Retirement – 8th Anniversary

October 31^st, 2025, marks the eighth anniversary of me retiring from fulltime work.  If you have read my previous retirement posts, you know that I have often written the word retired in quotation marks (“retired”) or as “semi-retired.”  Last year, I took several more steps towards permanently removing those qualifiers and I suppose I will continue to post these annual updates until I have actually done so.

So, have I gotten closer to being fully retired this year?  Yes.  No.  Maybe.  Well, let me explain.

You may recall from my retirement update last year that I had relinquished all of my previous consulting and teaching positions and I am now only consulting for my former company which I have been doing since September of 2022.  Each time I neared the expiration of my assignment, it was extended another six months or so.  At the end of June last year, it was extended an additional nine months until the end of March 2025.  Then before we reached that termination date this year, it was extended a full year until the end of March 2026.

This time, as we approached the termination date, we were in the middle of developing some method validation templates.  So, I was glad my time was extended so I could see this work through to its completion.  And as I have said before, I really enjoy working with the people.

Thus, I will not be removing that qualifier from my retirement status this year but I am doing less consulting so you could say I am getting closer.

When I was first approached about consulting for my former company and it was explained to me what was desired from me, I asked how many hours it might require a week.  I was told about ten hours which I felt I could easily handle.  As some of the projects I have been working have wound down, the hours each week have dropped.  In the past twelve months, the most that I worked in a single week is seven hours (only once) but most weeks it has been less than three hours and even as few as one hour.  Thus, even though I am still consulting, I am spending less time doing just that.

Now you might ask what I have been doing with my extra time?

I mentioned before that since retiring from fulltime work, I have never been bored.  I have never sat around and thought what am I going to do now?  I have always had something going on or a project to work on.

In the past twelve months, I have taken some nice trips.  In November of last year, my wife and I spent nine days on a glorious trip to Florence Italy.  Our travels have continued in 2025, some trips of which I have already written about and the rest you will hear more about in my annual travel update early next year.

Some of you may be interested to know that I have also stayed busy in the miniature 1/12-scale doll house world.  Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have built seven doll houses.  Over the past twelve months I have been busy with my sister building furniture to furnish her doll house and mine pictured above.

If you have read some of those posts, you know we are not just building furniture from purchased kits. We are finding full size Mid Century Modern furniture online, scaling it down to 1/12-scale, cutting it from fine wood with a laser cutter, sanding/applying polyurethane to the cut pieces, and then assembling them into the finished piece.  With this approach, we are furnishing our doll houses with unique furniture that you cannot buy anywhere.

My lifelong interest in miniatures has also kept me busy with LEGOs, which I rediscovered a few years ago.  With a love for puzzles, I find building with LEGOs is like working a three-dimensional puzzle.  And just like a two-dimensional puzzle, LEGOs even provide that satisfying “snap” when individual pieces come together.

I have also continued my love of reading.  In 2024, I read the most books I ever had in a single year in my life.  This year, I may actually break that record as through midyear, I had already read more books than I had by midyear 2024.  You will learn about the best of these books in my first posts in January 2026.

After getting over my back trouble, I have also tried to maintain my physical fitness.  Unless my travel, my granddaddy duties or my consulting meetings interfere, I run about 2.5 miles twice a week and go to the gym to do resistance training twice a week.  On those weight days, I also walk a dozen laps around the 1/10-mile track at the gym to get some steps in.  And to keep my body flexible, I do muscle stretches every morning after I get up.

I have to say that after eight years of retirement, it is still so nice not to have to set an alarm in the morning to get up at a certain time.  However, my body does seem to have its own internal alarm clock as I almost always wake up in the morning between 6 and 6:30.  I have never been a late-night person and thus usually go to bed around 10 which gives me a good fifteen to sixteen hours for wakeful “retirement” activities.

In spite of not being able to just say “I’m retired,” I am happy with my current status.  It provides me with a little professional interaction in a field I know very well and a little bit of extra money to pursue my hobbies.  The rest of my time, for the most part, I get to do pretty much whatever I want to do.  Now who would complain about that?

Cheers to another fun year of retirement!