My New Life

            Early mornings are very enjoyable.  Since I was 18 years old and enlisted in the US Army I have always been up early, usually before dawn, sometimes at the proverbial hour of 0:dark:30, and off to work at whatever job I was doing.  For the last decade I have risen at 5:00 AM in order to arrive at my usual parking space at Tinker Air Force Base by about 6:00 AM.  After that hour my spot would have been taken and I would have had to walk additional steps.  I was used to this routine, but as I got older the 10 minute walk from my parking place became more and more difficult.

            On Friday May 13, 2011 I resigned from my job and retired for about the third time.  My first retirement was from the US Air Force on November 30, 1979.  I then was hired as a Metrology Technician by the Raytheon Service Company and worked for various divisions of that corporation on US Government contracts until I resigned from that job in January 2001.  This was my second retirement.  I found that I was not yet quite ready to kick back and relax, so I went to work part-time for various companies which had the contract at the Tinker Air Force Base Precision Measurement Laboratory.

            I am only just now beginning to start my new life as a retired person.  My wife made a joke about it.  She said, “Come over here and sit on the couch and practice”.  “Practice what”, I asked.  She then said, “Practice doing nothing”.  I am not yet ready to be a couch potato, although perhaps I resemble one, so I am searching for ideas and things to occupy my time.  This blog was suggested to me by a lady friend, and will, I hope provide an outlet for my thinking.  The only other scheduled daily event to date is coffee with the birds just after the morning dawns sitting on the patio.  It is early summer here in Oklahoma; the sun gets pretty hot by about 9 or 9:30 in the morning.  I sit on the patio drinking my coffee and eat a small breakfast listening to the birds call and watching them eat until about 7.  For about 2 hours afterward I do some light yard work.  How do I know when to stop?  When it gets hot enough to cause perspiration I put my tools away and go in the air-conditioned house and rest.  Occasionally at this time I also take a ‘power nap’ in order to prepare myself for the remainder of the day.