FIRE life, part whatever

An update and stuff

Well this has been a comparatively crazy week. Since both kids are now in full time childcare or school, I should have plenty of time to do whatever, right? Ha! Nope, I keep on doing random stuff, and admittedly falling into a Parkinson’s law type trap:

So what the hell have I been doing with my time?

Well, first off, let’s look at how much “free” time I have.

My normal day starts when I wake up at 0600. I do a quick meditation, followed by like 5 minutes of yoga. My chi is then centered as fuck.🙄 Then my wife and I enjoy a few minutes of peace and coffee before the kids wake up. After that, it’s full on kids-chaos until just after 0900. I occasionally squeeze in a few minutes of backyard bow shooting before the kids leave, but most of the morning is spent making them breakfast, feeding them, getting them cleaned up, getting them dressed, taking care of their bodily functions, getting them cleaned again, and then getting the oldest to the bus stop and then the youngest to daycare. There’s usually about 30 minutes of either TV watching, lego building, game play, or reading in there too. We could probably knock this all out in half the time, but by spreading it out it’s less stressful as we can take our time. Everyone enjoys the process a whole lot more when we’re not rushing from one task to another.

Once the kids are off, I have until 3:15PM(yes, I changed time formats-you’re welcome) until I need to go pick up our youngest, then start on dinner, then get the oldest from the bus stop, then finish cooking, and then basically do all of the previously mentioned morning kids stuff in reverse. After the kiddos are in bed, my wife and I watch TV for about half an hour then go to bed and read for another hour. I guess we could squeeze other stuff in during the evening, but why? Sure, if something absolutely needs to get done, we will, but it’s nice to enjoy family time with plenty of buffer to take things as they come. I mean, why the hell did I work hard to save and invest like crazy for years, if we can’t netflix and maybe chill every night?

Anyways, as you can see that leaves me with about 6 hours a day to myself. Which is awesome! Side note, early retirement is freaking awesome. Highly recommend. But yeah….how am I filling those 6 hours?

Well first off, unless I’m doing a long fast, I’ve got to cook and eat lunch. If I feel like making a really amazing omelet, this whole process may take an hour. Which is enjoyable, but to keep the special from becoming routine, I only make fancy omelettes a few times a week. If I’m going the leftover or salad route, we’re down to like 20 minutes to enjoy a relaxed lunch.

Then there’s working out. I work out six days a week, which may sound like a lot, but at least two of those days is something chill like yoga and a long slow run or bike ride. At a minimum, working out takes 30 minutes if it’s just a HIIT run followed by stretching. If I’m going mountain biking locally, it takes 2 hours. Going to the epic state park for MTB? More like 4 hours. And I sweat like a madman even if I’m naked outside in a blizzard, so a shower is for sure necessary after every workout.

For me, working out is non-negotiable. I’ve been working out regularly for over 20 years now, and I can’t imagine not doing it. Sure, I could wake up at 5 and crush it like back when I had a full time job, but fuucckkkkk that. I retired for a reason.

So we throw in a minimum of 30 minutes for working out, 10 minutes for a shower, and 20 minutes for a quick lunch, and it looks like I’ve got 5 hours left to do stuff. If I do the long options of any of those, I can get down to a single hour of unscheduled time. Which again, is still totally badass.

Ok, so there’s all my regularly scheduled activities. What do I do with the remaining time, which is still ample? This past Tuesday, I went grocery shopping, worked out for an hour, then watched TV by myself after lunch. Then read some Anne McCaffrey until it was time to go pick up the kiddos.

It was freaking glorious! It hit me as I was driving home from Aldi on that Tuesday; I can do whatever the hell I want for the rest of the day. So I did!!

But then I don’t do that every day. If I did, I think I’d get used to it and hours of leisure would get boring. The rest of the week looked like this:

Monday: it was MLK jr day, and the oldest was off school. We spent a few hours hiking at a local park, then playing some pokemon inspired game he created on the playground. Made us lunch, worked out, and I took him to the doctor for his annual checkup.

Wednesday: Went to Kung Fu, did Yoga, and dry firing. Did a 24 hour fast, so I had more time to get stuff done. Did housework, cleaning, and then studied for my VITA/TCE exam.

I volunteered to do tax prep for those who can’t afford it through our local library, which is run by the IRS. I first heard about this from JL Collins’s blog. We’re required to take an exam to be a certified tax preparers for the program, hence me studying a bunch now. I’m mostly enjoying the process, though it does get a tad tedious-we’re talking about the tax code here people. Learning about tax loss harvesting from the IRS’s perspective is interesting, learning which boxes to check on the correct form is less so. But I’m glad I’m doing it. I’ve been interested in the program for years, and always delayed volunteering until after I retired. Now I am, so now I am!

I also spent at least an hour on Wednesday filling out paperwork for my new job. What?? Way to bury the lede there JSD! Well kind of. Like everywhere else, my son’s school district has been hurting for substitute teachers. I saw this movie, and figured “I got this”.

They pay like a hundred bucks for a full day of subbing, 50 for a half day. By the time taxes are taken out, I’m basically doing marginally compensated volunteering. So why am I doing this? I want to get more involved with my kid’s school system, and have had little luck breaking through the (inverted?) glass ceiling of our PTA. Working part time for the actual district seemed like a good way to get involved without having to sit through more committee meetings about how to decorate for the next party. Think I may sub once every week or so, which should be enough to get me in the loop with the hegemony that is our local school apparatus.

Gotta admit, even though I’ve taught rooms full of crusty cops things they didn’t want to learn, the idea of a classroom of kids staring at me scares the crap out of me. But that’s the point. In my life I’ve found that when I’m scared of something, it usually means I’m going to end up loving it or hating it. And I’m horrible about knowing which way it’ll come down beforehand. In this case I predict I will hate it. But I’ve been wrong so many times I figure I may as well take a stab at it. Best case I’ve got a cool part time volunteerish gig I can work whenever I want, and it’ll pay for my Chipotle habit. Worse case I quit next month, and I’ve lost a few hours of my life. Looking forward to how it pans out.

Thursday: I spent the morning going to my old employer’s firearms range. Thanks to LEOSA, I’m considered a retired police officer, and with a few restrictions, I can therefore carry a gun anywhere in the country. I have to pass a qualification course once a year with said gun to maintain this privilege, so I knocked that out this week. The qual itself only took like ten minutes. But then I spent another forty or so minutes shooting the shit with the guys that work there. After some lifting I went out for coffee with my wife. We go out every week or so and it’s fucking great. Spending uninterrupted time with my favorite person!! 🙂 Spent the rest of the afternoon studying tax code. Exciting day!

Friday: Had to go to this four hour orientation for new employees of the school district. Holy shit. Most of the people there are starting full time employment with the district, and there was only a few of us subs. We got the brief on what to do during an active shooter, which was well done. Then we spent the next few hours logging into all of the HRish systems, and the HR peeps walked us through the personnel management policies. Much of this was for the full time employees. As a sub, they’re just happy if we volunteer for anything. But damn, listening to the full time employee attendance stuff was downright depressing. All this stuff about requesting time off and having to wait if it gets approved. Look, I get it. I was a supervisor in a large organization, and know all these policies are usually a result of someone screwing something up. The rules keep things fair, but they’re a bear. Man, I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that stuff. Yay FIRE!

After that four hour reminder of why I retired in the first place, I went for a run and studied more taxes. Thus ended a comparatively exciting week! And really not atypical. Always seems to be a bunch of random stuff which fill the time, though this week was more bonkers than most. 😊

So that’s what I’ve been up to as of late.

When I left full time work, I had great designs for building out this blog and doing oodles of in-depth articles. I’m not trying to say I’m too busy to do that. Instead, it turns out I’m not that motivated to do that kind of work right now. Maybe someday I will. Maybe I won’t. In the meantime, I’m still enjoying writing, and delving into deeper stuff when inspiration strikes. I hope you get some value from these lighter posts, even if it’s just entertainment or schadenfreude. FIRE lifesytle posts from other blogs were instructive to me before I left work, and I’m trying to pay it forward. Let me know in the comments if there’s some part of my FIRE life you’d like me to discuss in future posts. No promises. 😉