Should We Stay or Should We Go

If you could eliminate one household chore from your life permanently, what would it be? Not put it off. Not hire someone to do it occasionally. Not magically make it easier.   I mean gone. You would never have to do it again. For me, this is an easy one. Grocery shopping. Hands down. I loathe grocery shopping. And it's not just the actual shopping. It's the whole process. First, I have to figure out what we need.  This sounds simple enough, except somehow the answer is always, "I don't know. What do you want to eat this week?"  How am I supposed to know what I want to eat five days from now?  I can plan, but then on the day I don’t have an appetite for that meal. (Or feel like making it). Then comes the list. Then the trip to the grocery store. Then pushing the cart up and down every aisle while trying to remember what we came for, looking at the list a hundred times, avoid buying things we don't need and figure out how to make our grocery budget str...

Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash When we retired, I had a pretty good idea of what retirement was going to look like.  Or at least I thought I did. After almost seven years of retirement, I've discovered that some of my expectations were pretty accurate, some were completely wrong, and some were just plain funny. So here are a few things I thought retirement would be, compared with what it actually is. I thought we'd travel a lot more. Turns out: We love travelling, and we do a fair bit.  But we also really love being home. I’m finding that I’m craving more home time where I can enjoy doing some of the quieter things. I thought every day would feel like Saturday. Turns out: Every day feels like Saturday, except now I sometimes have no idea what day it actually is. I thought we'd sleep until noon. Turns out: Apparently getting older has a way of interfering with that particular retirement dream.  I’m just happy to get a six hour night sleep in one go. I thoug...

  Photo by seeetz on  Unsplash Back in the spring, we did a big purge of the house. We had reached the point where there were just too many things. Things we no longer used, things we had forgotten we even had, and things that had somehow managed to follow us through the years without ever being particularly useful. So we started sorting. A lot of things left the house and ended up in the garage. The plan was that John was going to take part in a community garage sale, sell what he could, and then whatever was left would go to the thrift store or the dump. It sounded like a good plan at the time. The Garage Sale The garage sale happened in June while I was in Newfoundland with my sisters. (Good timing on my part, right?) Unfortunately, it was not exactly a raging success. There were only a handful of visitors, and when it was all over, John had made about $125.  Not exactly the windfall we had imagined. Still, there was a garage full of things that needed to be ...