More time on my hands

Well that was the plan, but now I'm not so sure.

Though I still have a couple of years before my official retirement when I can finally start drawing my pension, I decided, with my wife's blessing and enthusiastic support, to stop working now and live off our savings. It was a huge decision and took quite a while to arrive at. In September I handed in my notice with a view to finishing at Christmas. Unexpectedly, the company was not happy about losing my services entirely and after many discussions and much thinking I accepted their offer to continue in a part-time capacity. So, for the time being I am only working 3-days per week, and I hope to reduce that to 2-days in due course.

During the last few months I've been eagerly planning my days off .... but so have others. LOL. My wife, bless her heart, hasn't said a word over the last few years about my reluctance to do any DIY. We almost always had some decorating on the go, but I found it harder to work in the evenings after a day at the office, and became very neglectful of things that needed doing. To reward her patience, my first priority for my new-found time, is to start doing some decorating and make up for lost time. We also have a number of significant changes we want to make in our garden, especially the expansion of our vegetable garden and the growing of lots more produce.

I have also been planning my hobbies. I have a large box full of thousands of stamps. I inherited it years ago and decided to put it to one side until I retired from work. I have also promised myself some quality photo-shoots. As a keen amateur photographer I have been looking forward to getting out places with my camera, as well as trawling back through all the thousands of photo's stored on my computer waiting for me to do something with them. Of course, I also have my art. Plans include experimenting with different mediums, taking more time over my work, doing much more by way of practice, and (heaven forbid) even taking my pads outdoors for some plein aire work. Finally, I have my web site, which is long overdue for a serious upgrade (rebuild) and as a part of my extra online activities I planned to spend more time on my blog and certainly make a better effort to get round the blogs I follow.

So now I look at my two free days per week and expessions about quarts and pint pots come to mind. And the more I think about it the more I think that maybe the Monkey's got the right idea.