Time to reflect

At last 2012 has arrived and with it my retirement really does seem only days away although it's more than 70, it's an exciting time for me and although I'm still working my heart's not in it anymore.

Christmas came and went, we visited my stepson and his partner Christmas day and stayed overnight which was just as well, I went on the red wine and probably had a little too much as always seems to happen when I drink red wine in company, it happened at a friends wedding a couple of years ago and my stepsons wedding just over 12 months ago maybe I'd better stay off it at my sons wedding in August. I did really well for gifts amongst other things I got a Kindle from my wife which surprised me a little as she doesn't like me reading at home she says it's anti-social but I've started my first book anyway, the sequel to Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which I read previously, bought a wallet for it and I can certainly seee the attraction, I also got a Wii Fit and while I can't say I've adopted a fitness program I am making an effort in a small way and encouragingly although from the various tests my Wii Fit age fluctuates, mostly it is less than my real age and last night was down to 27 but it did go up to 75 on one day. I also had some clothes, kitchen knives, beer, and a solar powered security light for our car port, which I did want incase you asked, so gift wise from my point of view it was a good Christmas. My son came down on Christmas Eve and stayed until the morning of Boxing Day then the rest of the week just seemed to disappear, we did go down to London to see a show on the Thursday and the family came to us for New Years Day but otherwise Christmas was fairly uneventful.

It's a little overr 3 weeks now before our next cruise adventure, I'm sure I've bored you with the details previously but this one is with the MSC cruise line which is an Italian concern, reading reviews it would appear that the majority of passengers will be Italian and my only other experience with the Italians has found them to be more than a little rude but I'll take as I find and it certainly won't spoil my holiday. My ambition to do the Panama Canal cruise when I do retire seems to be dead now, my wife said the other night that she didn't fancy the 11 hour flight to San Francisco to pick up the ship unless she could have a seat upgrade on the flight, as it would almost certainly be a scheduled flight the only upgrade available would be either business or first class both of which are outside our price range so I'll just forget it for now, a shame really as the price is still falling.

I continue to visit the allotment but other than digging there's little to do at the moment until the weather warms up a bit and for the same reason I don't spend too long there when I do go because its so cold but we have all our seeds now for the coming season and our seed potatoes should be delivered in the next few weeks once we have them they'll need chitting then planting out in early to mid March as will nearly everything else but I'll be retired then so I'll have the time to do it. Yes a the risk of repeating myself as I write this I've around 71 days left until I retire of which 46 will be spent at work, the toolmaker, Paul, who is supposed to be taking over from me still hasn't had any more time to learn the software or the machine that it programs so I think he will definitely struggle, my boss hasn't said any more about asking me to come in and I hope he doesn't but part of me expects him to ask me to help in some sort of way even if it's only in a consultative manner to support Paul who's taking over from me, if I'm honest i don't want it I've had enough and if I wanted or needed to work I'd rather it be in a less stressful environment than I'm in now but my boss has been good to me, kept me in full employment now for over 23 years on a reasonable wage so if he needed my help I'd certainly give it though not for free. It seems impossible that I'm just weeks away from being 65 I certainly don't feel it.

So back at work now and work for me is coming in 3 short spells now as I approach retirement, I have around 3-4 weeks before we close for an extended Christmas and New Year break (my bosses choice not mine) then back to work for 4 weeks before our next cruise then once I return a mere 6 weeks and I shall retire. I've been training one of the toolmakers to do what I do as best as I can he's a bright lad in his early 30's but I'm no teacher and it's only when you come to try and show someone else what it is you do that you fully realise how difficult it must seem, it doesn't help that we're a fairly small company and within a few hours of this toolmaker joining me he's always dragged away again to do another job, so there's no continuity and I fear he will not have enough knowledge to take over even at a fairly basic level when I do go. I have told my boss that I am prepared to come back and help out if needed but I don't want to commit myself to working regular hours, I just hope it doesn't turn out like that if they find themselves overloaded. I have to say with retirement being so close a lot of the time I just don't want to be at work and I have noticed that I'm making a few more mistakes through lack of concentration, I think that's me focusing on the light at the end of the tunnel and not seeing the tunnel itself.

A few weeks ago I'm went to see the rheumatology consultant again since the spell in June when I was badly affected with reactive arthritis following the BCG treatment, I've been gradually improving up to the point now where I feel I'm almost completely back to normal I've even managed to get my wedding ring off, not that I've fallen out with my wife but since then my fingers have been a little swollen and the only ring I wear I couldn't remove, anyway this time I saw the senior consultant he explained that blood tests suggested I was in the 25% minority of people in which this would re-occur but symptoms suggested I was in the 75% majority that would not suffer a re-occurence but as I'm off all medication for it and more or less clear of symptoms he has discharged me. My bladder cancer treatment is still ongoing though and I'm got an appointment a few days before our next cruise for another flexible cystoscopy hopefully this will bring good news and it will just be a matter of monitoring the situation for a few years with no further surgery or any other invasive treatment.

So Christmas once again is around the corner our chldren have decided this year to change the way we give out presents choosing to buy a joint gift for only one other couple so that it is a more meaningful present and not just a load of tat, they each will buy one gift for one other couple so each couple get a gift and each give one, if we'd have joined in it would have saved us a lot of money but to buy a gift for only one of your children even though they're adults now is not an easy thing to do so we have compromised by saying that we will buy a joint gift for each couple and maybe reduce our budget at the same time so we'll still save money, with my retirement pending and the fact that this is apparently the worse time in history to buy an annuity our income and therefor our budget for gifts will be drastically reduced next year. I have to say sometimes the gifts we buy you never see again and I'd rather pay less if the gift is not going to be appreciated or used.

The new allotment plot is coming on well I haven't done any more digging for a couple of weeks but we have heard from the person who had the plot previously to say that she'd finished with it and left it so we went down on Sunday and moved all our stuff into the new shed, my wife had to come too so she could be sure everything was done tidily (I'm not the tidiest person by a long way) and as soon as we've got off the few remaining crops we will leave it completely to concentrate on the newer bigger plot. It's been up to now a very mild start to the winter and grass is beginning to grow again where I've dug recently but a few frosts should stop that in its tracks, weeds are of course an ongoing problem but thats the price you pay for having an allotment.

I keep dropping hints about this Panama Canal cruise I've seen for when I retire, it leaves San Francisco on March 19th, 2 days after my 65th birthday then cruises back to England via the Panama Canal, we could even combine it with a few days in San Francisco before we sail the prices have been falling but I fear that they may not fall any further, I don't know whether my wife is acting dumb and planning a surprise or whether she's not bothered about going at all, or whether as we first planned she's waiting to see how we get on in an inside cabin at the end of January before doing anything, watch this space I'll let you know.

My son has got a date for his wedding, it will be on Friday Aug 3rd next year. I did mention in a previous post that it coincided with the Olympics being held in London and although he lives many miles from the main Olympic venues when we tried to book a room many hotels were already fully booked and those that weren't were asking well above the normal prices, we finally managed to get in somehwere not too far from the reception but could only book the one night although we really wanted two. I don't know whether hotels are genuinely fully booked this far in advance or whether booking agencies have block booked rooms hoping to make a killing closer to the date.

Just a progress report really prior to my 13 nights on the shores of the Red Sea in Egypt, incase it needs saying we are both really looking forward to our holiday and it's coming at the end of an unseasonably hot spell here in England where the temperatures are in the high 20's C (low to mid 80's F for my American friends) everything is done apart from the packing, I have foreign currency, passports, flight tickets, hotel voucher and the hotel transfer has been arranged, so for the next 2 weeks or so I'll be doing nothing except maybe fetching the odd glass of beer to cool my inside or dipping in the pool to cool my outside. The current temperature out there is a very warm 32C (90F) dropping through the night to a low of about 21C (70F.

Apart from packing the one thing I haven't done is speak to my insurance company, I was waiting to go for my call back after my recent cystoscopy and biopsy and I went on Tuesday, my surgeon wasn't there so I saw what was obviously a locuym, he was older than me and I'm sure highly skilled as a surgeon but he'd obviously not seen my notes until a few minutes before he saw me so he didn't have any understanding of the problems I've had since the BCG treatment and tried to send me for more until I pointed out the reactive arthritis, he really didn't have a clue but he was able to give me the good news that although my bladder was inflamed from the BCG treatment the biopsy returned no cancer cells so the future holds a further cystoscopy in the new year again under general anaesthetic but otherwise no more treatment before then.

I finally got started on my new allotment plot this week but as the winter arrives although as I said earlier it has been hot the daylight is fading fast and it's difficult to manage more than an hour in the evening after work before darkness beats me, I chopped back some of the weed and started digging and I'd only got about 4 feet back when I came across a massive rhubabrb root extending on and off across the whole 5.5 yard width of the plot, nothing had been growing from it so I'm still trying to remove it piece by piece it's easy to cut through it with a spade and I've already filled 2 sacks with roots from that alone, Obviously the roots go much deeper than I've dug so whether it will return I don't know, I'll wait and see and if it happens I'll deal with that then.

Having made the decision to retire it seems to have lifted the weight of uncertainty off of me and I feel more relaxed and if I'm honest I could happily retire tomorrow now but funds don't allow that, they say you shouldn't wish your life away but March 16 2012, the day I finish work can't come soon enough for me now, as well as the countdown I have on here I've also one on the desktop of my computer at work that counts down in minutes and seconds too.

For a while now my wife has complained about our home computer being slow and if I'm honest she's right there is an inherrent problem with a connection to the hard drive which can be resolved by unplugging and replugging the SATA cable a number of times after which it behaves itself for a few weeks before playing up again, I have replaced the cable but it made little difference so I suspect the problem is on the contacts on the hard drive itself. so I'm loooking for a replacement computer, since we've bought a laptop I rarely use the desktop and she only uses it for email, ebay, the occasional simple game and general net surfing with maybe a little word processing here or there and viewing photos from one or another of our cameras so she doesn't need an all singing all dancing fancy computer a modern fairly bog standard one would esily be OK. I've seen one on a web site coming in at less than £190 (about $298) but it comes without an operating system and Windows 7 is about another £75 so I was looking around and saw the Ubuntu operating system which is open source so it's free and does practically everything that Windows does but in a different way so I've downloaded it onto my laptop to try and if it seems Ok I'll buy this new machine and install Ubuntu on it, I'm sure my wife will be sceptical about something so different so it's important I know my way around it before I do anything so I can show her. I've only been trying it for a few days and only for a few minutes a day but because it doesn't install lots of applications that you never use it seems to run faster and I'm enjoying the excercise of trying something new and learning new skills.

Well it's been a week or two now since my last post I shall have to try again to load theallotment pictures maybe from home, we're doing really well with it now having already taken french beans , potatoes, tomatoes, courgettes, lettuce, marrow, beetroot, carrots, onions as well as a few broad beans and runner beans and friends we've made in the few months we've been there have also given us apples which my wife mixed with a small amount of rhubarb that was already growing to produce a very tasty fruit crumble, I'm trying to get my wife to apply for a plot of her own which will give us much more versatility in the crops we grow and the quantity too although even if she does it will be about a year or more before one becomes available, a week or two back we walked down on a Saturday evening and although many plots were well tended there were a few which were totally neglected and could do with taking over by someone, I keep looking at the 10 pole plot shown me when I first took mine on, it's still unused and although the work would be tough for a few months on closer inspection it's not actually as bad as it first appears. We've told the secretary thaat we would swap with anyone that has a 10 pole plot and who wanted to take a smaller one but I dont think that's very likely.

I've been for my cystoscopy and now I'm waiting for the results, it was done under a general anaesthetic to allow the surgeon to take a biopsy sample at the same time and I was lucky enough to be the first patient taken to theatre so I arrived at 7.30 and was home before 1.00am I suppose I will be invited to a clinic appointment in a week or two now.

Our next holiday is now only just over 4 weeks away then it's the run up to Christmas the cruise I spoke about in an earlier post in late january and on March 16 I will retire, yes a decision has been made and I've decided to finish. There are a number of reasons, it will be good to have more leisure time and the freedom to choose how to spend it albeit with a much reduced income thogh someone I was speaking to a couple of weeks ago had a good philosophy he said I want to run out of money and breath at the same time. I'm not happy at work occasionally i enjoy what I do but increasingly I get frustrated with the work and some of the people I work with paticularly dave who can be very friendly and helpful but is infuriatingly irritating especially with his overwhelming sense of self importance, and Keith the new designer who is very good but is typical of what can happen when people take up engineering design without any significant practical experience and design things that can be made but are twice as difficult to make and take twice as long as they should, and although my health seems good again now the last 12 months has taught me not to take anything for granted so while I hope to have another 20 years or so yet you never know what's around the corner. I will finish work but not totally break ties with my employer, I've worked for him now for 23 years and he's been good to me particularly over the past 12 months when I've had to take quite a bit of time off so if he needs me for anything whether to cover holiday or sick leave or just to help out if a crisis occurs I will make myself available.

My bowls has also almost come to an end for another season we have a game this Saturday then the next week my football team play and the week after that we're going to my uncle's golden wedding celebration so this week will probably mark the end of the season for me, it's been a disappointing season missing nearly a month when I suffered with the reactive arthritis then the follwing month there were hardly ever enough people willing to play for us to get a game hopefully 2012 will be better when I will be able to play more often having increased leisure time