But who's counting?
I kid! Retirement is busy. There are lots of days I wonder how hubs ever found the time to go to work every Monday through Friday, not to mention all the Saturdays and Sundays he traveled to some upside down time zone in order to be ready for a Monday morning meeting on the other side of the globe.
There are also days I think, hmmm...he needs to go to work today. He's realizing those are the days I need him to go play golf, wash the cars, or do something somewhere besides where I am.
Does that sound awful? I don't mean it to sound awful, because on the whole retirement is grand. Of course it will be grander once the house is underway, but in the interim we're livin' the high life in our cozy apartment.
There is so little to manage in terms of daily living. I can clean the entire place in an hour, and we have very little here in the way of belongings, which makes me occasionally stop and ask myself why it is exactly we're building a house?
Oh yeah...
The water.
We need to see the water.
Hubs and I realized after moving in here that the layout of this apartment is almost identical to the very first apartment we lived in as newlyweds.
Except we have actual furniture here, not plants pretending to be furniture, wooden crates picked up on the side of the road, or a T.V. with an antennae that needs adjusting. We don't have jobs to go to everyday either, which is both a pro and a con.
Not so much a con really, just something that requires a little figuring out and of course we're only in this setting temporarily, so no sense diving too deeply into much more than the house build for now. Hubs has plans to do something, and I have plans to do something, but first we supervise-ha!
Other items I've noted in our temporary digs-
I have an electric stove here and am so not a fan. I grew up with an electric stove, but our house in the UK had a gas cooktop and my house in NJ also had a gas cooktop, and once you've cooked on gas you only want to cook on gas. My lake house will have gas.
I'd kind of forgotten about that whole hauling thing apartment living requires. Maybe blocked is a better word, because I did move my girls no less than fourteen times from dorm room to storage unit to apartment to storage unit and back again not so long ago. We're now living on the second floor, and I've successfully re-mastered the skill of carrying seventeen sacks from the car in one trip in order to avoid going back a second time.
Our mail is in a central location here, a box with a key that I check every day like I did when I was in college. No care packages from my mom though, just bills, junk mail, and people confirming our change of address.
There's a lovely pool on site, and a really nice gym too, so hubs and I are taking advantage of both. Most of the time we have them to ourselves, because hey! retirement!
We sent all of our belongings (except for our clothes) to storage and we're living with rentals. A short list of things I wish I'd thrown in the car and brought with me would include a corkscrew, my hand mixer, a pastry brush, spatula, wooden spoon, my iron, and my microplane. Each day I think of just one more thing I should have thought to add to the car, but then I remember there was only exactly enough space left for me in the vehicle when we headed south. Also, the movers packed up my kitchen before I completely thought it through.
Where are my bathing suits?
We've spent a fair amount of time here trying to locate documents and various and sundry items we know we packed or locked in one of our umpteen lock boxes, and this place is not that big, so you'd think getting your hands on what you need would be simple, but no. Still a lot of emptying boxes and then emptying them again later because you are sure that's where you put xyz, but for some reason xyz isn't where you remember putting it.
Attempting to register with a family doctor has been a wee bit trying. More than one physician's office has instructed me to download new patient forms from their website, complete them, and send them back for review. The Dr. will review my 'application' and I'll hear back in 3-4 weeks as to whether or not I'm in. What??? Hello 2015!
We are hopefully nearing the end of the paperwork hoops we have to jump through to break ground on the house, and will sign our actual contract with pricing and all the dotted lines on Tuesday. In this period of trying to transfer everything including our very own selves from one state to another, I'm glad hubs is retired and available to handle some of the icky phone calls and general nonsense like car tags, title transfers, and contracts that need reviewing and tweaking. Normally he's working and that's all my domain.
In this season of retirement though, I'm happy to share.
