Just keepin’ on keepin’ on

During Skype with Susan yesterday evening, she started going over a list she’d seen of places outside the U.S. where you could live well for … well, for approximately what she and I will have via pensions and Social Security when we finally do retire. Some of it was interesting, even if I feel a certain skepticism (we’re six years from paying off our mortgage, in one of America’s lowest cost-of-living states, economically we’d probably be better off staying here), but I suspect it was mainly her way of getting through the fourteen-plus months she still has to remain in California. Even though I was mostly humoring her, however, it caught my interest to some extent. As we get older, some opportunities diminish, but that very fact opens out the possibility of others. Where would we live if we could afford it and didn’t have to stay with our jobs? Austria? Czech Republic? Guam? Panama? Australia? I learned long ago that there are always more potentialities than actualities (“Most neat things don’t happen” is the way I put it forty years ago.), but then nobody — including me — would have foreseen me becoming a soldier and then a truck driver, or that we’d host two international weddings within four months, or that our kids would now be living not just outside the U.S. but on different continents.

No telling. Probably won’t happen, but it could.

* * *

Today was my second of two days off, and I took my car down the hill to a little shop to be checked over for any problems I would prefer to deal with in advance. Took me forty-five minutes to walk back up to my house, and I was barely in the door when I got a call that the car basically needed only an oil change. So, I let them do that while I rested a bit, then I walked another forty-five minutes downhill to pick it up. Yes, if I’d known it would be done that quick, I’d have taken a book and waited there. But I didn’t, so I got some exercise. Time not wasted.

* * *

In the late afternoon, after things had cooled a bit, I saw clouds gathering and decided to try and mow the lawn before rain arrived. I was mostly done — with the front, still have to do the lo-o-ong strip by the highway — when it started to hail. Not little pro forma hail, either, we’re talking respectable lumps the side of marbles. Finished, and retired inside for cool air and coconut rum. Am I living the dream, or what?

* * *

Of such thrills are my life made these days. Try to keep your envy under control.