First week

Friday Friday

You were the jewel of the week

Friday Friday

Rain or shine I loved your day

Friday Friday

You were the weekend preliminary

Friday Friday

Without you hopeless will have been the week

Friday Friday

Now all you are is just another day!

This has been our first retired week. Out of that week, I have had the flue for the past 3 days. In our previous life, loosing 3 days on a week holiday was something that would have me so mad. Now, it's just waiting for it to pass, taking it easy.

Next week will be about getting the trailer ready to hit the road. We are going to load the trailer with enough content to last a couple of months. I think the biggest challenge is to decide what we are going to bring and what to leave behind. At about 140 square foot of living space, you just can't bring all the toys... also we will need clothing for both warm and cold climate.  

We will buy a bike rack to carry the bike over the tongue. We are in no means the athletic type, but we do enjoy going miles on bike paths. This is a great way for discovering new locations.  

In July, there was a sale at Canadian Tire for the type of battery pack that, after charging it, you can use to boost you car with or you can use to supplement some electrical need on the road. Of course they were out of stock, we got a rain check. Yesterday I went to the store to get one, but, another customer was in that aisle and started to tell me that he bought the same model and that he was not happy with it. It couldn't supply enough juice for a few hours without needing to be re-charged. Not what I need.

I was thinking about getting 2 * 6 volts batteries for the trailer. From researches I did on the Internet, the consensus is that it is far better than a 12 volts battery. It should provide us with enough power to hold us for the rare occasion when and where we will not have electrical hookup. Having that setup, we will be much better than with the little power pack.

I might not post much during the weekend, this will be family time.

Maiden retirement voyage

This is it, I couldn't sit around anymore, this morning, on this third of October 2012, I hitched the trailer and started our maiden retirement voyage.

All Hitched up

You might be wondering where we are going? Maybe Florida, Texas, New Mexico, California.

This summer I have been following closely my good blog-her pal Carolyn. She spent a good part of summer in Washington and Oregon. Those two are definitely on my radar. She kept posting beautiful pictures and meanwhile I was biting my finger nails off with envy. But that will be for another trip :(

But before telling you where we are going, let me tell you a bit about yesterday.

Knowing we were leaving today, even with the flu, we cleaned the trailer. I did the exterior, roof including, while Christiane was taking care of the inside. I filled up the black tank (for the one that doesn't know what I am talking about, it is the tank where the c-a-c-a end up) three times with the hose and flushed it. When you are not flushing regularly, there is some odor that... seem to ferment (do I need to say more?) 

After that we relaxed. I hate to talk about this because it reminds me of my ex-work, but I have been involved with a census. I first thought that we were feeding 5 cats, but, noooooooo, there are seven of those looking-for-a-free-meal cats enjoying our treats. Hopefully my wife won't read this but... I'm thinking about a trip to Costco to get a 50 pounds bag of cat food... This should hold them happy for a week! 

Back to our maiden trip, the weather was perfect, traffic was non-existent, I backed up from my spot, turned around and backed back to our lot in Val-des-Bois. So in total the trailer was moved about twenty feet from it's original location. Exciting isn't it? Hahaha see what happens when retirees have too much time on their hands.

Final destination

 We moved the trailer because my wife's sister Jo and her husband André will be our guests for a few weeks. They are fulltimer and live in their motorhome. As a good host, we let them park by the utilities... see we are NOT all bad!

Hiting rock bottom

Mirror,mirror on the lake...

That's it, I am sick... runny nose, sore throat, I feel like my jaws are made of bricks. Who would have guessed that retirees could also suffer from flue. That's not fair, I don't have any sick day, I have to go through that on my own time...

Yesterday, we spent the day like a lot of our future days, I would guess. It was cloudy, but by the afternoon, the sun decided to show up to brighten the already gorgeous fall colour. We built a fire, and sat all afternoon outside, surounded by 5 hungry cats. Boy we had fun with them... and they seemed to appreciate the freebies... must be what they talked about when they say it's a win win situation.

Not easy getting all the cats in the picture

We truly enjoy days like that, there is almost no one around, we can just relax and de-compress from our working life. We are also planning what we will be doing soon...

Tomorrow, we are going back home for a few days (Caroline - time to do cleanup before the parent units showup :) ). There is some business that need to be attended to, and since we are retired, we don't have to wait for the weekend to do them:

I need to buy a new battery for the trailer, I didn't know much about batteries and I found out that battery that are in a trailer should never be allowed to go below 50% of their charge. If you let that happen, you reduce considerably their life expentency. During the winters, I was disconnecting the batteries but leaving them where they were. Now they don't hold their charge anymore.

We also want to buy a bike rack to mount the bikes over the tongue. There seem to be problem with bike rack and trailer, I feel that if while driving, I can see the rack, I might be able to prevent losing my bikes on the road.

Our Daughter from the East (Julie) is coming for the weekend. We will pick her up at the airport friday.

It's our baby's birthday and we will celebrate that event as a family. Julie's birthday is also in October, we will celebrate her birthday as well. A lot of cake in the futur for us... yummy!

We don't have any definite plan as to when and where we are soon going, I will be letting everyone know when we are ready.

Feeding wild animals

Sunday was raining pretty much the whole day, I would think that for those people that (I hate to use this word) w-o-r-k on monday morning, it could be depressing. For us, it was just another day at the office (matter of speaking of course :) )

We spent sometimes on the internet, played solitaires and watched TV. Like our previous life, we watched the Amazing race and the good wife.We also watched a lot of car leaving the camping to go back to the city... The result is that we have pretty much the whole camping ground just for the 2 of us!

When I say just the 2 of us, I mean the animals standing on 2 legs. There is a healthy population of wild cat in the camping. Other than mice, a good amount of their diet was coming from the campers generousity. Since we are pretty much the last ones left, we carried on the task. Saturday I gave them spaguetti (no wine). I also planned ahead, and I took food from our cat at home, part of her food. When I did that, she looked at me like I was out of my mind... When we go back home, we might just take food from our daughter... Everyone has to contribute!

The wild one
 

The evil one

Wild Blue Jays (what is good enought for the cats... )

Just so that you feel bad for me, this is a picture of my cubicle this morning. You see folks, retirement is not all about benefits... and I share my cubicle with my boss... She can be demanding at time hahaha

Day 2

Before writing about our day yesterday, some comments:

I changed the title of the blog. When I started to write this blogs, we had years ahead of us before the R day, however, we were lucky enough to retire this year. So in reality, we reached the end of our journey to retirement.

The new name is more reprensentative of what we will be doing. I didn't do any scientific research but I think that a speeding snail, even going down hill, doesn't rise much dust in its trail. I will really have to remember this often, going from a go-go life to a slow one is something that I will have to conquer.

Why will I write this blog?

The first and most important reason is to have our daughters sharing our journey. I think it's  the best way to bring them with us. We will try to do interesting things just for them so they don't drop us from their reading list. hahaha

I also want to have a journal, I forget so fast that having everything in writing will help me with my recollection of events, town, people, etc.

For a long time, I have been reading several blogs, I gained a lot of insight through them. This is a great way to share informations with a very large pool of persons that have common interest.

I also want to keep in contact with friends and family, I will have a facebook account so that I can see what they are up to...

Now for people who are new to the world of blog reading, when you click on a picture, a new window opens where you can see that same picture but in a larger size as well as all the other pictures from that posting. I like that.  Often, before even reading a post from the blogs I follow, I will go and check out the pictures in their bigger size.

At the end of each post, there is a comment section, I really enjoy every comments. This is a little like my pay for writing the blog. You don't have to have an account setup, there is an "anonymous" option available where you can write a comment. If you are "anonymous, could you write your first name at the end, it will help me with any response.

Back to regular programming...

Yesterday was just a perfect fall day. A lot of sun, not too cold, but cold enought that we had a good fire going for most of the afternoon, to warm us.

I went to the library, got a couple of books. I had a 1$ fine on my account because of a late returned book... Shame on me :), it's one thing that doesn't bother me at all, fine at the library. I always paid without arguing, most library don't have a budget that is excessive. For a small town like Val-des-Bois, they are providing a great service.

There was a lot of people at the camping that came to close their trailler. For winter, they have to blow all the water lines and pump antifreeze in those pipes and get all their stuff secure for the winter.

I went around to some of our friends to invite them for supper. So we ended up 7 people at the table. This is a little like the last meal... Fernand and Reina left last night, Jean and Suzanne are leaving this afternoon and Guy who came only for the day but stayed overnight is also leaving today.

Professional Retirees

Reina, Fernand and Christiane

Jean and Suzanne

Guy and Suzanne (because Nicole was not there :) )
 

We had a wonderfull time with a lot of laugh (and a lot of wine!). Hope every one has a great winter, see you next summer guys!

A new journey begin

Today is really our first day as retirees. I was asked yesterday what will I do... and in the same phrase a person was saying "You will probably sleep in". Well not quite, I like to get up early. I was not getting up early for work but because my perrfectly tuned body :) was ready to start the day. Most of the time, I didn't even need an alarm clock!

So today I woke up before the sun rise, got my coffee going, and went outside to take a picture of the sun rising - this is how dedicated I am to this blogging venture. But as you can see in the picture, the sun was in a little fog, and I thought, how appropriate since this is how I feel, I  too am in a little fog...
Don't get me worng, this is not a dark cloud, it is more like I don't see clearly what is ahead but I am more than happy to find out!

Now let's get back to yesterday... My plan was to get to work, send an email to my EX-colleagues to thank them for having put up with me for so many years, go around and shake hands, hug and share souvenirs with everyone. A good thing I was not in management, because, my plan was not one that was well thought of. If you think about doing something like I was, DON'T pick a Friday... I missed a lot of people that I wanted to see...

When I arrived, I sat at my (now) ex-desk, and was putting final words to my email, Ghislaine came to say goodbye, we ended up both with tears in our eyes. After she left, I was thinking that it would not be an easy day...

In the elevator, I saw Claudine, we were talking about my retirement, but her floor came up and she left, I wanted to go back later but I forgot, if you ever read this Claudine I am sorry that I missed you but I am sure we will see each other at the "boulangerie" some time.

Shortly after, Christianne called and invited me to have coffee with QA at the cafeteria, I couldn't pass that opportunity to say goodbye to a group of people that kept pointing out my soooooo many mistakes for so many years hahaha. It was good to share a last coffee with you, Christianne, Peter, Isabelle and Michel. I missed Charbel (not :) ) and Johanne, and the ex QAs like Marie and France.

Around 10nish, Luc my ex-chief came back to the section to say goodbye, I was so glad to see him.  He now works for another department. One story with Luc that Elaine always reminds me of is that at a divisional picnic, we were playing a ball game, on the pavement. I felt down and kissed the pavement, Luc came to me and had a look of horror in his face when he helped me up. He took charge and was walking with me toward one of the building. I was bleeding a little but I was not feeling like I really hurt myself... On our way, Luc told me that in the building there was a shower and that WE should take a shower... hahaha I hit my face on the pavement but I was conscious enought to know that I would not get in the shower with any one, not even my chief :)  Now Elaine, you had a lot of chuckles about that, what I might have forgot to tell you is that in French the pronoun (On) which translate as (We) in english, excludes the person that uses it. So it was not an indecent proposal, ouf!!!

Just before leaving the building, I saw Éric and Robert (my boss and the chief), I teased them about NOW I could tell them how I really felt about them, but, the truth is that they are the best persons that I had the opportunity of working for. I really enjoyed working with them and I was lucky to end my carrer with such great people.

Before noon, I dropped my employee card at security and that was it, I was out of the building and into a new journey.

I picked my up wife who was also having her last day, she was waiting at the door with her BFF Nicole and Dan.  She received among other things, a lawn chair for her retirement.  There is a plaque on it, Retirement 2012.

We went for lunch at a Shawarma place in a shopping center.  There was a long line up, I got in the line up, while my wife when to get something... I was in the line up for maybe 2 minutes when a women started to talk to me. I thought it was my wife, I turned around and it was someone I didn't know. She kept chatting and also complaining about the line up. She looked at her watch and told me that it had been 5 minutes... I told her I didn't care because I had plenty of time, I had just retired half an hour ago. She told me that she retired 3 months ago, and the funny thing is that she retired from the same department, she was working 2 floors above me. Us retirees should stick together hahaha

After lumch we went to do some grocery and got back home to pick up stuff we were bringing to the campste. We said goodbye to our daughter, got in the truck and drove away. We both were anxious to be on our way, but having eaten Shawarma for lunch.. we were thirsty and didn't think of bringing a bottle of water. The camping is an hour away from home, usually, we don't do any un-necessary stop, but, now we ARE retired so I stopped to get a bottle of water. My point is that it is a change of pace folks, I took a consious decision to stop just to teach myself to slow down, there is no fire to attend to (this is just a way of speaking because in the future, there will be a lot of fire and it won't matter if it is Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Friday...

Full disclosure

After spending 4151 days working at statistic Canada as a programmer, I am ready for this day.... That is retirement day!

I worked at Tunney's pasture in Ottawa, building Jean-Talon, on the sixth floor. Here is a picture taken on sept 27th 2012.

For the one that doesn't know, Statistic Canada is a government agency that each year is recognize as one of the best employer in Canada.

I know that I will miss my co-workers (also known as my friends), but going from being an older employee to becoming a younger retiree was just one opportunity I couldn't resist.

Of course you might be asking yourself why to retire, let me show you by some pictures:

The above picture is the view from my cubicle when I am standing up... between the hanger there is a window that I can almost see.

Following is a view from my "new" office, I can see a mountain which is getting it’s fall blanket on, a lake where there is no motor boat allow. What can I say about those two ergonomics chairs. If that was not enough... a little wine is really acceptable around a nice fire.

What is really helping me to cope with the syndrome of quitting my working days is to be confident in my collegue and knowing that someone else can and will do my work...


Nooooooooooooo