Saturday, March 1, 2008

Update on progress towards fulltiming

Although progress on getting the house ready for sale has been made it has been slow going since my last day on January 22nd; I cannot believe it has been almost 6 weeks already! Think about how fast time seems to go during Christmas break or vacations and then double or triple speed is how fast retired time goes!

It has been a little too cold to spend a lot of time in the basement which is the first really big task so we have concentrated on the inside of the house. We organized the pantry & cleaned out all the refrigerators and freezers. We worked on the filing in kitchen desk, office desks, computer desks with stuff ending up in the shred pile, garage sale pile, recycling pile and throw away pile. I think I have shredded more in these 6 weeks than while I was working and have recycled a lot of paper. With all of the stuff we have accumulated over the years we are going to have a huge garage sale as part of the subdivision garage sale weekend in May. I then organized our 7 years of receipts that we will have to maintain. For this we used the Ziploc large bags and crammed one year into one bag. That way I can get three years in a box that used to hold only one year. Each year I will then shred the oldest year and relabel the bag.

Other news of note since I retired. I am drinking less caffeine, doing more exercise and getting more sleep. One of my Lenten obligations this year is no sweets and I am dieting per Weight Watchers and the "Eat This and Not That" book resulting in an approximate weight loss of 8 pounds to date with a lot more to go. Our 22 year old furnace bit the dust last week so that was an unexpected expense but a brand new furnace has to be more appealing than an ancient one.

We attended the RV Show at Bartle Hall and was a little disappointed that one of the floor plans on our short list was not there but the other two were. There were also a couple others that caught our eye but right now our current leader (subject to change w/o notice, etc.) is the Carriage Cameo F35SB3. We will not be buying on until the house is on the market at the earliest so it could be a while.

The next two big tasks to tackle are the dreaded basement and yard work.