What I've been up to lately (a peek at my "retirement")

I spent the first year of my retirement overseas, working on a book and also being a tourist.  

I figured that when I came back to the U.S. this past summer, I'd learn what its like to truly be retired: I have read so many other blog posts about the joys of waking up without an alarm, of no longer needing to care about artificial (or not artificial) work deadlines, of running errands mid-week instead when the stores and streets are empty instead of during the crowded evenings or weekends.

Hah.

First of all, my running buddy and I get together three times a week.  Although we've allowed ourselves the luxury of pushing back our starting time from 6:00 to 6:30 a.m., the alarm clock is still how I wake up every day.  It's not because of work; it's because that's my choice (well, and because my friend works, so we can't really run later in the day). But still, it's rare that I turn off that alarm and just sleep in.

And then, a bunch of things happened.  

One is that toward the end of September, my husband and I fairly impulsively decided to downsize significantly and move to a condo.  There were a bunch of reasons for doing so eventually (and I hope someday to write a blog post about that).  But there were also a few reasons for doing so quickly -- in particular, noisy neighbors who talked loudly all night long on one side of our home -- and so all of a sudden, we were in a swirl of moving.  This threw us into a deadline-intensive couple of months:  between mid-October and now, we've been caught up in buying a place, fixing it up, triaging all the stuff in our row house, moving what we wanted into the condo, prepping the row house for sale, and getting it on the market.  That has been intense, I tell you!

Another thing is that I got ready to teach a class.  I know, I know, I'm retired: but it's only one class.  I figured it would be a good way to help my former department (several people are on sabbatical this spring, and they need a bit of extra help), and I thought a part-time gig would be a good way to help structure my time once my book was submitted to my publisher.

Oh, and that reminds me of another thing!  The book, whose first draft I finished while traveling last year, was accepted by a prestigious publisher and is now under contract!  So another thing I've been doing -- and will continue to do -- is to work on the picky things related to preparing it for eventual (2027) publication.  This is stuff like getting permission for the gazillions of figures I use, working on promotional materials, indexing things, copy-editing . . . it's very bureaucratic. (Kind of like a job.) So, yay for that!

And then there's this other HUGE thing.  While I was in the middle of moving and booking, my professional society wrote to me and said, "As you know, the editor of Illustrious Journal [not its real title] is stepping down suddenly in January. We think you should take over for a year as Interim Editor; could you do it?"  

Now, usually it takes about a year to train people to be the editor: they get one year of shadowing the previous editor and taking on the various tasks one-by-one as they get up to speed.  Since I was in the thick of all that moving/packing/cleaning/repair stuff when they made the request, I didn't even do any pre-January training.  I told them yes, I'd do it, but that during December I'd stick my fingers in my ears and sing la la la la whenever any Illustrious Journal stuff came my way, because really, I had to make sure I had a place to live. Then January came, and, my goodness, what an amazing amount of administrative stuff I'm learning!

So this is my retirement: waking up at 5:45 most days, running with my friend before the sun comes up, teaching a class, working on the administrative aspects of a book manuscript, and dealing with a deluge of editorial work and funky computer interfaces.  I tell my friends and colleagues: "the sooner you get behind, the longer you have to catch up!".  I'm snowed under with catching up, for sure. If I'm posting a bit less than I'd thought I would, well, now you (and I) know why.

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I do want to say that all of the above stuff I wrote is part of why retirement is so cool: this is a lot of stuff to do, but it's all stuff that I chose.  I would never have been able to take on Illustrious Journal if I'd been teaching full time; the class I'm teaching is one that I truly love teaching, and knowing that I'm teaching it while retired makes me feel much freer about the way I teach it.  (Dude! I'm not grading homework!  I hate grading, and generative AI makes the homework process all the more problematic.  I'm so glad to be able to just shove that aside).  

There's also the freedom to structure swaths of my time how I choose.  Late in the summer and early in the fall -- before my husband and I decided to move houses -- I got to spend time with my dad, whose illness progressed, creating occasional emergencies and eventually overcoming him.  I got to visit him several times while he was feeling well and while he was feeling ill, and my sister and I could be with him for his final week.  I am incredibly grateful for that time together. 

So this is a bit about what it feels like -- at least, for me -- to be retired.  It's not relaxing, nor boring; not in the slightest.  But it definitely feels like retirement gives me chances to respond to events and to choose my own adventure.