What are you going to do with yourself?

Sometimes, when I talk about retiring, people ask me what I am going to do with all that time. Because they seem to imply that retirement is a bad thing, I usually infer that these are people who so identify with their jobs that they see having no job as a condition to be avoided. I don’t think that way.

I grew up thinking that retirement was something to eagerly anticipate. My father talked about retiring early and going to Florida for as long as I can remember. That was his goal. He achieved it by retiring when he was 55 and moving to Florida. His father and mother had retired to Florida in the 1940’s. Their choice of a place to spend their “golden years” had a great influence on him and on me. Unlike many people, I had two generations of successful retirees as examples.

When I got my first “real job”, I was lucky enough to be approached by an agent who sold annuities for an insurance company. I made the decision to start investing in my retirement at that early age. I did this not because I was wise, but because of the examples of my father and grandfather. Retirement was something a long way off, but it was something I knew would eventually arrive. I steadily saved. Now I have the means to consider a life without a steady job and the income one provides.

All this doesn't address what I am going to do with myself. While I was teaching, I had three months in the summer of miniretirement. I often didn't do well with filling that time. I often found myself bored and grouchy. I've learned from those summers. One factor which contributed to the boreddom was often it was too hot and too humid in Kansas, where I lived at the time, to do much outside, so I had to contend with summertime cabin fever not unlike what I have been experiencing here in Laramie this winter. I realize now I have choices. I can find meaningful occupation when the weather is bad. I can bundle up and go out anyway. I can go elsewhere. Each of these options has merit. I suspect I will counter cabin fever with a combination of the three. The key is to avoid the mindset which beings on the funk of feeling trapped by the weather.

More the next post....

Scary roads

Christmas has come and gone without much ado. We had snow and wind so the company we had hoped for used her head and stayed put in Denver. The many roads (6 highways) in and out of Laramie are notoriously treacherous when we have foul weather. I 80 runs east and west from here. The west bound lanes are the ones most often closed. The engineers who built the highway used expediency rather than good sense when plotting its route. Old highway 30 used to run several miles north of the northern most tip of the Snowy Range. This enabled the horrible blizzards that are generated out there to blow themselves out on the prairie a bit before reaching the road. In order to save a few miles on the route the interstate was built right up against the mountains. Now the frequent snows and howling winds make that part of the road impassable on a regular basis. Some argue that WYDOT should use more sense than the engineers and close the road more quickly when there are white outs or the winds are so strong they are blowing the big trucks over or off the road. There have been many wrecks on that stretch.

The eastbound intertstate has it's own set of problems. When you drive east from Laramie (7220 ft), you immediately begin to climb up to what is known as The Summit. Rising to an altitude of 8624 feet the Summit is the highest point on the whole east/west route of I80 and home of some really awful weather. What I haven't mentioned is that I80 is the main east/west truck route. There are many more trucks on this route than on any of the other routes. Some of the drivers of these rigs do not use good judgement when driving up to or down from The Summit. As a result, the stretch of road from the top to where the road levels out as it enters Laramie Valley accounts for the most wrecks in the state. WYDOT has made efforts, lighted and unligted signs, reducing the speed limit, etc., but many ignore the warnings and crash. If you make it up to The Summit and continue east the road runs along an open stretch were you can see the Front Range, the Medicine Bow Mountains and the Snowy Range just by swivling your head. The winds up there are fierce. The wind at Buford has been clocked at over 100 mph. Winds approaching 60mph are not unusual. When these winds pick up the light, dry snow and blow it around, the road disappears in white river of snow. It is very scary to try to drive on a road you cannot see.

The third major Laramie route goes south from here. The stretch ofUS Highway 287 from Laramie to Ft. Collins, CO is one of the countries most beautiful highways in the west. It is also deadly when the weather is bad. Miles of windswept roads turn to sheets of ice when the sun, wind and snow mix. Even so, I prefer this route when I have to go to Colorado because there is little truck traffic.

The other routes out of town are mostly for local traffic and people trying to reach the mountains to hunt,ski or snowmobile. Most are hardy types and used to driving in horrible condiitons.

We hope for snow because a good snowpack provides us with adequate water during the summer months. The price we pay is having to stay put or very scary driving conditions.

Winter Gardener

I've started my garden. Oh, I know it's only a few days from the winter solstice and it was -15 yesterday morning, but it's time. It's time.

I got a book on interlibrary loan entitled The Way We Garden Now by Katherine Whiteside. The subtitle is 41 pick and choose projects for planting you paradise large or small. It's a low key, practical guide to gardening. Whiteside banishes perfectionism. Just what I need for my winter garden imagination.

I've already imagined enlarging the flower beds in the front yard, building the compost heap containerwe've been putting off doing, and thought about what tools I need to acquire or replace. I've worried about imaginary weeds and bugs, then read what to do to rid my space of them. I've planned an imaginary watering strategy for the desert conditions here on the high plains. What will be next? I have no idea, but it sure is fun thinking about the warm days of summer here in the heart of winter.

morning by starlight

It's cold this morning. It was 0.1 when I got up to feed the dogs and let them out before I went to the gym. On my way out the door, I looked at the thermometer again. It had dropped that final .1 degreee and stood at exactly 0. I put on an extra layer under my jacket and pulled my cap down tightly. When I stepped out the front door, I was not smacked by the cold. There was no wind, which makes all the diffence in the world. I won't lie; it was cold. But, it was tolerable since I was dressed for it. My main aggrevation was that I had to scrape my windshield. The frost on it stuck like glue, so I scraped and scraped without making much of a difference. I got enough off to be able to be safe and left the rest for the sun.

When it's this cold and colder, things start not working right or at all. One of the most annoying is the fan on the heater/defroster does not work when it is about zero. This is a problem when you need to go someplace and cannot see out. So I scrape on the inside of the windshield as well. The car also whines and creaks sounding like it might shatter if someone hit it. I haven been that cold. Sometimes I whine and creak, so I sympathize rather than curse.

When it is this cold in the morning, it usually means that there are no clouds holding what ambient heat there is in. When you look up in the dark predawn, the stars and planets look back at you. At 6 AM here, Venus is high in the east and one of the dippers is low in the west. The snow reflects their light and makes it possible to see quite well with out artificial light.

It sounds strange, but I like mornings like this: the light of the stars, the crunch of my steps on the snow, the feel of my warm winter jacket and most of all no wind.

Wyoming Authors

Since moving back to Wyoming, I have been reading a number of Wyoming authors. The latest of these is mystery writer Craig Johnson. I just finished his most recent book and the third in this series, Kindness Goes Unpunished. The first two are Cold Dish and Death Without Company

Johnson's hero Walt Longmire is sheriff in a thinly veiled, fictional county in north central Wyoming, that he calls Absaroka(read Big Horn)County. The other main characters are a hodgepodge of types that he is over the course of the book working at developing. Longmire's best friendHenry Standing Bear, is a Northern Cheyenne healer, his main deputy, Vic Moretti, the daughter of a family of Philadelphia cops. I think one of the reasons I enjoy reading a mystery series from the beginning is that you become better acquainted with the characters over time the way you would with real people you meet.

Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming which is a tiny town east of Sheridan. Its main claim to fame is th Ucrosss Foundation which is the kind of place it would be fabulous to be awarded a fellowship to spend several months writing or doing art or music.

Books are my friends.

While I was at Jessica's over Thanksgiving, we watched an Oprah she had taped. It was one of the the shows which dealt with a woman who had become a hoarder. People who hoard to the extent that woman did have a compulsive disorder. Like many disorders, hoarding is a fairly harmless tendency that many of us have that has gone wild in the hoarder. Jessica and I got to talking about what we tend to hang on to or acquire beyond what we need. I confessed that with me, it is books.

I love to read. I always have one or two or more books going. My bedside table attests to this.


I also love to acquire books. The earliest presents I remember getting were those "Little Golden Books" that used to cost a nickle or a dime. Instead of badgering my mother for candy or toys when we went to the store, I would bargain for a Little Golden Book. I was pretty good at it and eventually, I had a whole shelf full.




I have moved many times and on each of those moves I have packed and hauled boxes and boxes of books. I think I do this in part because my books make me feel secure and at home. I also think they represent a kind of wealth to me, a wealth of knowledge. My books are not rare volumns and are not intrinsicly valuable, bit they are mine and comfort me.



Periodicially, I cull my shelves and thin out those books which I am sure I will never read again or read for the first time. I ususally give the culls to my local library of which I am a very loyal and frequent patron for their annual "Friends of the Library" sale.




My hoarding tendency is stocking up on even more books before I have read the one's I already have. I do this constantly. Then, to make matters worse so that I fall even further behind in reading what I already have, I go to the library and check out even more books to read.
If I am not content with what my local libraries have on their shelves, I order more through interlibrary loan. The two libraries I use, the local library and the university library, have made it only a matter of a few clicks and keystrokes for me to access millions of volumns for free.

I am always on the lookout for new authors and new books. I read several blogs dealing with books. Nancy Pearl's Book Lust and Nonfiction Readers are just two of them. Before the internet, I used to read Booklist, the ALA publication about new books, regularly in order to make lists of books I wanted to read. I guess the list making is another manifestation of my own book lust.


I am trying to cut back. I have put myself on book probation. I cannot buy any more books for myself until I have read 10 of the books I already have and have not read. One of the rules of this probation is that I can use the library. This is not meant to be a cruel punishment, rather it is just to get me out of the habit of acquiring more books than I have time to read.




I plan on keeping track of what I have read by making a list for this blog. I also plan on celebrating when I finish reading the ten books by buying myself a present. A book.

Birds of a feather

After spending a few days in relatively warm Austin (40, overcast, rain), it was nice to get back to the dry, sunny, cold Laramie. Sunday was my first day home and we went up to Pole Mountain to run or hike. There were a few clouds, but it was a bright day and not much wind. The trail I took, Headquarters, is a point to point trail, but there are several places where other trails join or intersect so you don't have to hike the whole way. My plan was to hike out about 45 minutes to a place where the trail comes to the top of a ridge and the trees thin out and then take another trail back to the truck. From that spot, on clear days like Sunday, you can see the front range with Long's Peak and Mount Meeker in the distance to the south. If you move your line of sight a bit to the west the mountains of the Rawah Wilderness poke their white heads up above Boulder Ridge. Further west is the seemingly solitary Jelm and then the Snowies are almost directly west of this vantage. The altitude at that spot is about 8800 feet so it's no surprise you can see a ways.

It was late afternoon as I was standing there taking in the view. The sun was about a foot above the horizon. The slanting light was bright and clear. As I looked, a flock of birds flew up in front of me. At first I thought they were just misc. brown birds. I watched them roil through the sky in that wonderful way flocks of birds have. How do they fly like that and not smash into one another?
As they flew, over and behind me, I noticed that they were not just misc. brown birds. They were larger than sparrows and had a different look than starlings.
The flock of about 50 or 60 birds landed in a dead pine tree about 20 yards behind where I stood. Since I was between them and the sun, they seemed to be in a spotlight. I could clearly see their plumage and markings. I knew they were waxwings of some kind. The only kind I was familiar with were cedar waxwings. However, these birds had a rufous patch on the bottom of their tails. When I got home and looked them up, it turned out that they were Bohemian waxwings. I kicked myself for not bringing the camera along. As I took a step to leave, they all flew out of the tree.