One year ago today: April 19, 2013, St. Pete's.
Five years ago today: April 19, 2009, "Debbie113".
Finally, a booking. The possibility of a gig in the west end has turned into the real thing, just at a different club than expected. Some place full of surfboards. I don’t surf, as it is an MBDA*. But I’ll sure take their dollars. Look at that bank of televisions on the back wall. That spells “sports bar” in Florida, bringing you all the thrills of golf, curling, and cars driving in circles. I see it is a neighborhood pub since the neighborhood is what’s in the promo, shown here. By policy, I don’t advertise here much, even my own gigs. Please let this club be a break for the band.
A bad time to plan retirement is when you still work for a living. Work conditions you to become pre-occupied with the schedule of paying the bills. I learned that you need a couple of years away from the whole work scenario to discover what you really need. It takes that two years to untangle the brain from the whole work-for-a-living mindset. There is no job that will ever allow you that two years off. So you wind up working well past what you need for comfort because you equate income with security.
These are lessons I’ve learned from my own “practice retirement”. Unless you made it big, and most of us here did not, it’s nuts to be obsessed with maintaining a pre-retirement lifestyle. No way will your retirement standards match your working routines. Unless you have millions, inflation will always hit a fixed income. The trick is to manage that income in ways that protect you. I can’t hand you the entire enchilada here and now, but if you can reach the point where you can afford acceptable food and shelter, it is crazy to keep working. For example, while I am not in a mansion with caviar, the entire US system would have to collapse before I’d have to move into a group home and eat corn flakes twice a day.
Do you see what I’m saying? No, I’m not rich, but there is no crushing poverty or gut-stretching hunger over here. I still have to save up for what I want, I can only afford one haircut a month. But it’s been ten years since I had to bust my backside for this. As long as I have a comfy place, and I do, with food, everything else can be acquired at my leisure. Set up these basics and say to hell with work. Then quit. Another thousand years on the job will not improve things one bit for you.
It is a huge leap of faith to see it as I do. My plan was to work until age 40 and if not rich by then, to take what I could and move to where I could afford a few luxuries. Alas, there was nobody to ask for the right way to accomplish this. But I had to do it over again, I would have taken the least piddling retirement I could have and moved to Panama. Working only when I wanted something besides the essentials of my own comfort. And I mean comfort, not merely survival.
A good example would be the Taurus station wagon I had when I retired. That thing cost me just sitting there. It was years before I found I could get around 90% of the time on a scooter, and if I changed my style, close to 100%. Yeah, I’ve got scooter repair bills. But not insurance and expensive registration and mechanical complexity that eats up hundreds per month just being parked. Not bad considering it was not that long ago when I considered a car to be a necessity. Now that I know otherwise, I have the cash to go anywhere I want by motorcycle if it came to that.
ADDENDUM
Where I do not encourage or publish comments, I do read them. By now you know that replies sometimes appear to clarify my own position. You know why that makes sense? Because never, in all these years, have I ever received a comment that contains facts and references that support any other point of view.
I get the criticism, but that isn’t the same thing. If you want to change someone’s mind, start with supplying good, logical reasons they should do so. These days, the lion’s share of comments are fakes who have obviously never read this blog. It’s mostly “invitations” to link to Facebook or other social nonsense by advertisers eager to tap into my six-figure readership. I consider the pay-per-click gang somewhere near “tapeworm” on the blog evolutionary charts.
Hey! I just coined a phrase. Those who plaster tag ads on their web videos are “tapewormers”.
I’ll state again that this blog is NOT affiliated with any other blogs. We (yes, there are more than just me involved over here) do not endorse nor condone any produce or service anywhere unless specifically stated here. And usually the motive is a review or similar. The best way for to get mentioned here is to do something pathetically idiotic and the second best is to do something impressive or constructive.
Much of today’s receipts are questions about why my electronics posts are so sporadic. I can answer that. The response is that this is not a tutorial. The posting frequency matches when I build something and not the gaps in between. Mind you, if you include the times I mention libraries or reading material, there are lots of indications of steady progress. But take today for example, I was wondering why the word “Arduino” has not appeared in a crossword puzzle. It is ripe with vowels but nobody has picked up on that yet. So it isn’t like there is nothing going on rather that it is pretty hard to take a picture of that type of concept.
But so you’ll know, other than the critics, this blog has led to, among other things:
Job offers
Marriage proposals
Partnerships
Penpals
Cash
*MBDA = Male Dominated Beach Activity.
Here is the London hair salon poster of Kim Il Jong, the one the Korean embassy complained was disrespectful. Most of the chicken-shit media did NOT show this picture in their reports of the incident. Just you remember that. Return tomorrow for more criticism of big media.
PS There is a rumor all North Korean male college students will be required to sport haircuts like the illustrious leader. We better hope to hell Donald Trump never takes over.
