What I Did On My Summer Vacation,Part 4

And one more post on the Sturm! The Drang! The Plotz! of post-retirement.


Part 4: Relaxing

Between retirement and going back to work, and in between household organizing and cleaning and job-hunting, I also tended to get a lot more sleep, more regularly. And read a few books (yes, Patrick, I will do a review of LITTLE BROTHER, and thank you for the copy) and watched a number of movies via Netflix. Hilde and I also splurged on our anniversary in July and went to go see IRON MAN on the big screen at the local cineplex.

And spent way too much time browsing the Internet. A goodly amount of this was reading political blogs, trying to predict which way the country would go in November. Thank God that Obama was an expert campaigner, and that John McCain turned out to be a stumblebum. (Is that rude to say? But it's true!) I don't expect perfection, or miracles, from Obama, but at last I can feel that, finally, really, "the adults are in charge" (or at least will be in another six weeks).

One other aspect probably needs a few remarks: After retirement, between not working at a regular (fairly physical) job and both spending more time cooking at home and nibbling too much on the results of that cooking, I found myself gaining one to two pounds a week.

My ideal weight is about 165, and I was actually at that weight a few years ago, after spending some months on a diet and exercise program. I'd slacked off a bit, and had gotten back up to about 185 when I retired at the beginning of June. By early July, I was up to 193 pounds. Eep!

I started up an exercise program again, which stabilized the weight level, but didn't seem to do much to lose extra pounds. (I was building up muscle mass with the program, which was probably part of the reason the numbers didn't change, but too much of that extra weight was still fat.

It was only after I went back to work that I started losing weight again. Between a lot of walking (and some bicycle-riding) on the new job, and doing portion control on most of my meals (oatmeal & banana for breakfast, a diet shake and a can of V-8 juice for lunch), I've dropped back down to about 184.

At which point my weight seems to have stuck again. Going back to work meant that I pretty much lost the time to do my exercise routine daily; I need to try and find the time to resume that, in addition to calories burned at work, and see if I can drop at least a few more of those pounds.

And that, folks, is how I spent my summer vacation.