something.

And you know what? I’m rolling with it. I’ve been thinking a lot about this whole retirement thing and all the helpful articles about reinventing ourselves for our second act and overdosing on an abundance of gratitude.

I must admit I am pretty grateful, and at least gratitude takes the heat off of mindfulness, which must be tired after such a long slog. Me? I just keep marching forward, although I always thought I could do even better. I told myself I had not yet reached my full potential.

While the reinvention message spoke to me at first, lately it has become nothing more than noise. The thing is, I’m not sure I can do better. I was incredibly lucky to earn an excellent living mostly by being literate. I worked for great corporations and organizations, but I was never a true believer. The mission, the vision, the values? Just widgets.

In hindsight, it’s entirely possible I peaked.

At first, the idea I had peaked was kind of hard to accept, but I let it simmer awhile, and it’s starting to take hold. At least I made it to the endgame with a decent retirement. I can still evolve as a human, and it’s possible a professional opportunity will surprise me.

But with every retirement day that passes, I find that I enjoy just being alive without the pressure to earn a living, reinvent the wheel or memorize the vision statement.

And for this, I am abundantly grateful.

I still say happy holidays

The Happy Holidays backlash mystifies me. Not everybody celebrates Christmas. I’m not scared.

Complaints about being politically correct don’t hold with me. I believe most PC terms reflect how people want to be addressed or acknowledged. I don’t think of it as being PC to say Happy Hanukkah or Happy Solstice or Happy Kwanzaa or the all-encompassing … Happy Holidays.

If holiday greetings are about spreading love, why can’t we share our kindness and good cheer with people in a way that respects and welcomes their unique experiences? If I know you celebrate Christmas, then by all means, it’s Merry Christmas! But if I don’t know you or I’m aware you have different cultural traditions, I’m either going to acknowledge your celebration or go with Happy Holidays.

We celebrate Christmas at our house but more as a folk festival than anything else. We do not subscribe to religion but sometimes adopt features of the parts we like! And then we make new traditions.

Our Christmas Eve tradition for many years is Dale’s homemade pizza and a movie, preferably a comedy. I’m struggling to find a good one for this evening, so if anybody has ideas that can be streamed from Netflix or Amazon, please share!

Christmas morning we have coffee and open a few presents. We abandoned big loot years ago. Now it’s just one or two things for each other and what the sisters send. And something for the cat! My sister-in-law sent a wrapped gift for Riley, and he knows it’s his. He has been pawing and clawing and sniffing around since it arrived. Catnip, perhaps?

Then we eat leftover pizza and enjoy a cold beer. While the pizza/beer buzz wears off, we putz around and start Christmas dinner, which we typically eat around 5:30 or 6 p.m. We keep it simple. Roast beef, broccoli and mashed potatoes. Dessert varies. This year we are eating homemade plum pudding from last year’s Christmas dinner. It has been wrapped well in the fridge. I tasted it, and it’s still delicious. I’ll make new hard sauce to go with.

As a treat to myself, later this afternoon I will try out my new homemade cannabis bath salts. All my achy breaky parts are screaming this time of year, so I’m hoping for some soothing relief. It was so easy to make using Epsom salt, Himalayan pink salt, baking soda and cannabis-infused coconut oil. I can’t wait to give you a full report on the outcome.

Until then, Happy Holidays! And Merry Christmas!

In search of control

Today is our actual anniversary, which is double the pleasure because it’s also the winter solstice. I struggle with the winter blues, and gaining a bit more daylight every day makes me happy. I’m trying to be chill, but there is serious shit going down out there. When the going gets weird, I tend to seek order and control by tidying up and possibly creating a spreadsheet or two.

Did bathrooms and floors yesterday. Next stop was tidying up my digital house. As one reader suggested, I called to cancel my New York Times subscription. I’ve been paying $15 a month, and they offered to reduce it to $4 a month for 52 weeks. I said no. By this time, I had a new mindset and scrapped the whole thing.

As another reader suggested, I found it for free anyway. You need a New York Times account, but you don’t subscribe to anything. Then you go here to get this little code and – magic – free NY Times for 72 hours. There is no limit on how many times you can do it.

I thought canceling my subscription would help me back away from the news, but that’s a lost cause. Readers have different opinions about what’s going on in the White House, so I won’t list my complaints, except to say the stock market is making me crazy. Most retirees can relate to that.

Yes, it will come back, but it’s hard to see money disappear in the blink of an eye. My investment strategy is conservative, so I believe everything will be OK, but I still hate the drama.

If it gets really bad, I wonder about going back to work. The idea does not appeal to me. I love retirement, I love playing golf, taking long walks, hunkering down with a good book, cooking. There really is enough money in our retirement account to ride this out, but I tend to be a worrier. 

It occurred to me if I had to take a job, I wouldn’t pass a drug test! More and more companies no longer test for cannabis, so that’s good. I might have a shot. Certainly not in my former industry, which was defense. For me, cannabis is medicine, and now that I’ve experienced the benefits, it would be hard to give it up. I’ll just worry about it instead.

Writing about my worries helps me put them into perspective. I imagine myself three years from now wondering why I wasted all that time fretting when everything turned out OK in the end. I was like this with cancer, too. I spent years worrying about it returning but then started imagining a future where I said, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I wouldn’t have spent so much time worrying about dying.”

I have to get there with retirement. Trust that we planned well. There will be ups and downs, spendy years and frugal years, but we’re fine. In the end, we’d like to die broke, but after a lifetime of saving, the most likely scenario is not spending it while we can enjoy it.

In the meantime, I’m hunkering down in the kitchen and on the couch – a bit of cooking and reading to lift my spirits.

I’m probably going to make Dal Makhani tonight. This recipe from Urvashi Pitre is the best, although I add a couple of Serrano peppers for heat. I also want to experiment with some sort of cannabis bath product. I’ll be perusing The Cannabis Spa at Home for ideas.

As for reading, I just finished The Woman in the Window. I would call it a psychological thriller. Hard to put down. I’m enjoying the Molly Murphy historical fiction series by Rhys Bowen. A young Irish woman lands in turn-of-the-century New York City and blusters her way into solving crimes. First in the series is Murphy’s Law.

I’ve started a spreadsheet with books I want to read and list series in order. I have a column for author, character, title, library/buy and status. I have access to two library systems, so I check to see which one, if any, has it and if not, I list it as a buy.

Of course, much of what we experience in life and retirement is out of our control, but every little bit helps. If it gets any worse, I’ll probably have to clean the refrigerator. Maybe create an inventory?

Celebrating our 40th

This week is our 40th wedding anniversary, and while we aren’t particularly sentimental, we wanted to do something special to commemorate the occasion. We booked an overnight trip to Bodega Bay, a beautiful seaside town we can drive to in about 2.5 hours. 

One of the many perks of retirement is schedule flexibility and going places during the week when prices are usually lower. I checked for every night in every hotel using every travel site on the Internet until I got a good deal. Tuesday night was the least expensive, and even then, it was outrageous. Bodega Bay is not cheap. We like the area because it’s beautiful, close to Sonoma and we love the oysters.

We took the scenic route and stopped for lunch at a beautiful cove where the restaurant specializes in all things seafood. We had clam chowder and split a dozen oysters on the half-shell. Our table overlooked the water. We splurged and each had a Blood Mary. The view was amazing, so we said what the hell and ordered another.

Four Bloodies, soup and oysters added up to one of the most expensive lunches I have ever enjoyed. But Dale had cashed our annual check from USAA, so it was practically free. Then we headed north to our hotel. We were a little early, it was chilly and raining, so we were pleased our room was ready. Perhaps emboldened by the Bloodies, I said, this is our 40th anniversary, I don’t suppose there are any upgrades available?

I’m not normally one to ask for stuff, but I figured you don’t get it if you don’t ask. She went in the back and emerged smiling, confirming a complimentary upgrade to an ocean view room with a fireplace and a luxurious over-sized tub. Bingo!

The room was gorgeous with a spectacular if foggy view. I believe I said in my outside voice I certainly planned to take a bath, but I didn’t seize the faucet in time. Dale announced, I’m taking a bath! Oh, how nice for you. I suppose that will use up all the hot water, but go ahead. Enjoy.

Well, if he gets the tub, I thought, I’m going to relax in the sumptuous robe I saw hanging in the closet. I was prancing around singing “Mama’s got a brand-new robe” and decided to pass on the bath, as it just sucks the life out of me anyway. I needed my strength for the next round of oysters. I crawled into bed wearing my new robe and started to read.

Dale’s in the tub, and I could hear all these bubbles, like a whale surfacing? I honestly didn’t know what to think. He was in there a long time. I thought this is it, after 40 years, I discover his dark secret.

Shamu emerged from the bathroom with no curious afterglow, so I assumed there are manly bathtub things I don’t understand. We hung around until it was time to go for dinner. This time I had scoped out a place with fried oysters on the menu. Fabulous.

On the way back to the hotel, I asked about the noises from the tub. He’s like, what do you mean? I explained the bubbly whale-like sounds I heard, and he said, “Oh, that. I may have farted.”

Oh! Farts! Not some kinkster bathtub sex ritual. What a relief. 

Budgeting for creature comforts


Unlike Individual 1, I love the failing New York Times and have a digital subscription to the tune of $15 a month. If I had to be super-frugal, I probably wouldn’t subscribe, but my retirement goal was more about being moderately frugal. So far, so good.

Aside from all the news and opinion I can possibly digest, I love the daily mini-crossword and try to do it in under five minutes before I even get out of bed. It’s going to be a great day when I do it in under a minute.

By the way, I know this is not normal. 

NYT Cooking, which is excellent, is another favorite section of the paper. It used to be included with the basic subscription. I could save recipes to my recipe box, but suddenly most of them are grayed out. That’s because there’s now a fee, and I must upgrade my subscription for full access.

This bugs me. I try to be smart about how I spend money in retirement, and I’m reluctant to shell out more for something that used to be free. But they do provide a service I enjoy very much, and I suppose it’s not unreasonable to pay for it.

I finally looked it up. It’s another $5 a month. Food and cooking is a big part of our lives, even more so in retirement. I like to cook, and I like to read about food almost as much as I like to eat it. We don’t go out to restaurants often, so think of all the money we are saving! And who doesn’t need a little culinary inspiration? 

Obviously, I’m trying to talk myself into it. But $5 is $5.  I know there are retirees who can’t or won’t have cable or Netflix because of the expense, and certainly I would cut back if I had to, but I’m hoping that will not happen until they pull the remote out of my cold dead hands. 

When you are planning for retirement, you tend to think about the big expenses such as healthcare, transportation, etc. But little things add up, and you do have to be prepared. I had cable before I retired, and I had a digital subscription to the New York Times before I retired. My preference was keep them in my life once the paychecks stopped. 

Sure, I read all the retirement advice about maintaining your standard of living … multiply your current salary by some astronomical number and that’s what you’ll need to live on. We were actually living on a good bit less than we made, hence the retirement savings, so it was a gross exaggeration to assume we’d need the same income in our later years. 

But the basics of our pre-retirement lifestyle have not changed. Decent cars, good quality sheets, great food, wine and beer, cable, Netflix and the New York Times. I’ll pass on the exotic travel, but when we had enough in savings to keep the creature comforts, I knew retirement could work.

So, $5 for NYT Cooking? Maybe. Probably. 

Simple retirement style

Today was the holiday luncheon for my golf league. I wasn’t going to attend, but I’m trying to socialize more and make friends. The luncheon was not as much fun as actually playing golf, but I had a good time. The biggest deal was seeing everyone all dolled up.

No one recognized me, because I stuff my hair under a hat when I play golf. Nobody knew I had all that gray, and they had never seen it down. This was maybe the second time this year I blow dried my hair. I thought it came out great, but I don’t plan to start that business up on a regular basis. 

Makeup is not my thing … which is great for retirement. Cheaper, faster. Men look good without makeup, right? I’ve never understood the need to paint our faces. That said, for special occasions, I will put on a bit of tinted moisturizer and some blush. I also fill in my eyebrows with a pencil and brush. I’m sure mascara would look fabulous, but I hate it.

Some people say gray hair without makeup washes you out. Color me washed out.

I’m not into Christmas, so it would be unlike me to wear a Santa sweater or snowman earrings. There was a lot of that going on, and everyone looked happy, but I stuck with my basic black and blue. The jacket and tee are leftovers from work. I bought the jeans at Kohl’s earlier this year.

The boots are kind of a funny story. I’ve had them since Texas and expect to have them forever. They are nice quality leather. I noticed when we went wine tasting at the vineyards, most of the women wore jeans tucked into boots. I started copying, and I’ve had tons of compliments. I swear, one woman wanted to lick them. Sometimes it is nice to fit in.

As I was exploring my closet, trying to figure out what to wear, I tried on several outfits from work. They felt alien. I didn’t want to purge my closet during the first year of retirement. Now that I’m in year two, I’ll probably donate some and re-purpose the rest. 

There may not be much left by the time I’m done, but then I don’t need a whole lot. Athletic clothes for summer, athletic clothes for winter and a few outfits with jeans. Jammies!

Well, I do love the high-tech stretchy fabrics and lust after a lot of the clothes at Athleta (seriously, that could be my whole wardrobe). However, until they decide to appoint me brand ambassador and air drop me gift baskets of clothes, I only shop there for items I can’t find anywhere else.

So, yes, you likely will spend less money on clothes after you retire. I prepared several years in advance by erring on the casual side of business casual. For colors, I stuck with neutrals that could easily be mixed and matched.

Before I bought anything, I’d ask myself, would I wear this in retirement? I wanted clothes that transcended the workplace. I also avoided dry clean-only clothes to save money while I was still working, knowing it would come in handy down the road.

Everybody is different, and I say wear what you want. But even if you are a super fashionista, you can dress yourself in retirement on way less than it took to keep you stylish at work. 

Calming down a bit

I wrote a post in October about the struggle to let go of the idea my life is only as good as my achievements. Here it is December, hardly long enough to make a batch of kimchi, but with every day that passes, I feel less tethered to success. I like it.

After retiring last year, I was happy to be done with my career but still felt driven to do something exceptional, something amazing to prove I’ve still got it. I had a million thoughts going in a million different directions. It’s not enough to retire and simply enjoy our joblessness. We must reinvent ourselves! Organize our frugal lives! See the world! Change the world!

But the weight of these expectations during my first year of retirement left me anxious and exhausted. Couldn’t I just calm down, think before I leap and accept I had a great career and my reward for hanging in there is a great life? What if I just focused on what feels good and see what happens?

A weight was lifted once it occurred to me I did not have to reinvent myself. I’m surprised by how quickly the idea took hold. Maybe I just had to say it in my outside voice.

The thing is, I’m still doing freelance work, but the idea of a real job is not the slightest bit appealing. Never say never, but I can’t imagine going back to all that – although I certainly don’t plan to wither away doing nothing.

In addition to my recreational pursuits, I’ll continue to use my skills and talents and make a little money, but I’m not feeling motivated to do something exceptional. It’s not about standard definitions of achievement or success. It’s more about intellectual curiosity and social interaction. And a little cash doesn’t hurt, either.    

As I worked through this drama in my head, I told Dale I would get a job, but I can’t work Tuesdays or Wednesdays, because that’s when I play golf. And I can’t work Mondays in the summer, because that’s when I play golf in the mountains. Maybe Mondays in the winter but not if I take up cross-country skiing. Reading, cooking, long walks, sometimes more golf – that’s what Thursdays and Fridays are for.

As you can see, I’m kind of busy.

Please say this isn’t a passing fancy. Retirement was an opportunity to jump the track, but I didn’t do a very good job of clearing a path for the freewheeling journey of my dreams. I just jumped to a new track. My brain was saying, “I will continue to succeed at something, damn it!”

Until proven otherwise, it appears I’m experiencing the joy of being trackless. But I’m curious about other retirees. Are you ambitious? What motivates you? Have your goals and ambitions evolved over the course of your retirement?

It’s still about the hair



This week marked one year of blogging at Retirement Confidential. During that year, I wrote 111 posts and published twice a week on average. I feel good about my progress, although I saw a decline in readership when I deactivated my Facebook account.

I miss the traffic Facebook generated, but I don’t miss Facebook, especially as information about the company’s business model continues to unfold. My life is better without Facebook. I’ll continue to pursue other strategies for attracting readers.

Why are readers important? Well, as a writer, I write to be read and to connect with a community of like-minded people. That’s pretty much it. 

I’m writing because I’ve always been a writer, mostly for my career in communications, but now that I am retired, I have the opportunity to discover my unfiltered voice. Writing is cheaper than therapy, and the beauty of a blog is there are no gatekeepers. Nobody to tell me it’s not good enough to publish. Maybe it isn’t, but no one else gets to decide for me.

I took a peek at my all-time most popular post, and I was totally surprised.

It’s my hair.

So much for writing! I keep my longish gray hair simple and usually tie it up in a messy man bun using a silk scrunchie. My hair credentials are solid. From 2008-2013, I wrote a blog about gray hair and other important topics of the day. The blog was Rock the Silver. I pulled the plug on it when my career became particularly intense, and it took everything I had to stay focused on making it to the end.

As for other topics, people seem to like the funny stories about my 40-year marriage. Among the top five posts: A new opportunity to annoy your partner and Driving each other nuts in retirement.

Categories help readers decide if this topic is of interest to them. And the categories are:

  • Cannabis
  • Current Events
  • Food & Drink
  • Health & Wellness
  • Lifestyle
  • Personal Finance
  • Style & Fashion

All the categories are represented well in the statistics, so I believe I’ve set a good focus for our conversations. But I would like to do better. Which categories do you like? Which ones not so much?

Technically, I am challenged. I finally figured out how to resize the images, and then WordPress changed how to resize images. Aargh. There will undoubtedly be mistakes along the way, but I will always do my best to keep Retirement Confidential clean and readable.

Thank you for joining me in this grand adventure. I truly appreciate your time and interest! Any other feedback you’d like to share? Anything else you’d like to see?

Size matters

Other than food, we typically don’t do Christmas in a big way. Dale buys and decorates a tree. My tradition is to sit around and watch the action while drinking single malt scotch. The ornaments are a mishmash of family treasures, homemade gifts, impulse buys and beautifully crafted wood ornaments we collected in six years of living in Germany.

To him, size matters. Dale wants the biggest tree this stinking desert has ever seen. Although in recent years, he has re-calibrated his expectations. We downsized when we moved to California, so sadly, his Rockefeller Center days are over. Yes, we live in an expensive state, but look what we save on trees!

In the end, the tree is beautiful, but if it were up to me, I’d skip the whole thing. One year we were burned out and just put a few presents under the coffee table. I loved it.

Other than the tree, we don’t decorate for the holidays. We slap a nutcracker on the mantel and call it Christmas. Last year, our first year in this home, the neighborhood was festooned with shiny objects, so we may go crazy and add some outdoor lights.

Although I don’t help with decorating, I do pack the ornaments back in their boxes after the holidays, so there is work involved. I used to hate that part, but now I like examining the little jewels as I eagerly tuck them into slumber. Oh, how cute! You’re dead to me.

In spite of all his fuss, Dale is a huge procrastinator. For his sisters in Maine, there are still unwrapped presents sitting on the dining room table. I’ve done all I can to prod him along, but it’s out of my hands. And the tree – his pride and joy – has not been purchased yet. He believes it’s wrong to buy before December (um, it’s December) and usually doesn’t get around to decorating it until the week before.

I try to just go with the flow, although if I were a Christmas person, you can be sure this show would be timely and organized. Sometimes it’s hard to believe he spent his career in the Army. However, his easy-going attitude is an antidote for my somewhat obsessive nature.

Gifts aren’t a big deal either. Maybe a few stocking stuffers, a CD, a book, a pair of socks. For California cold, Dale likes lightweight fleece, but he’s hard to fit, and size does matter. He’s 5’6”, and most men’s clothing is way too long for him.

It’s a shame, because he looks really good, if I must say so myself, but clothes seldom fit him properly. I spent some time on the Internet yesterday in search of tops more suitable for his frame. I was trying to keep it a surprise, but I finally caved and decided I would measure Dale’s chest.

He was at his computer, and I said, hey, can you please do me a favor and stand up?

Dale was like, sure. He started to get up, and he could see the tape measure in my hand.

I said, “I’m just going to measure your penis.”

The look on his face was priceless. My whole body still hurts from laughing so hard. It hurts now. He really almost lost it. I said, oh, just kidding. I need to measure your chest.

Several hours later, I was still laughing, snorting actually, and he gave me the high-five. Humor always wins. Our 40th anniversary is this month, so I guess we’re doing something right.