A friend of mine once said that growing old is not for sissies. She was absolutely right, as I am rapidly finding out; too rapidly it seems.
There is another part of aging that I am not all that fond of either — retirement. It is not exactly what I had in mind when I signed up for it. (Of course, some would say that I really didn’t have a choice in the matter, but that is another story.)
I envisioned retirement to be a leisurely endeavor with lots of golf, travel and enjoyment. I am not going to tell you that there is not a lot of enjoyment because there is, but golf and travel? Uh huh. Just not happening, man.
Oh, I have played an occasional round but it is not the twice-per-week frequency that I had imagined. Finances, of course, play a part of it, but there is a bigger issue — there is just so much darn work to do. You know what I mean?
The first thing I did when I “retired” (aka, when I was no longer given the option of drawing a paycheck) was fire my yard maintenance company. At a cost of more than $100 a month, it was an expense that both my wife and I knew we didn’t need. Especially when I was able to do the work myself. Back in November, it seemed like a slam dunk. I mean, what was there to do? Mow the lawn once a month, and rake a few leaves here and there? But now that spring has sprung and things are actually GROWING, it is a far different deal. Hey, there is something to do in the yard EVERY day. I trimmed the hedges just last week and they already need it again. I am getting tired of it. Read the rest of this entry »
Just like you, my wife and I are outraged at the bonus payments made to present and former officials at American Insurance Group, more commonly referred to as AIG (or as it will become known: Ain’t It Great?)
The outrage is understandable. Taxpayers (without a vote on the matter) get to fork over some $170 billion (that’s BILLION, with a B, folks) to bailout a company whose conglomerate Ponzi scheme worked little better than little ol’ Bernie Madoff’s one-man backroom operation.
Here’s the rub for me, the $170 billion — or to paraphrase Barry Goldwater, “A billion here a billion there and pretty soon you are talking real money.” — is money the U.S government said it had to give to AIG to “bail them out” because they were so deep in hock and and so big we couldn’t afford to allow them to fail. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the questions I have learned never to ask my wife is, “Do these pants make me look fat?” Especially when I am buying jeans, as I was last weekend.
Jeans are especially difficult for me to buy since I am one of those ‘tweeners, meaning I have an odd-shaped body. One of my former co-workers once told me I had a squatty body. I think he was being kind. A video-tape of me playing golf in an earlier post on this site confirms it.
Basically, my problem is genetics. In other words, not my fault. I was supposed to be in the neighborhood of 6 feet tall. Instead, I am not even in the same zip code, at just above 5-foot-7 and three-quarters inches tall. I blame it, too, on unnatural selection. My father was the tallest of his seven siblings and my mother was the shortest of her seven. Go figure!
When I sit down beside someone who is 6 feet, I sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them. It is when we stand up that you notice the difference. I only get a little taller when I stand while the 6-footers keep on going. My torso is the same length as most of the taller folks; it is my legs that got short-changed, so to speak. Read the rest of this entry »
School districts across the state of Florida are wrestling mightily with the tasks of making draconian cuts in their budgets. School Board members are losing sleep, superintendents are visibly depressed and teachers are all on edge, wondering if they will have jobs in the coming months.
But what are the parents saying? In one county, at least, we don’t know publicly what the parents are saying, except for those who have called their school board members. While Clay County school officials have urged teachers and parents to send them their ideas on how to cut the school budget and to contact their legislators to appeal for more funding for education, there hasn’t been that uproariously loud voice from the community protesting the cuts. At least not yet.
I am sure that tongues were wagging at water coolers around many schools today, and rightfully so. Cuts are coming. Schools face the prospect of layoffs because of declining enrollments and cutbacks in funding from the state. Several counties have already begun closing underused schools.
As one superintendent said, “It may get uglier before it gets better.”
In Clay County, School Board members will be wrestling with a proposal to eliminate some 115 positions at a savings of $6.3 million for the 2009-2010 school year.
”We have no growth,” Superintendent Ben Wortham told board members at their regular meeting Thursday night. (Jan. 15) as he laid out a plan to reduce the district budget by $10.5 million due to a decline in state funding.
Welcome back and Happy New Year! It has been a while since we visited but I am sure you all have been as busy as I have over the past couple of weeks and didn’t have much time to read anyway.
So, did you get everything you wanted for Christmas and have you kept all of your New Year’s resolutions so far? I hope so in both cases.
My wife and I got a lawn mower for Christmas. No kidding! It was a mutual decision, sort of. Actually, I wanted a riding lawn mower but we got a self-propelled version instead. It would be good for me, she reasoned, because I needed the exercise. We got the lawn mower because I don’t have a job right now and we decided that I could do the lawn rather than pay a company big bucks to do it for us. That made sense to me. Hey, I wouldn’t lie to you, would I?
I didn’t make any real resolutions this year, just the same old same old that I haven’t followed in the past anyway. You know, lose weight, exercise more, get organized, yada yada yada. Oh, I will still try do to those things like I always try to, but I have chosen this year year just to have them as objectives, rather than goals. Not sure there is a big difference, but it makes sense to me anyway.
One of the things I do vow to do this year is cut our household expenses as much as possible and I am making good headway at it. First, I cut our telephone, cable and car insurance bills. Now we are refinancing our house, which will cut our monthly obligations on the mortgage nearly in half. If anyone has any ideas on how to cut other things, like electric and water bills, I would appreciate a heads up. I do practice conservation measures as much as I can, by the way. Read the rest of this entry »
Christmas always brings out the nostalgia in me and I am sure it does the same for you as well. If you have ever wanted to share your memories with others, here is your chance. I am going to post a few of the memories that are the most special to me and I am going to encourage you to do the same thing.
Here is how it will work. You can add a comment to the end of my column or you can send me an email at lthames.com of your special memories and I will post it for you. Don’t worry whether you think your writing is very good because I am sure it will be satisfactory. If it isn’t, I will make some subtle changes to bring it up to snuff. After all, I used to be an editor, you know.
All right, here goes my list. Keep in mind that these are just the memories that reverberate in my mind from time to time and they are not in any order, just randomly as I recall them.
√ A favorite all-time gift — The set of six-shooters that Santa brought me the year my sister was born when my family lived in Selma, Ala. I was 6 years old. The guns came with a snazzy leather holster that went perfectly with the cowboy hat, chaps and Western shirt that I already had. I fancied myself as the next Wild Bill Hickok (as portrayed by Wild Bill Elliot in the movie serials that were popular in the ’40s and ’50s.) I kept that gun and holster set until about 20 years ago. Wish I still had them.
My first experience with a daily newspaper came in 1958 when the father of a childhood friend of mine asked me if I wanted to help him deliver papers while his oldest son took the summer off.
”Sure, I’d love to,” I told Mr. Fulgham, Eddie’s father, not really sure what I was getting into.
My family and I lived in the West Brow community on Lookout Mountain, about 10 miles from the famous Rock City tourist attraction. Mr. Fulgham’s route covered the Lookout Mountain communities on both the Tennessee Read the rest of this entry »
It has only been a month, but I am already getting tired of this thing called “retirement.” I don’t know if I want to do it for the rest of my life.
Of course, it is not exactly my idea of how retirement was supposed to work. I envisioned picking a day a few years in the future and saying, “That will be the date when I want to retire.” And it would be in conjunction with my wife’s retirement.
I was planning on paying off the two cars my wife and I drive, putting a few more bucks safely away in our IRAs and doing some of the home repairs that are starting to surface around the old homestead. It is 15 years old, after all. Read the rest of this entry »
Not wishing ill on anyone who has lost a job or is facing uncertain times, there may be an upside to the economic turmoil we are facing. Sort of getting back to basics, if you will.
With unemployment rising and a topsy-turvy stock market, a lot of us are being forced to change our outlook on gift giving for the Christmas season. An article in the Times-Union recently quoted some families who were cutting back on their spending this holiday season. That may not be a bad thing.
posted
Mar 30, 2009 by Lamar Thames
