Hey, It hasn't QUITE been a month!

 May has been a LOT on all fronts. Work has been crazy busy with ridiculous demands: 

PM: "Hey, we forgot to involve you at the start of this project, our bad! We're really sorry. Now, how fast can you get your part done?" 

Me: "Normally a project of this size would take 10 weeks," (explains the calculations).  

PM: "Can you do it by May 16th?" 

Me: "That's a little less than 4 weeks." 

PM: (wheedling like a kid who wants ice cream before dinner): "I know, but..."(insert schedule woes here).

And that's just one project. And they wonder why I threaten to go park cars at Disney.

My retirement date remains "Somewhere in the future...." 

Meanwhile: That House will be under contract this week and will close mid-June. My time as The Accidental Landlady is coming to an end, a decade past when I'd thought it would. (I was so young and foolish in my 50s.) I am not getting enough equity out of it to retire this summer, so yeah, looks like I'll be doing what I'm doing for a while longer. I'll evaluate after the next quarter. 

Meanwhile, I've got job searches set up for Disney and Disney-adjacent opportunities, because you never know. If a role I really want at Disney appears, you bet your ass I'll apply.

My employer offers financial advice through a 3rd party company, and they had a "Planning for Retirement" online seminar the other day, so of course I signed up. Apparently I'm already doing everything they advise, so that's both reassuring and totally not. 

Not, because the main thing that struck me was how their advice started: "You need to think about what you're going to do next, after you leave your current career." They weren't talking about traveling, hobbies, etc. They were talking about getting a "retirement job."  

Basically, these financial planners told their audience that yeah, if you want your retirement funds to last to the end of your days, you really need to think about at least part time work for a few years after you leave your career. Do consulting, get a part time job doing something different (my plan) but stay in the job market as long as you can.

I know this is true and good and sound advice, but damn, it's sobering to have financial planners saying, in the nicest way, that they strongly recommend that you don't totally retire when you retire, so you can survive whatever happens in the economy and won't outlive your money. 

This is of course far easier said than done. 

The cleaning out of The House was eye-opening, for sure. It made me want to get rid of all my worldly goods now. It has been depressing to see how much shit was still stored there, in closets and in the garage, that had been stored for decades and which, when hauled out into the light of day made absolutely no sense to hold onto, and I'm finally more than ready to trash. 

It has made me a rabid proponent of Swedish death cleaning. Not that I'm planning to die anytime soon, but because I'd really love to live in an organized and decluttered house NOW. I've been on a binge this weekend, and it feels really good. 

I've said it before, but my inability to get rid of shit is hereditary. I'm really aware of that now. When I see something I don't need my first thought is always, "Somebody could use this!" and I stare at it for a while and then put it back where it was. 

I did it this weekend: I was purging cabinets of duplicate and unused kitchen stuff and discovered that I have THREE identical Pyrex glass pie plates.

No, I do not know why I have 3.  So I texted the above picture to my daughter asking if she could use one, and her answer came back almost immediately: "I have 2." 😂

A much needed reminder that nobody really truly needs your shit; they have their own.

Except when they do need your shit. I've had a small table and chairs against the wall in my kitchen, I am not kidding when I say I think it was used twice in the last decade. It just took up space, and I kept telling myself it had to go. So yesterday I posted it on the neighborhood FB page, free to a good home, and I swear to God within 5 minutes a couple who live around the corner DMed me and claimed it. It was exactly what she'd been looking for, and I was so happy to give it to somebody who will actually use it. The only creature who ever utilized it was Ellie, it was her perch to look out the front windows.

I'd been meaning to get rid of it for literally years, but never got around to it.  It was gone to its new home within 20 minutes of my offering it.

 

Likewise, Ellie's "dining table" had been in my office for the last decade. She eats on a super basic IKEA end table to keep the dogs out of her food. It had been in my office because there was no room in the kitchen. I also had a cat bed/tree in a box since Christmas, because I'd been intending to make this change forever. Yesterday the table and chairs left, the cat perch was assembled, and the cat dining table replaced the unused human table. The transformation took about 45 minutes from posting on Facebook to the cat checking out her new spot. 

I'd put it off forever because, because I don't know why. 

Anyway, multiply that by everything I own, because I'm on a roll.