I wear this wig almost daily. I renamed her Flannery, from “Flatter Me”. She’s my current fav of the wig posse.
YES! I read every page of this and liked it very much!
Iris on bird patrol.
Mushroom carrot chicken soup from scratch!
Scenes from today’s walk…
Other peoples’ porches as seen on this morning’s walk…
Cat power!
More scenes from a walk
Porch life with soup
I’m just gonna sit here for awhile.
Next year at this time, I’ll be retired.
It’s fall, y’all!
Walking in South Pasadena
Spooky!
I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity – to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.
-Edith Wharton
Greetings middle-aged mammals. The land of Peace & Serenity is looming on the horizon, but as with all mirages it grows, shrinks, and becomes wavy the closer I get to it. 7 months and 19 days to go.
I had my meeting with CALSTRS, the pension peeps, where I learned I will be receiving a check each month for exactly 64.43% of my current salary. I will trade in 95 days of sick pay for an additional 0.522 of service credit – that’s a little over half a year. I took 2 leaves of absence a decade ago which reduced my time served by 1.5 years. I still conclude that it was worth it! Of course I could work another 1.5 years to make up for it and retire at the age of 64. That would raise my pension to approximately 70% of my salary, but I could get hit by a bus between now and then, couldn’t I?
No, no, no. 29 years in the classroom is long enough. I predict it will take me about a year to recover from the day-to-day chaos and the noise. I count myself as very fortunate that I don’t have any students throwing fits and tearing up the classroom on a regular basis. I’m lucky to have a feisty, but good group of kids that mostly listen to me. Fights don’t break out in the class. No one is cursing me out or insulting me. Parents aren’t threatening me or lodging complaints I’m not being investigated for raising my voice too loud, or hurting anyone’s feelings. Yet. The world where I started my teaching career is a different one than this one. If you’re a classroom teacher, I hope you’re okay out there. I’m thinking about you and will continue to do so long after I retire.
I’m planning to sketch, cook, garden, walk, nap, and read my way towards a more serene future. I’ve already begun. First step towards retirement is rethinking how I spend money and learning to live below my means. I’m grateful to have savings, investments, and my pension to draw from. I know I’m doing better than some, but not as well as others. I want to live a slow & simple life. Mostly I crave long stretches of time that isn’t filled with trying to get little homo sapiens to do things they don’t want to do. (classwork)
I’ll be writing a lot more about retirement in the coming months. Keep me posted on your own journeys, gentle readers. They are so very interesting to me.
