An anniversary of independence

Four years ago, on June 8, I retired.

How time flies when you’re having fun.

Am I having fun? You bet, but it’s not the carefree kind of fun.

I’m free, but not free of care.

The fun is in the independence of a daily grind dictated by someone else’s demands, someone else’s deadlines, someone else’s expectations.

My demands are my own, my deadlines are my own, my expectations are my own. My daily grind is whatever I want to make it.

Thus, my successes and failures are my own.

The fun of working retired is deciding what is worth my time and effort and what is not.

If the need to ski on a weekday winter morning is overwhelming, then so be it. If the need to surf on a weekday summer morning is there, then to the ocean it shall be.

If I need to visit my daughter in Connecticut or my son, late of New York City, now of Washington, D.C., then that’s what I’ll do.

If I can’t stand looking at the grass that I see needs mowing outside my window, I’ll hop on the lawn tractor and get to it.

There is still care about the bills that have to be paid. They don’t stop coming due each month just because of some notion of ‘retirement’.

Visa, Hyundai, Verizon and the rest of them still want their money.

So you work enough to pay the bills, work enough to send the quarterly payroll taxes check to Uncle Sam, and work enough to hopefully help family and have some fun.

I like working in my jammies first thing in the morning, having taken my cup up coffee down the hall to my office, where I also keep my guitars and my piano and my music.

I like it that, if work becomes too much of a bother, if the muse isn’t there to inspire me to write, I turn to my music. I couldn’t very well do that in the corporate life from which I retired.

I miss the people of work. I miss the camaraderie, the singular purpose of a shared vision, the interaction. I don’t miss corporate budgeting, layoffs, and frustration of being told “we can’t afford to do that.”

Here’s to the fourth anniversary of independence, to four years of care, and four years of free.

Cashing in on retirement angst

Financial service companies are trying to cash in on the hopes, dreams and angst of Baby Boomers who are in the throes of retirement.

In fact, more and more marketers are seeing the size of the cohort -- and its relative wealth -- as one big cash cow.

From financial companies to pharmaceuticals to cars, we’re seeing more and more advertising that tell us we’re desparately in need of retirement planning and medication to ease our arthritis, lower our cholesterol, and re-erect our erector sets.

On the financial services front, Prudential is the latest to address Baby Boomer retirement through a series of ads (and a web site) focused on that First Day of retirement and what that means in terms of expectations, dreams, hopes and anxiety.

On the web site, you click on a picture of a new retiree and you’ll get their story.

An automobile engineer from Rhode Island, who retired on July 4, 2011, said: “Goals and desire that are realistic will be key to living the kind of retirement I want. Once you’re comfortable in your own skin, life is easier.”

My retirement story started in June of 2008.

I didn’t retire, I was retired.

My retirement eligibility with my company had arrived earlier that year, but I figured I’d stick it out for a couple of years, more perhaps.

I didn’t really have a plan, but economic changes at the company forced a plan on me, and I was given a one-time offer of an incentive to retire. It was the classic offer I couldn’t refuse from the corporate mafia.

I remember my first day of retirement distinctly. Normally awake by 6:30 a.m., I was wide awake at 5 a.m., anxious and disoriented.

Disoriented because, all of a sudden, I had no place to be, no meetings to attend, no tasks to get done by deadline.

Anxious because, all of a sudden, I had no plan for what was next in my life: I had no second act, no encore planned.

(For an idea of what it’s like, check out videographer Mike Kravinsky’s online series about Baby Boomer reinvention, “The Nextnik.”)

It was like I’d been abducted into an alien world of having nothing to do after an adult lifetime in a world with everything to do.

I don’t woodwork. I don’t fix cars. I’m not the least bit handy when it comes to handyman work.

But I can’t do nothing.

I read, I write, I research. So I parlayed skills learned from 30 some odd years in the newspaper business into a bunch of freelance writing and editing jobs that keep me occupied, engaged, and as busy as I want to be.

Financial service companies may want to help us with a plan, but the truth is that a lot of us Baby Boomers don’t have a plan -- we don’t have a financial plan, much less a life plan for retirement.

We’re just going with the flow, just as we’ve always done, making lemonade when there are lemons, guacamole when there are avocados, and plans when there are opportunities.

We are what’s on our feet

It’s said we are what we eat.

We are also what we wear on our feet.

I was thinking about this the other day -- why it caught my attention, I have no idea -- and started counting up the shoes, boots, etc. that I wear on a regular and fairly regular basis:

17.

That’s right, 17.

To me, that seems like a lot because I don’t consider myself a shoe person, at least not in the manner of Imelda Marcos, the wife of the former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. It was rumored she had up to 3,000 pairs of shoes.

I break my shoes down into three categories: the Everyday shoes, the Athletic Shoes, and the Specialty Shoes.

Now that I am among the legion of Baby Boomers who are retired but still working, they reflect a person who leans more toward the casual and athletic.

That wasn’t the case when I was a full-time professional. That person was definitely more business, reflected in the shined dress shoes of greater formality.

Today’s Everyday shoes are a simple treaded leather lace-up for the fall, winter and early spring. They are replaced by a deck-shoe type slip-on for the late spring, summer and early fall.

It’s on the rare occasion these days that I’ll wear the cordovan or black dress shoes.

Around the house I’ll wear my Adidas flip-flops when it’s warm, my L.L Bean slipper mocs when it’s cold.

The Athletic shoes cover a wide range of activities, and have grown in number now that I have the time to devote to and concentrate on my physical well being.

I have shoes for running, shoes for cycling and shoes for walking. I have booties that I wear to surf when the Atlantic Ocean is too cold for my piggies. I have shoes that I wear to the beach. I have boots for skiing and boots for apres-ski eating and drinking. I have shoes for tennis -- I’d like to think I’ll pick up a racket again, but I probably won’t.

My Speciality shoes also cover a wide-range of activities.

A pair of trail shoes that I bought for hiking are actually used more for mowing the lawn and assorted yard work.

I have fleece-lined boots from Columbia for snowblowing the driveway. And I have steel-toed work boots for any occasion that requires steel-toed work boots. I needed them several years ago for a project I managed; I guess I hope there will be another project like it to manage some day.

In the meantime, it’s the working retired casual look for me on my feet.

Baby Boomer children to the barricades?

The young people taking to the streets in France to protest future cuts in their government retirement got me thinking: Would my kids do the same thing over changes to their Social Security?

No, they wouldn't.

Social Security has a big bull's eye on it right now.

The government retirement benefits that their grandparents enjoyed and that their parents plan to enjoy, could be vastly different by the time the children of Baby Boomers get to retirement age.

The issue in France is like it is around the world. Governments are going bankrupt. One major cost to a government is its pension system.

France wants to try to save money by raising its pension eligibility age from 6o to 62.

Young people and union members took to the streets in protests and strikes. It got violent there for a while. The transport of fuel went to a standstill.

The French National Assembly has voted to approve the change, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy plans to sign it in the face of a legal challenge.

A similar fate faces Social Security.

One way to rein in spending government spending here is to put more control on entitlement programs such Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Social Security and Medicare are especially vulnerable because of the volume of Baby Boomers who are now becoming eligible -- 10,000 a day for the next 20 years.

The worry is that more money will be paid in benefits to retired Boomers than will be paid in payroll taxes by America's workers.

The full retirement age for those retiring now is 66. (You can start collecting at 62, but you don't get the full value of the benefit.) For those born in 1960 or after, the full retirement age is 67.

A deficit panel created by President Barack Obama is considering a proposal that would raise the retirement age to 68 by 2050 and to 69 by 2075.

Baby Boomers will get theirs. I'll get mine at 66 ... 62 if I decide to accept less.

Baby Boomer children may not. My daughter Elizabeth will be in her mid-60s in 2049, David in 2052. And you have to wonder if Social Security will be there then and how much further out of reach it might be for my kids.

When it comes to a retirement lifestyle, I'm a traditionalist

I'm not a very high risk kind of person.

I know what I know and I'm comfortable with that.

Risk for the sake of risk isn't me.

I'll take a calculated risk, but I have to do a lot of calculation in the process.

So it came as no surprise recently when I took a survey as part of some research I was doing for my Baby Boomer Examiner writing and found I was a "Traditionalist' when it came to some expectations for my retirement years.

The survey from Trilogy Communities recently released an online personality assessment aimed at Baby Boomers to evaluate their desired lifestyles and personalities and how those relate to where they would like to live. Trilogy has active lifestyle communities for people 55 and up in Florida, the Southwest, California, and Northwest.

The online assessment tool includes several categories having to do with home, recreation, travel, and interests. It asks, for example, how close do you want to be to your family, and it offers three images to choose from: Within walking distance, within driving distance, within airplane distance.

By having the results come back as being a traditionalist, apparently I'm not willing to take many risks when it comes to what I want to do and where I want to live through my retirement years.

Well, I wasn't much of a risk-taker up until now, why would that suddenly change?

Since retiring from newspapers in June 2008 about the only risky thing I've done is create Broad Cove Media -- my one-man media empire. (I'm not sure but maybe you can count learning how to surf as being a risk.)

I haven't tried to remake myself into something that forces me to color outside the lines. I don't color that way.

Writing for an audience in and of itself is a little risky, but the craft of writing, which I've been doing for almost 40 years, isn't.

Baby Boomers have all the opportunity in the world to re-make themselves.

We're having to remake themselves because of a changing employment landscape or because of how we need to stay engaged professionally, socially and mentally as we age.

But Baby Boomers shouldn't try to remake themselves into something they are not.

I admire the stories about Wall Street executives who retire to become chefs, but that kind of a leap isn't going to be the norm.

It's important that we stay within ourselves.

I'm not going to try to be somebody I can't be.

Management by walking around

When I worked in an office, part of what I did was management by walking around.

Now that I work in a home office, my management by walking around is a little different.

Back then , I'd walk through the departments I managed to see and be seen. I probably learned more by walking around than I ever did in the endless meetings.

Now, I walk through the halls of the house to put a load of clothes into the dryer, or through the kitchen for no other reason than to go through the kitchen.

Back then, I'd chat with the department personnel.

Now, I yell at the squirrels as they try to make their way from the roof to the bird feeder hanging in front of my home office window.

If squirrels were the only stress then I could argue that, at the end of my second year of retirement, I'm as laid back as laid back could be.

But I'd be lying.

Certainly it's less stressful than the office job with the corporate responsibilities of budgets, deadlines and personnel matters.

But retirement -- especially a retirement of part-time self-employment as a web content provider -- has its moments.

I still deal with budgets -- two in fact, the personal budget and the business budget. I let my accountant sort it out to keep Uncle Sam happy. Funny how Uncle Sam always ends up being happier than me come Tax Day.

I still deal with deadlines, imposed by the people I write for. Back then, I worked a day job, Monday through Friday, for years. What deadlines I had I could usually meet within those parameters those days and those hours. These days I work every day of the week -- it's a piecemeal schedule of a couple of hours here and there during the morning, afternoon and evenings. It's enough to keep me busy, but not so busy that I can't find enough hours to do those things that being retired offer.

It's all good.

I don't deal with personnel who work for me but I deal with the people for whom I work. Generally, we deal with each other by email, occasionally by phone, almost never in person.

The only living things I see during my walk throughs are the birds that come to the bird feeder. They are my office pets. I provide them with seed; they provide me with a distraction of flight, color and behavior that is often amusing, particularly when the male goldfinches are trying to establish territory. I make them happy; they make me happy.

My nemeses are the squirrels. They're like that poorly performing employee you know you have to deal with by trying to change their behavior ... or by getting rid of them.

Maybe the character of work hasn't changed so much after all.

Flowers in spite of my worst intentions

The flowers around the yard are incredibly beautiful right now. Spring has indeed sprung in abundance.

Which begs the question: Are the flowers doing well because of me or in spite of me?

Definitely the latter.

If they're doing well it's because of my benign -- make that abject -- neglect.

They're better off that I don't even try, quite frankly. If I make an honest attempt to cultivate them and help them along they'll most assuredly perish.

I'm just not much for yard work. I'll mow the lawn when it needs it. I'll weed whack on occasion.

I don't de-thatch. I don't fertilize. I don't put down weed killer.

I am a disinterested participant in yard work. It is a chore, something that has to get done like taking out the garbage and recyclables each Monday morning.

My disinterest is so abject that I've been known to mow over the very flower beds that are now springing with so much life and color. I did it once ... by accident ... honest.

My lawn looks just fine to the people who can see it: me and my wife, since the yard is pretty much shielded from the road we live on. I don't need it to look like the outfield of Fenway Park.

I thought in retirement, though, that I might get into yard work.

I went into my first summer of retirement by planting a vegetable garden of tomatoes, peppers, and herbs. It was okay. I went into my second summer of retirement with another vegetable garden, using my experience from the previous summer to improve the yield. It was less than okay.

I'm about to go into my third summer of retirement and I'm not going to bother with the vegetable garden.

I did an analysis and found that the return on investment -- the ROI -- wasn't any good.

I was investing way too much effort into the garden and getting diddly in return -- frequent watering, weeding and mulching for a couple of tomatoes and peppers.

And frankly, it's boring.

I recently wrote an Examiner.com post about a recent survey of Baby Boomer women who say that they'll carry their gardening interests well into retirement.

More power to them, I say. Me? I can't be bothered.

Could I live here?

When my wife Jane and I travel to different areas these days, I have a question in the back of my mind: Could I live here?

It's not that we're actively looking for another place to live. But as I think about where I want to spend my so-called "retirement years" I look at the places where we travel as a potential new home.

The classic retirement move isn't so classic among Baby Boomers.

The stereotype had been to retire, pull up stakes and get thyself to the Sun Belt -- Florida, Nevada, Arizona ... anywhere folks could escape the cold and snowy parts of the country.

But the first wave of retiring Baby Boomers hasn't followed the stereotype.

The migration to the Sun Belt states has cooled as Baby Boomers like myself, because of finances and other considerations, take a more analytic view of where we want to reluctantly grow older, if indeed that's anywhere different from where we are right now.

Certainly, there's a lot of research that's available in this analytical approach. There are any number of "10 Best Places to Retire" lists out there.

It's an interesting shift of sensibilities, a process of age.

When we graduated from college, we went where the jobs and opportunities were. When we were married and had kids the quality of the school system was a consideration.

But as much as you can assemble data about a place you have to have a good feeling about a place.

It's like when my children were looking at where to go to college.

They could do all the research they wanted about a school's academics and tuition and acceptance standards. But they also had to have a good feel about the place.

It's why my daughter Elizabeth never got out of the car when she got to the University of Connecticut at Storrs. She just didn't have a good feeling about the place. It's why my son David never applied to Brown in Providence, R.I. He didn't have a good feeling about the place.

You have to know in your gut that something is a good fit to who you are.

So when we visited various places in Florida a couple of weeks ago, I assessed the locales both in my head and from my gut. I did the same thing when we spent some time in Alabama and Delaware.

There are some places on my radar that I want to check out, such as Cape May, N.J. We traveled through there after getting off the ferry from Lewes, Del., and I'm curious to spend some time there.

One component in the process is the availability of work. Retiring for Baby Boomers doesn't mean shutting down professional productivity. It might mean a shifting of gears and doing something different, but it doesn't mean we just idle as we age.

Certainly the internet and the ease of access has made work much more portable. The work I do in my study in New Hampshire I could also do from another study in another state.

The other important component, at least for me, is the proximity of family.

Jane and I can get to a good chunk of our family -- and they can get to us -- within a half a day's drive.

There's a comfort in this access to my mother, and some of my siblings, and nieces and nephews, and my children and some of my stepchildren, and someday to grandchildren.

Do I want to be a plane ride or train ride away from that? I'm not sure. Probably not.

But I'll keep investigating in the meantime. If nothing else, it gives us a good excuse to get away from where we are to maybe appreciate where we are a little better.

The need to upset the routine

Even in retirement there is routine.

It's not like, as some people believe, you retire from a career of work and begin a career of loafing around. At least that's not the experience that Baby Boomers, including this one, want for themselves.

We need to be doing something. In general, this is a generation of achievers -- over-achievers, in some cases -- and the idea of doing nothing is not an option.

In retirement we want to decide what to do with our time, not have someone decide or dictate for us what we do with our time.

My time is goes to writing and data mining as a contractor and sub-contractor. And my time goes to keeping myself healthy by going to the gym. And my time goes to keeping myself engaged in the outdoors by golfing, surfing and skiing.

And my time has a routine to it.

I'm in my home office between 6:30 and 7 a.m. each day to boot-up my computer and start writing for a couple of hours. I get to the gym usually by mid-morning. Then I get home for lunch and spend the afternoon doing rest of my contract and subcontract work. Within that routine I'll make room for the round of golf, a few hours in the surf, or some time on the mountains.

Even that routine, as appealing as it might be, needs to be broken up every now and then.

Which is why I've been happy to have been on a road trip this week to Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey.

It is said that writing is discovery. Writers explore their surroundings and discover something of themselves when they put words to paper (or words to screen). It is a mental journey.

Travel is discovery too, a tactile journey of the five senses:

• The feel of warmth of a late September sun in the left field seats at Camden Yards in Baltimore;
• The scratch of sand in my toes on Rehoboth and Dewey beaches in Delaware;
• The fleeting glimpse of dolphin leaping from the water;
• The taste of crab in the dip at Striper Bites in Lewes, Del.;
• The gentle roll of the ferry from Lewes to Cape May, N.J.;
• The glimpse through binoculars of the migrating raptors at Cape May Point.;
• The hum and clang of slots inside Caesar's and Trump casinos at Atlantic City;
• The aroma of the frutti de mare that came from the kitchen to my plate at Basil T's Brewery and Italian Restaurant in Red Bank, N.J.

In writing I can take myself so far. Travel outside of the routine takes me the rest of the way there.

This isn't what I signed up for

I'm so busy it's hard to be retired.

I had that thought this week as I was on the road in Maine, doing some contract work that would eat up most of the day -- an incredible day, in fact, that should have had me on the beach or on the golf course.

The day before I'd spent the day reporting and writing about the President Barack Obama's visit to New Hampshire; I got credentialed to cover him for Examiner.com.

With Obama taking up all of Tuesday, with the job-related road trip taking up most of Wednesday, I would have to devote Thursday to catch up on the contract and freelance work I didn't get to.

I'm retired. I'm an empty nester. So where is all this free time I'm supposed to have? Is this what I signed up for? Is it a bad thing that even the president is cutting into my retirement free time?

With the weather finally acting more like summer around here, my mission was to commence the Endless Summer.

Instead, I'm juggling appointments and phone calls and to-do lists.

The fact is I'm happier now in retirement than I was a year ago as a three-month retiree.

The hardest part about retirement is filling the time with stuff that's engaging.

I had hoped to volunteer but I haven't found anything I'm passionate about to invest my volunteer time. Maybe that'll come some day; it just isn't here yet.

So I've tried to advantage of what I do best ... write.

I may bitch about being busy, but it's only for effect.

I'd rather have way too much to do than way too little to do.

Ten lessons from a year of retirement

I'm certainly more at ease not working than when I was working. I see a wider horizon of opportunities now that I'm not working vs. when I was working. And I can nap, which was usually frowned upon at work.

That is some of what I've discovered in the year since I retired after 30 some odd years of newspaper work.

Here are 10 Lessons of Retirement that this Baby Boomer retiree learned after Year 1 of retirement:

1. Have a daily plan
For some people there is a certain serendipity to waking up in the morning with nothing to do. They find enjoyment in just letting the day happen around them. I'm not one of those people. I need a plan, have always needed a plan, and retirement didn't change that. I know when I wake up what my day will entail. Is there room in the schedule for an unscheduled lunch with a friend or an unscheduled round of golf or a trip to the beach? You bet. But I need organization, always have. Having things to do is much better than having nothing to do.

2. Stay active, part I
Get a gym membership and use it. Or walk or bike or take a yoga class. Garden. Golf ... but don't ride a cart if possible. Use your body. In a related note, become an organ donor when you die. Maybe you'll take better care of your liver, kidney, heart etc. if you know they could possibly outlive you.

3. Stay active, part II
Use your brain. Read books. Read newspapers. Read magazines. (The printed mass media could certainly use your allegiance.) Sculpt. Paint. Do Sudoku. Do crossword puzzles. Write if you are so inclined. Don't give dementia or Alzheimer's any kind of a head start on that brain of yours.

4. Promise yourself that you'll learn something new
As a kid growing up in Colorado, I imagined myself as a skier in the winter and a surfer in the summer. I accomplished the skier part early on, but never got to the surfing part, even after living in New England near the coast for the last billion years. But after retiring last summer I promised myself I'd learn to surf. And I did ... sort of. I'm no pro, but I can stand up on the board and this summer I'm going to work at getting better. The point is, learn to do something you wished you knew how to do. Restore a '57 Chevy, for example.

5. Travel
If you've got the time and the financial wherewithal get out of the house and go some place different. Even if it's just an occasional weekend jaunt to a nearby city or country inn. Shuffle it up, instead of driving or flying, take the train. Talk to the locals. Eat what the locals eat. Expand your view of your state, your country, your world.

6. Watch what you eat
Being home as much as I am, I'm tempted to eat big breakfasts, big lunches, big dinners. Big mistake. Moderation, moderation, moderation. Also, see No. 3.

7. Give yourself the daily gift of music
It's not enough to just sing in the shower. Listen at some point during the day to the music you love. Listen at some point to something that might be new to you -- jazz or show tunes or classical, for instance. Better yet, play an instrument. See No. 4 ... learn to play the piano or the guitar. Revel in your ability to create music. Our species' ability to make music is truly one of our greatest gifts.

8. Volunteer
Find a niche and donate some time. You've got the time to give. You've got the experience to give. I've dabbled in a couple of areas. Honestly, I haven't found my niche yet.


9. Be who you are comfortable being
Doing the research and writing that I do each day I'm amazed at how much encouragement I see for Baby Boomers to remake themselves. That's all well and good. The corporate executive who goes to cooking school and remakes himself as a chef is just fine. But don't remake yourself into something you're not. If you like how you're made already, be happy with that.


10. Be a role model
Show your kids, your grandkids that you've still got it. With experience comes wisdom. You've been there, you've done that, you've gotten the t-shirt 10 times over. Don't lecture. Mentor. Teach by doing, not by telling.

No escape from the garden

Given the dead of winter here in northern New England, I thought I'd escape gardening.

But no.

For the last several weeks I've been trying to grow some herbs inside the house using the Chia process. You know: "Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia!" And I'm doing a bad job and I'm feeling a bit guilty because I thought these Chia plants were a) foolproof and b) indestructible.

Some background:

After going into semi-retirement on June 6 my wife Jane for my birthday a couple of weeks later bought me a shopping bag full of vegetable and herb seeds so that I could create a garden during what she believed to be my boundless idle time.

I was suspicious at the time that she didn't want me to have boundless amounts of idle time -- the whole idle hands are the devil's playground thing.

It turned out OK. Not great, just OK.

I harvested plenty of herbs -- thyme, sweet basil and cilantro. And I harvested a bunch of tomatoes. I think I managed to produce one edible pepper out of six plants. My attempt at growing eggplant was a complete bust.

So when summer turned to fall and late fall finally killed off everything, I turned the ground over thinking that was that, my vain attempt at a green thumb would be over.

But no. As Michael Corleone said in "Godfather III": "Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in."

Jane for Christmas bought me the "Gourmet Chia Herb Garden" kit. My kit included sweet basil, cilantro, parsley and margoram, along with the growing pots and the special Chia potting soil.

I followed all the instructions for their patented growing system, and so far I'm underwhelmed. It's been several weeks and I'm not seeing, for example, the one to two inch leaves on the basil.

The real issue here is that I'm not as idle as my wife thinks I am. There's a lot to do when you're writing for four blogs and doing all the online social networking to market those blogs.

The inside garden requires more attention. At least with the garden out in the yard over the summer, I could depend on the occasional rain storm to water the plants. No such luck inside the house. It's all on me, and that usually means a certain death as far as plants are concerned.

Maybe I'll get a sprig or two of basil to use, but I'm not optimistic. I'll just be standing idly by hoping for the best.

When the salt mine is home

I love the fact that I have a home office where I occupy myself with the daily tasks of writing, blogging and social networking in order to promote the writing and blogging.

But the most difficult part of a home office is that it's located at home.

It's not the distractions that are bothersome. I don't have a fix-it bone in my body, so I'm neither compelled nor distracted to do anything related to painting or fixing a leaky faucet or changing the filter in the furnace or anything like that. I'm fairly disciplined about the tasks at hand. I approach the writing with a deadline in mind, the way I did as a reporter in what seems like a lifetime ago.

I have a few distractions -- the guitars and piano in the office that beg to be played. I can call up Fancast on my computer and watch old episodes of "Spenser: For Hire" with Robert Urich and Avery Brooks. I can cruise the web to my heart's delight, all in the name of research.

The real problem with working at home isn't the occasional distraction, it's the fact you're home all the time.

I used to have a salt mine to go to every day. You know the drill: You get up each morning and prepare to commute to the salt mine to do battle in the work-a-day world of meetings, telephone calls, emails, fires to put out, action plans to strategize. After a day in the mine, you'd return to your sanctuary, your home, the place of rest and rejuvenation.

But now when I commute to the office it's down the hall and to the right. I can do the commute in my jammies and flip-flops, carrying the mug of coffee I just poured in the kitchen. There's no official start time, and there's no official quitting time. The rest and rejuvenation of being home gets a little muddy as it mixes with the need to wander into the office to check my DIGG account after dinner to see how much activity there's been through the day.

There is no rest for the home office weary.

Which is why I can't wait to get out of the house. I look forward to the walk to the end of the driveway to get the morning newspapers. The same is true in the afternoon when I walk out to get the mail. When I go to the gym I extend my workout far longer than I ever did when I was working at an office.

This need sometimes competes with my wife Jane's needs. By the weekend, I'll have a need to escape from the house where I've been at work all week, while she'll have a need to nest in the house because she has a salt mine that she's been going to during the week.

We are scheduled to be away this weekend and next. I am looking forward to packing a bag, pulling together my toiletries, picking out a book for the road. I won't miss the home office for a few days, but I'll bring along the laptop and Blackberry to write and blog and network when I get the chance. When you have a home office, you can leave the home but sometimes the office has to travel.

Awakening the hermit gene

By the second day of a conference I attended recently I was flat-out exhausted.

I figured it was because of the overindulging in food and drink on the first night of the conference. My butt was definitely dragging the next day, and I figured I was just out of shape when it came to overindulging in food and drink.

My wife Jane, however, insisted I was exhausted from being with people again. She surmised that I was out of shape when it came to interpersonal interaction and that dealing with so many people tuckered me out.

She's correct that I don't get out much ... retirement and working from home will do that to you.

There are days when, if not for talking to Jane in the morning before she leaves for work and in the evening when she comes home, I don't speak a word to anyone.

This is a far cry from the way it used to be when I'd go to an office and have meetings, and make and take telephone calls, and engage in my favorite practice of managing while walking around.

Now when I go to work it's down the hall in the house and when I walk around it's an empty nest.

Frankly, I don't mind it much.

Jane calls it the hermit gene. She believes that buried in each of us is the desire to be alone and be left alone. I don't miss the stress that sometimes came from the office-related interactions.

I communicate a lot from my home office but the words are almost exclusively written, not spoken. There are the web sites -- Boomer Angst, Eats@Home and Examiner.com -- to feed with words.

But there are also the social networks at Facebook, DIGG, LinkedIn and AARP and the various Google Groups to keep up with. We talk a lot to each other; we just don't say anything out loud to each other.

Social networks are often the talk of the day, not only for professional shut-ins such as myself but for people who work at jobs and who have plenty of people to speak to on a day to day basis. Between Facebook and MySpace, two of the most popular social network sites, there are about 200 million users.

We share comments, photos, and videos. We share stuff we've read online with each other. We have common interests in family or schools or work or mutual friends. We share a lot or we share a little. We share the important and we share the mundane. And it's all done without speaking a word.

So maybe I'm a little out of practice when it comes to social gatherings where the interaction is up close and personal, when it involves body language and spoken language. But since I'm interacting on the social networks and don't think I've gone totally hermit ... at least not yet.

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.

Hey, am I still in this race?

There's an old bridge near where I live, crossing a part of Great Bay. Unused by traffic now for several years, it serves as a place for people to fish, walk, run and bike, all the while taking in the sights of the water and landscape beyond. It is a lovely place on my route for walking or running.

The other day I came across some graffiti that had been spray painted on a part of the bridge's aging pavement. "Even if you win the race," it said, "you're still a RAT!" Included with message were spray-painted images of the Three Blind Mice, one in red, one in white and one in blue.

It was a bit ironic really to be running at the time, listening to music through my headphones, contemplating a to-do list in my head and come across a reference to the rat race. And I began to wonder: Am I still even in the rat race anymore?

The rat race, of course, is that euphemistic term that applies to the self-defeating pursuit of working too hard to get ahead, stay afloat. In the normal scheme of our lives, in the every day routine of work, we sometimes feel like the lab rat navigating the maze or the rat on the wheel, running fast but getting nowhere.

The fact that it's called a race raises the notion that we're competing against each other for money, for status, for a higher rung on the ladder at work. We navigate the maze and run in the wheel in pursuit of a nice house in a nice neighborhood with good schools for our kids. We're always racing to get ahead.

But I think that changes as you get older. It definitely changes when you're out of the workforce.

It's not that we're not in the race anymore, it's that the race priorities change. We might be a lap or two behind, we could be a couple of miles behind the race leaders, but we don't care. The rat race can leave us behind at the starting line for all we care.

As I got older, as I approached retirement I got less worried about the self-defeating aspects of the rat race. I'd gotten as far as I was going to get, which was pretty far, and I wasn't going to worry about it anymore. It didn't matter that work sometimes became a maze of worry. It didn't matter that I was running on the wheel and getting nowhere, at least I was getting my exercise of earning a living, providing for my family.

In semi-retirement it's different. There's still work to be done, but it's a different work, at a different pace, on a different rat race course altogether. My pace is driven by me, not by someone else's clock or someone else's deadlines or someone else's expectations. It's like I'm in a rat race of one, competing against myself. And I don't really care what place I'm in.

There will always be a rat race of one kind or another. I know I'm not the fastest rat in the race, not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. And that's just fine.

Trying to stare down time

I have a lot of time on my hands right now. I mean, literally, I have a lot of time in the form of clocks and watches, and they keep staring at me like I'm supposed to be doing something with my time now that I've retired.

Within my field of vision of my writing space here at home, I have six clocks telling me what time it is. Worse, they keeping tell me I have a lot of time on my hands.

What is it about retirement and watches/clocks? Why are they usually given as gifts when someone retires? A web search to answer that question doesn't offer much help. The search results are almost exclusively gift ideas for retirement and 95 percent of the gift ideas are for watches or clocks. Could it possibly be rooted in the notion that retirement gives us time to do whatever we want? Or is it meant to remind us how much time we put into a particular job?

I received one retirement gift that feeds the notion. It came from my wife Jane -- at the suggestion of her brother David -- and it marks my retirement date and the 30 years I was with the company. And, as I indicated above, it ticks away on my desk along with five other time pieces -- an electronic baseball scoreboard that has an electronic clock, a clock that also keeps track of low and high tides, the clock on my computer screen, the clock on my cellphone and the Timex on my wrist.

Then there's my body clock ... which does a pretty good job of keeping general time, especially when it's time to eat. It tells me when to get up; it tells me when to sleep. (And these days when it tells me to take a quick sleep in the afternoon, I don't have to tell it no.)

It was my body clock that has required the most adjustment -- the greatest amount of re-timing -- in the couple of months since I stopped working full time. My work week for many, many years was fairly regimented, each day a structured effort to get things done. At the gym most mornings to get the exercise part done. At the office by 9 a.m. to get the work part done. Eat lunch at noon to get the nourishment part done. Drink coffee at 2 p.m. to get the mid-day kick part done. Home by 6 p.m. to get the dinner part done. In bed by 10 p.m. to get the sleep part done.

The assumption by most people was how great it would be not to be a slave to time. I could sleep in. I could stay up as late as I wanted. In fact, for a while there the body clock went in the opposite direction. For example, it alarmed me awake at 5 each morning, anxious about what was on the day's agenda, when in fact there wasn't much of an agenda at all. Yes, there was some online content I've been developing, but nothing that required me to be awake that early. I'm an early riser, but 5 a.m. was a little excessive.

The good news is that after a couple of months my clocks and I have reached an understanding. Chill out. There's no hurry, no reason to get anxious, no need to be running mentally through a to-do list at 4:45 a.m. There's plenty of time for everyone and everything. Want to surf? There's time for that. Want to write and develop some online content? There's time for that? Want to do yard work? Well, let's not get carried away.

Time is not the enemy, which is something Jean-Luc Picard, the sage captain of the Starship USS Enterprise, observed during the 1994 movie "Star Trek: Generations."

"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives," he said. "I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived."

I have plenty of companions for my journey. If I could just get them all agree to what time it is.