No more back to school

For the first time in 19 years I don't have someone going back to school.

In that regard I can regard the current "Back to School" advertising as being even more annoying than usual.

But I can't help but let there be a wisp of nostalgia about it.

There was always something fresh about the prospect of another academic year, even as my daughter Elizabeth and son David progressed through college. There was still the talk of the courses they were going to take, the books and supplies they needed to buy, the living arrangement details they needed to finalize.

Now, in addition to being an Empty Nester, I'm a Unschooled Parent (in more ways than one, some might argue).

Elizabeth is happily at work as a doctor of physical therapy in Connecticut after what seemed like years and years and years of back to schools.

David is a May graduate of Boston College, and he is now engaged in the job of finding a job.

It may indeed be back to school some day for him, but as of this academic year I can ignore the ebbing tide of summer to thoughts of school.

This will make me want to hold onto summer for as long as I can, especially since here in northern New England there wasn't much of a summer through all of June and a good portion of July.

Somebody somewhere owes me more summer. I expect payment in August and, quite frankly, through all of September.

With a fall school season I can ignore, I can give myself the gift of the Endless Summer, with a nod to the 1966 movie of the same name. It's having the attitude of always being on on vacation from readin', writin' and 'rithmetic. It's scoping out surf gear instead of scoping out back to school sales.

I can be the beach bum I always wanted to be, worrying more about how glassy or choppy or big the surf will be rather than worrying about the best rate on tuition loans.

But the Endless Summer -- as it has always been -- is a fantasy.

There's the small matter of winter around here.

And even with no back to school, there's still plenty of readin', writin' and 'rithmetic to do.

Ice out means start of spring, sort of

We have a tradition up here in northern New England called "Ice Out" that is more a harbinger of spring than the equinox.

It's when the M/S Mount Washington cruise ship can navigate Lake Winnipesaukee safely between her New Hampshire ports, unimpeded by ice. "Ice Out" has an official declarer, aviator Dave Emerson who flies over the route regularly until he sees that indeed the ice is out of the lake.

For 2009, he declared "Ice Out" this past Sunday the 12th at noon.

Spring had begun ... well, maybe not yet.

My winter in southern New Hampshire was just a little longer than the winter up there a couple of hours on the lake.

For my own purposes, "Ice Out" is when the ice is totally clear of my driveway. And that didn't happen until Tuesday, April 14, at 1:45 p.m.

Granted, there's still lots of snow in certain areas. Heck, if you feel like it you can still ski late into spring and early summer, depending on the snow pack in Tuckerman Ravine (pictured here on Monday courtesy of the Mount Washington Avalanche Center). The ravine with its incredibly steep headwall is a natural bowl near the peak of Mount Washington that collects feet and feet of snow.

So, if snow and ice are the measure of winter you can find it up here for a while yet.

But now that the ice is out of my driveway my spring has sprung.

The shovels are stored in the garage and I swept a winter's worth of sand from the driveway. I took the ski rack off the roof of the car and I put the golf bag and the golf gear in the trunk. With spring in New England you never know when a golf game might break out. I've learned that you have to take it when you can get it because the golf season passes oh so quickly.

The surfboard rack will go up on the car's roof soon enough. I'm a fair weather surfer, so I need the ocean temperature to get up somewhere in the 50s before I venture in.

Right now the water temp is 42 degrees.

Trust me, it still feels like winter in the ocean and frankly it rarely feels like summer in the waters off northern New England. But we'll take what we can get.

What I did -- and didn't do -- on my summer vacation

Summer is a good time to think about composing a future life in the key of retirement. Now that I've finished a summer of retirement, I can accurately say that my composition is definitely unfinished.

That's not to say it was bad; it had some good parts and it was discordant at times with me trying to find my emotional cadence after suddenly not working after 33 years of working every day. It just feels undone.

I often say that I'm glad my retirement started in early June, because it has given me the summer to re-think my thoughts away from the things I was doing at work to the things I wanted to do from home. Pre-retirement to-do lists were different from the retirement to-do lists.

First off, I had to define retirement ... is semi-retirement appropriate? That assumes that half the time is spent retired, as in not working, and the other half is spent working, as in working for some kind of recompense. That didn't happen, so I'm not sure semi-retirement works as an accurate description.

Full retirement -- as in not doing anything -- doesn't really qualify because I was working at stuff. Let's call it a quasi-retirement ... quasi, as in having a resemblance to, as in close but no cigar.

I retired from the newspaper company where I had worked for 30 years, promising myself I would use the summer to re-engineer myself as a professional, that I would think of how to use what I learned as a newspaperman and recreate myself in some other way.

Here's the good, bad and ugly of what I ended up doing:

-- I bought a surf board and wet suit and learned how to surf. I'm not very good. After a lot of trial and mostly error I could stand up and get a pretty good ride on some of the milder waves that the Atlantic has to offer;

-- I created Broad Cove Media as a business platform from which to operate a newspaper operations consulting business and publish web-based content. I didn't do any consulting during the summer. I write weekly, as I always have, for Boomer Angst, and I created Eats@Home as publishing avenue for one of my favorite pastimes-- cooking and eating;

-- I planted an herb and vegetable garden, courtesy of the herb and vegetable plants wife Jane bought for me as a birthday present in June. The herbs did very well. The peppers and eggplant ... not so much. The tomatoes are doing pretty well. If the garden produced anything it was in spite of me, not because of my abilities as a gardener;

-- I do a little volunteer work for the Great Bay Coast Watch program, which is run out of the University of New Hampshire and which looks after the health and well-being of the Great Bay Estuary here in southern New Hampshire;

-- I'm writing for Examiner.com as its Baby Boomer Examiner. This is a national news, information and entertainment web site, and it uses experts -- so-called national examiners -- as contributors. I contribute almost daily content related to issues of interest to Baby Boomers. That's been great because it gets me writing every day, something I haven't done since my newspaper reporting days some 20-odd years ago;

I'm busy and I'm productive in the sense that there's something to do every day.

Oh, and there's the golf. It can't be a quasi-retirement without the golf, can it? I play golf each week with former colleagues from the newspaper and there's a weekly pot to be won based on scoring. I've earned $76, which means I've earned more money playing golf in retirement than anything else I've done this summer.

I guess if Beethoven and Schubert can have their unfinished symphonies, I can have one too.

Does this technology make me look fat?

Most of us, when we think of technology, regard it in terms of machines: computers that compute faster, electronic servers that host infinite information on the internet , even cars that because of technology are more powerful yet more fuel economical than their predecessors 20 years ago. Not many of us, however, regard technology and clothes in the same thought.

Yet, technology has made great strides in the advancement of how clothes function, especially in the field of sports.

Take swimming, for example. Speedo has introduced a new swimsuit called the LZR Racer. It's expected to play a significant role in the Summer Olympics next month in Beijing, China. It was already the talk of the competitive swimming community during the recent Olympic trials for U.S. swimmers in Boise, Idaho, where records fell like a house of cards. The full-body LZR actually squeezes the body with 70 times more force than its predecessor, actually making the body more sleek -- and therefore less resistant -- through the water. One Italian swimming official described the suit as "technological doping."

We've come a long way baby from the little Speedo brief that Mark Spitz wore in 1972.

This compression technology has made its way into other sporting attire as well, both for the professional and more casual athlete.

I have two such pieces of clothing -- a compression top for winter running and a full-body wetsuit for my recent pursuit of learning how to surf. My problem with the compression technology is that it is very revealing. There's no hiding a body flaw with something that is so skin tight in can almost make the individual hairs on my chest show through. And my primary body flaw during these days of middle age is belly fat.

My belly isn't Type 2 diabetes threatening bad. Admittedly I could lose 10 pounds. In my normal day-to-day clothes it really doesn't look too bad. But my normal day-to-day clothes tend toward generously-waisted pants and loosely fitting shirts. It's when I stuff myself into those compression suits that it's an eye opener, in more ways than one.

To begin with, just getting into a compression garment is an aerobic exercise in itself, the equivalent of at least a mile on the treadmill at an 8 minute, 30 second pace. It can take your breath away with all the grunting and straining and effort to literally stuff 175 pounds into something seemingly made to hold 100 pounds.

I thought I might need something in the roomy size for my wet suit, but Tyler at the Summer Sessions surf shop in Rye, N.H., was careful to fit me to make best use of the technology that's meant to keep your body warm against the extended exposure in the cold ocean water of the Atlantic. He wanted me in a wetsuit that was as tight as possible without restricting my ability to breathe. I learned after the first day on the beach to get into my wetsuit beforehand at home ... best not to scare the little kiddies and their mothers with the grunting and swearing required of getting into the thing. Maybe that's why surfers are confined to more remote stretches of beach.

If nothing else, the compression running top and the surfing wetsuit give me the visual incentive to maintain an exercise schedule and try to eat a sensible diet that leans more toward lower fat foods.

Sure, the clothes make the man. But do they have to scare the women and children in the process?