Update on February.

So, yeah, remember months back when I said I'd wanted to retire before the next hurricane season?

So, I'm still planning on retiring this year at some point, I swear, but I had my annual performance review today and it was so lovely I blushed, even on a call. I've known my boss for a decade now, but she hasn't been my official boss until the last year. I started with her as a contractor, not an employee, then I was a contractor in a different group, then finally became an employee in yet another group, with a boss I also loved (we'd worked together when I was a contractor) but I hated the job. 

Lots of reasons, nobody's fault really. I'll just say it's a bad idea to start a new position with a lot of unfamiliar technical moving parts and working with people you don't know in a work from home situation during a pandemic. It was never a good fit. 

Then my original supervisor when I was a contractor wanted me back in an employee role and she's now my boss, and I said HELL YEAH! Basically, she plucked me out of that awkward, ill-fitting position into the bosom of my former world where I know the players and know how to get stuff done, and I have been living mostly happily ever after, except for being old and still wanting to retire. And we laughed about that as part of my review. 

She was like, well, this is the part where we talk about your future career path in the company, and we both just started laughing. I'm there to do what I'm doing, and she wants me there to do it (it is not an easy role to fill). I said I'd give her a long lead time and keep her informed once I figure out how "retirement" is gonna work, and joked about parking cars at Disney, and we talked about her grown sons and she asked about my new grandson, and it was just so lovely. 

So yeah, I may hang around a while longer. They dangled enough money to make another six months worth it, and I'm working almost entirely with people I like. If something great appears at Disney I'll be all over it, but for now, it's all good.

Oh, and while I don't talk about where I work, I will say management just shrugged and said they're not changing their DEI policy, they don't plan their business on who's in the WH, so that was the icing on the cake for me. 

And my annual bonus will almost, but not quite, cover the actual price of the AC replacement, which came on about a 1/3 higher than my guesstimate. New AC for me next month without taking out a loan!! Not a cruise, but also not a fiscal disaster.

Another reminder that my catastrophic thinking wastes a lot of energy and is bullshit. 

This is also why I'm not writing about the insanity going on right now, it's all unsettled and getting swatted down by courts, and it's really too soon to tell how much of the shit being thrown against the walls will stick. I'm in "one foot in front of the other" mode and doing what I can to support the people filing the lawsuits. 

 

So, How's February Going So Far?

 Today's what, the 8th? 

The condo board sent a notice that we're getting hit with a $1500 special assessment for damage due to Hurricane Milton, oh, and if you could just write us that check by March 1, that'd be great! Thx. You bet your ass I have questions, and we'll be having a meeting about it this month.  

And then, my AC quit cooling. 

But Catherine, it's February, why are you running your AC? Because it's in the low 80s and humid AF, we wake up to pea soup fog every day at this time of year, and you gotta dry the air out or it's awful. So I called a repair company I trust, and the tech came out, had a love fest with Eddie, who adored him and watched him work from a  respectful distance, and he got it running and cooling again, for now, but it a temporary fix. 

Bottom line: over $4k of repairs on a 17 year old system, or a new system. That's kind of a no brainer, $4200 on repairs to a 17 year old system or probably around $6k for a shiny new one.

So we're 8 days into this fucking month and I'm looking at, best guess, $7500 of unexpected expenses. Remember last summer when I won that $10k lottery jackpot? The check after taxes was $7200. It's still in the bank, meant to be spent on something fun, like a cruise. 

And the Universe snickered.

Collecting Survival Tips and Such.

 So, I'm not going to write at length about our current disaster, other than WE FUCKING TOLD YOU SO YOU FUCKING MORONS. 

Survival tips:

Don't immerse yourself in the firehose of bullshit Executive Orders; they're not automatically law and most are straight up un-Constitutional and will go nowhere. Every Republican appointed judge is not in Shitler's pocket, and they're already going "Naah," to attempts to end birthright citizenship, etc. We do still have laws. This is a tactic to frighten and overwhelm people and get them to give up.

Don't abandon social media spaces you use for valuable connections with groups that are important to you. Right now there's a lot of hand-wringing about abandoning certain sites because the owners have orange lips. Block the assholes with wild, gleeful abandon and don't click the ads, but don't yield social media spaces you actually use to these fascist assholes, use it in ways that benefit you. 

DO take breaks when you need to and figure out what level of information you can consume without losing your mind. Get outside (weather permitting) do crafts, do hobbies, read books, watch movies, and don't check your phone more than a couple of times a day.

Be disgusted. Do not be afraid. They want fear; that's the whole point of this firehose of bullshit. They want fear and surrender in advance. 

One for instance: The oil and gas industry pushed the stock market up a bit because Shitler apparently claims we are suddenly, magically going to go back to oil and gas based everything. He can't make that happen. The world has already invested trillions in moving away from pollution based energy, and while we do still need oil for the time being, energy companies think decades out and they also know how much useful oil is in the ground. They're not going to throw out their own business plans and scream "Bless You Shitler, we're gonna trash the billions we've invested in the future and rebuild the coal and oil plants we've been tearing down to return to the diminishing and more expensive dead dinosaurs!" We are already selling more than we consume, oil leases are sitting around unused, this is also bullshit to con the rubes.

Even if it wasn't just an insane idea for the planet, it's not economically feasible. This transition began decades ago.  Was it urgent enough or aggressive enough? No, it was not. Lobbyists buy a lot of denial. But it's no longer "if" we will move to clean energy, it's happening. Not fast enough, not nearly fast enough but it's really not an option, and anyone who actually understands this shit knows it.

I'm not being Little Miss Sunshine here, we are in for a world of hurt in so many ways, ICE is already acting like the SS, enough bad shit is really happening. I'm just suggesting that when you hear a new outrage, wait 48 hours until actual experts weigh in and let us know if it's really a thing that could happen.

Well I guess I did sort of write about it, didn't I?  

Anyway, my job situation remains murky, like an old Magic 8 Ball. My boss assures me that she and HER boss both want to keep me for as long as I want to stay and are figuring out how to reconfigure things to give me work, but it's a weird situation. We had a face to face team meeting this week and discussed legal issues and I suddenly felt like I was back in the job and remembered that I really used to LIKE it. I like the people I work with, etc. but it did feel more like nostalgia. Without getting too specific there were references to "How we used to work" not only before covid but before various other changes that are now in the old days. It was comforting to realize that it's not just me; everybody's feeling the same thing. 

I've been focused on fixing things I can fix. Today I re-potted a dozen sad, neglected pot-bound plants that were temporarily camping inside when the nights were dipping into the 30s. "Florida Winter" appears to be over, the next 3 weeks will be considerably warmer, mid-70s days and 50s nights. I re-potted most of the Succulent Ranch today. It was one of those tasks I'd put off for months because it's just a pain, but it did feel so good to get it done.

Backstory: I think it was Christmas 2020 when my daughter gave me a set of adorable tiny owl planters for Christmas. I mean, tiny, like desk ornament sized. I went on eBay and bought teeny, tiny succulent clippings, none of them bigger than the first joint of my little finger. I bought 10, and didn't expect more than 2 or 3 to survive, I thought they'd be cute little accent plans.  8 of them did, and they grew and thrived and are now big grownup plants in real pots. They outgrew their first big kid pots, and are now taking over the balcony. I had no idea what had been unleashed. 

Hence, the Succulent Ranch.  I need to get some hangers for the string of pearls and string of dolphins and get the "son in law" who still needs a blog nickname to put up some hangers, because they really want to hang on the balcony. I still marvel that these plants started as clippings the size of a fingernail.

The slide scan project continues, and while I'm not blasting through it because it's still tedious, I can say I've made more progress on it this month than anyone did in the last 50 years. I'll get it done in the first quarter of this year.

Next weekend is Epcot Festival of the Arts. I did productive house things this weekend. Next weekend is for fun. 

Spa Weekend

So, right now the timing of my retirement may not be entirely up to me. Projects are being pushed out, etc., and I'm basically just hanging out in wait and see mode. 

I'm ready-ish either way. I was hoping to have a part time position (my boss even floated the idea of keeping me on part time if I wanted to, but it's not her call) lined up, the house my daughter rents being sold, etc., but I'll start collecting Social Security in March regardless. 

 I'm still hoping for a part time gig at Disney, but that's a super popular thing for retirees in this area, so I'm basically stalking opportunities. I wouldn't mind a six month break between retirement and starting a new thing.

Did you know that after you hit your full SS age there's no cap on earnings?  A coworker friend, who is older than I am and at full Social Security age, did not!  I said I'd started the ball rolling on it and she immediately asked how much I could earn, and when I explained how it works she didn't know. From the Social Security website:

When you reach full retirement age:

• Beginning with the month you reach that age, your earnings no longer reduce your benefits, no matter how much you earn.
  

 

So my good deed in December was to clue her in about that, and now she's getting that ball rolling and planning to retire this year too. 😂

Anyway, because I'm just waiting to see which way things shake out and my current workload is very light, I decided yesterday that I'm taking tomorrow off, and I'm doing a 4 day unplugging and spa weekend. Monday is MLK day and a company holiday, and I'm ignoring that other thing happening almost entirely. I am hoping that the predicted bitterly cold weather happens. 

I will catch up on movies I still haven't seen, knit on something for myself, do "spa foods" like fruit and tea and fancy fizzy water (on BOGO at Publix this week - like they know me!) and just...unplug. 

The only items on my to-do list for the next 4 days are to facilitate just totally fucking off.

Onward into the Insanity.

 Welcome to 2025! Are we ready to invade Greenland? No? How about Panama?

 Despite my first comment above, I will not be blogging much about politics. There are many people who do it far better than I ever could, and my blood pressure doesn't need elevation. If you're not already following the brilliant Heather Cox Richardson, go sign up for her newsletter now. Newsletters and The Daily Beans podcast are enough to keep me in the loop about what's going on without stewing in it. I swore off corporate media after the election and haven't missed it a bit.

I'm starting the year a bit late because shortly after Christmas I came down with my annual holiday virus of some sort. Not the norovirus, but its wimpier cousin. (I've had the norovirus. This was not that.) I almost always sick around the holidays, I have no idea why. I don't have a whirlwind of social obligations that would expose me to tons of people and germs, but it's become a thing: some time between Thanksgiving and the new year, I will get some sort of crud. Sometimes it's a respiratory crud, sometimes it's this version, but yeah.

So, anyway, I was sick for the first week of the year. I listened to audiobooks,  drank gallons of tea, and couldn't get too far from the bathroom. I lost 4 pounds, so it wasn't entirely bad.

 It did give me time to think about the future, and make some basic plans.  And to realize that a random piece of advice online (I'd attribute if I could) was very wise. The essence is to go small. We can't fix what's coming by losing our minds about it, we will do what we can when we can. What we can do is focus on our little world and fix what we can, make our lives as good as possible. 

I'm planning to retire this year. I can't afford to retire in any sort of fancy way, but I did do a few smart things in the last 20 years and my monthly nut is actually doable. Not in style, but livable. And I don't really want to totally retire, I just want a part time face to face job with a fun element. I know jobs are jobs, none are a party, but I want my purpose to be making fun for people.

I really want a part time job at Disney, and I'm focused on that as a goal.  I've spent the last nearly FIVE!!! years working from home. We were sent home in March 2020, for "a few weeks" which stretched to months, then I got a job on a remote team, and yeah, working from home isn't the amazing experience we'd been led to believe. 

Working from home was great for a while, but I'm now officially burned out. My email brings an issue, I work on the issue, I email, or IM, or sometimes actually call about the issue, and then it's on to the next one. It's utterly soulless, and I'm utterly over it.

I'm craving fresh air and face to face human interactions. I'd love to get my dream job in Animal Kingdom talking about the gorillas, but honestly, any human contact that isn't food service (I sweat too much) would be just fine by me. I'd be perfectly happy to chat with little girls in princess dresses and tell people where the restrooms are and help them figure out their schedules. I joked about parking cars at Disney when I got mad at my job, but seriously, I'd park cars to get my foot in the door there. 

So retirement is the overarching goal for 2025, but there are lots of lesser goals I've put on my list of life improvements. 

In the first quarter of this year, I will be ignoring the national shitshow as much as possible, and getting my home in order. I have a lot of what we call "deferred maintenance" issues, as well as neglected clutter. This year is starting off with Swedish Death Cleaning.  Yeah, it's basically just decluttering, but mine is extra special because I'm decluttering shit I inherited when my parents died.  I'm Ghost Cleaning shit from the last generation.

I have a large plastic tub of 35mm slides. They weren't always in a large plastic tub; they were in a closet at my parents' houses, hauled around in increasingly tired cardboard moving boxes for 40-50 years. When I cleaned out their last house after my mother passed, guess what? They became mine.

And I can't just throw them out, because at least half of them are part of my sad family history and my grandkids might need to share them with their therapists someday.  (It's genetic. Look how miserable they were on Christmas!) The rest are random nature pictures taken by my amateur photographer and nature nut uncle; I'm keeping the best of those, but honestly, there are a lot of trees without time or place. Not keeping those.

I've ignored this project forever, because just sending them out to be digitized wasn't worth the cost without a preliminary review (many, many unidentified forests) and reviewing them was tedious AF. I tried bribing the Kid to help and she gave up after half an hour. It's tedious.

I finally, finally found a system that works. I use a lightbox app on my iPad, the SlideScan app on my iPhone, and every day I grab a handful of slides and scan.  Boom, they're on my cloud account. Is this as high quality as having it done professionally? No, it is not.  But these slides have been sitting around for half a freaking century at this point and preserving them this way is better than throwing them out. Quick and dirty is better than not done at all. I'll still have to sort through them to identify the random people and places, but again, we don't really need a dozen pictures of me in an Easter outfit I don't remember. I was struck again by how much I look like my father. 

So, that's where I am right now. I am not checked out on the shitshow, but I'm balancing it with getting my own world in order.