Tag: retirement

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Free With a Price

I guess I must be strange, but when I go to a seminar, I actually want to hear what the speaker has to say.

I recently went to a free seminar on improving your retirement income. As a low income person, to have the opportunity to receive free financial advice from a seasoned professional is a blessing.

But as usual, that sentiment is not shared by many in an audience.

The man next to me loudly announced to a woman, who made the mistake of trying to chit chat to him about the topic before the talk started, that he had no intention or need to retire, that he LOVES what he does. So why are you here? To annoy everyone else I soon found out. He huffed and puffed, clicked his pen constantly throughout the talk, threw the free handouts we got on the chair next to him and sat defiantly with arms crossed.

There were many interruptions and of course, the self proclaimed experts in the audience that took liberties to answer questions for the speaker.

Sigh.

There are so few seminars I have gone to where no one is on their own agenda and respect the speaker and reserve their questions and thoughts until the end of the talk.

However, I did learn a few things, mostly that when it comes to financial advice, you really need a custom made plan as everyone’s life situation is different. And you need to get several opinions and ultimately, make your own plan. The people who could benefit the most are the low income persons, who can’t afford a financial adviser. However, there are free seminars!

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Black and White

My shelves are overflowing with albums filled with black and white photographs of days long gone; of my Mother, Father and family.  Slowly they are being scanned to computer and archived into acid free portfolios. However this is mostly a future retirement project as it is very labor intensive.

A nostalgic love affair for the 1950’s and 60’s photo’s, film and TV has consumed me, a result of too much winter and a longing to return to my youth.  My childhood was a joyful time even in black and white.

I cherished my first camera, a bulky black plastic box with a round view finder, black strap on top and cylindrical film canister you had to load onto a reel.  Suburban flora and fauna captured in still life; squirrels, birds, the pet cat, my Mom’s elaborate flower gardens.  I’ve come a long way since then into the age of digital, but I pine for those black & white film days.  It was bulky, messy and time consuming, but darling.  I miss the hands on work of creating black & white photo’s.

When I took photography at College in the 1970’s we developed our own film.  Definitely a labor of love.  Colour developing required very expensive equipment and none of us could touch it until we mastered the black & white techniques.

I was also quite the TV and movie buff in my early years.  In this booming age of technology I have been fortunate to revisit much of this on DVD.  They do look better on a big LCD screen than the curved grey glass of our old black & white TV!  Many films and series have stood the test of time.  I was raised on long slow films so I can endure them.  Modern films bore me with jumbles of fast moving snap shots of non stop action that lack cohesion.  Nothing can beat a good story, in film, photo or black print on a white page.

On top of my bookcase is a favorite black & white photo of my Brother and Dad ready to leave on a fishing trip.  There is something about the tones and details of the greys, blacks and whites that is so pleasing to my eyes.

This is very strange to love black & white because most of my art works are very bright collages of near neon colour.   And I do love colour photography, yet . . .

There is definitely a mood to black & white that you can’t replicate in colour.  It evokes an emotion that takes me back home.

Perhaps when I retire I will pursue black & white photography once more, maybe even film!  Give my senior years a mood!

I can try to recreate some of my lost youth, but it all seems so long and black and white ago.

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Something to Say

Once my Mother suggested I write a newsletter and I replied “But what would I write about? to which she shot back “Since when did you lack for something to say?”.

She was right of course.

But I come to today’s writing and find I don’t have anything I want to say.

I have the reassurance however that no one reads my blog, so why worry?  Except, I love to write, no wait, it is beyond that, I have to write.

It is a compelling force that never lets me alone.  I write about anything and everything all the time, or the same thing over and over.

It took me months to shred all the angst filled journals I used to fill with ink, and I have filing cabinets overflowing with stories I’ve written in long hand.  Yes, I write everything in longhand, just like my Dad.  And just like him I have my favourite utensils; his was a mechanical pencil on foolscap, mine a black pen on ruled paper pad, affixed to a clipboard uncomfortably balanced on my lap.

I do not enjoy the ease of typing on a computer, which I totally do not understand since I love typing on my typewriter.

As a youngster I typed out my imaginations on a gigantic Underwood, it was magic with its long stemmed jamming keys.  It would be fabulous to have that back!  I evolved to portables and then electric, until they stopped making typewriters.  I found my stories sounded different when done on a typewriter.  Pen in hand became my preferred choice when computers arrived.  I write them out, then put them on my laptop.  However, I must confess, last year I purchased an electric Smith Corona for $15 at a Thrift Shop and have been happily pounding out a story ever since!

So why write a blog?  Indeed, especially one like this with no point?  Well, it is something I’ve wanted to do since my Underwood days.  Have my own column in a magazine.  I had a lot of topics to discuss then.  But today I’m not so opinionated.  Now I have my own spot in the internet universe.  I have little idea why such a thing is so compelling, and I’d prefer not to understand actually.

I started off with something in mind, and that was my retirement but I see this blog is evolving, and leading me somewhere.  I don’t much care where.  I suppose once I am at my where someone will read it.

It is not important.  What seems to matter is I delight in doing something that is totally my own once a week.

Maybe next week I’ll have something to say.

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NOT on the Buses

Nasty day.  Not snowing yet, but that rain is near ice.  The bus is late, difficult to gauge by how much, they come when they feel like it, sometimes two arriving together, and then nothing for days.  My feet start to get cold.  A bus passes, too full to pick us up.  This is the daily attempt to commute to work.  Repeat the scenario on the way home, the wait so long, I could catch the next bus back to work.

Nothing can accelerate work place burn out faster than a lousy commute.  Perhaps the commute started the burn out in the first place.

Forget the advice to spice things up by going a different route.  I take the shortest, and only route available.  If there was another way, it would be infinitely longer – why would I want to do that?  Get up earlier and come home later?  Na.  And in the winter it is dark a.m. and p.m., not much change of scenery there.  Finding another route is as bad advice as standing on a bus without holding onto anything to improve your balance (yes this piece of wisdom is on the internet).  Advice doled out by people who never take the bus.  Ever.

It’s not the scenery that dulls the mind.  It is the waiting. Looking hopefully down empty roads and seeing no vehicles, of any kind, in sight.  Just blowing snow.  Or sheets of rain.  Or a nice sunset on the good days.

Once on a bus, packed in like sardines, our bulk is smashed to one side as bus takes corners on two wheels, and folded up like an accordion on sudden stops and starts.  And it stops at every. single. stop.  We get every. single. red light.

Eight a.m.  The driver sings at the top of his lungs all the way to work, in two languages.  A lot of tremolo, but not gravel down a tin chute, thank goodness. But at 8 a.m.?

Move closer to work?  Are you kidding me?!  The repercussions of that should be evident.

But busing beats walking. Walk?  I had to during bus strikes.  In January.  It took an hour and a half one way.  And I had it easy.  Some people had to walk hours and still put in a full day.  I near froze, got buried in a snow bank by a snow plow and generally believed my life would soon end.  Bicycle?  Dangerous. But brave souls do it. Koodoos to them for sure.  Plus they save a huge amount of money and get in shape.  Winter must be a blast to bicycle in.  I used to in the summer, but bike thefts are common.  So nice at the end of the day to find your only ride home is gone or worse, mangled.  No room in current office for safe stow away of bike.  I know, I have an excuse for everything.

Of course everyone has their own horror stories of taking the bus.  I could curl your hair with some of mine.

I am, of course, ranting.

I figured it out.  I have gone down the same road almost 6000 times during the past twelve years.

If I get to retire when I want, it means maybe only a thousand more trips.

I won’t miss it.

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Second Childhood

I laugh to say this –

“Technology had to catch up to me”

Especially since I was a hold out on landline telephones until this year.

Locked in me is my 5 year old creative self.  So many interests that, unfortunately, in the mindset of 1960’s middle class dumb were not valid careers.  At least, not for a woman.

Acceptable career choices were like frame selections for glasses – four.  Round, cat eye, aviator and engineer glasses (plastic top, wire bottom).  Secretary, Stewardess, Telephone Operator, Housewife.  Breaking outside of these boundaries were not for the faint of heart as any woman who did can now attest.

Creative endeavors were regarded as cottage industry crafts.  Lots of manual labor, little profit.  But I saw a world beyond craft sales.  I wanted to have my own column in a magazine and publish my stories in books.  Display my art on book covers and advertisements.  See my photo’s in journals and coffee table books.  Design clothes and merchandise.  Most of all, I wanted to make epic movies like Cecil B. DeMille, Sergio Leone and John Huston.  Not very likely to happen for a middle class suburbia girl.

Careers slightly outside of the norm lacked imagination.  Thus, because I excelled in math, my parents envisioned a career in accounting.  The only creativity I could find in that involved food – fudging the numbers and cooking the books.  I was bored to tears and quit.  My head was off into astronomy, physics and mechanics.  I had a love affair with cars.  Exploration of these pursuits were confined to books, museum visits, and much to my parents chagrin, tinkering with mechanical beings – including the car.

Womanhood arrived, dragging with it, office work, the killer of imagination.

Severely strangled, but not snuffed out, all my interests stayed with me through an emotional adulthood.  They surfaced occasionally, wrecked havoc with the boredom of office work, fought with me constantly to be expressed and whenever possible completely took over all my senses and caused me to quit viable jobs.  Left and right brain waged war.

Enter the digital age.  My knight in shining armor.

Publish?  Design?  Create?  Permission granted!  No panel of judges to determine if I am worthy.  Software and hardware abound!  Upon the discovery of this new world, I plunged in with a custom built computer, affording me ten years of epic film making.  Bless the internet – I publish books, design merchandise, I have my own Blog!

I don’t much care if no one ever sees my stuff.  I am a child once more.  That is enough.  My second childhood.

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Retirement

My parents had a traditional retirement.  Winters in Florida.  Good pensions.  Interest rates were at an all time high.  They sold their home and lived well in a beautiful apartment.

The definition of retirement then was to stop and do nothing, or walk forever on a beach and collect sea shells. Although my parents had the ‘traditional’ retirement they were far from inactive. My Dad became an amateur geologist and my Mom and him traveled all over in this pursuit.

Things are a lot different for me.

And

Times have changed.

I have read a depressing number of books happily informing me that there is absolutely no way I can retire.  I basically have two choices; work until I drop, or live in poverty.  I am penalized because I am not married, I don’t own a house, I am a low income earner, I didn’t save a ton of money either, and good grief, I am a woman!

I don’t have a pension, or any benefits other than an annual vacation from work.  Although I have a degree, I never used it in a professional way (life got in the way).  And I really don’t have enough time, energy, interest or money! to come up to speed and pursue a new academic career (this topic I will pursue later).

I know, I really messed up my life.  But it ain’t over yet!  I can mess it up more!

When I examine the whole idea of traditional retirement, I realize it is a fairy tale, at least for me, in line with the knight in shining armor.  Retirement needs a new definition. Do I want to live happily ever after – YES!  So what is my definition of that?

Well, first of all – stop reading crappy retirement books, and take a look at myself and what I can make happen in the years I have left, with what I have left of me!  Perhaps I can inspire you to do the same.  That is what I am going to share with you in this blog.