Dishes and Laundry

Sometimes I think it’s all I ever do. They told us in financial planning courses that we would be spending more time in our cars and more time traveling and eating out after we retired. Funny, that isn’t what we are doing. I swear I spend way more time with the laundry and the dishwasher.

Why? Eating in the house way more than we did when we worked. Cooking from scratch.

All those freezer containers. And, breakfast and lunch all week in the house. We may eat out a few times a week now, but those 10 extra meals, plus all the cooking, means more dishes to wash. I really hadn’t thought of that. Add to that, the laundry. We live in Tee shirts, jeans, shorts and sweaters. No more dry cleaning or taking shirts to the laundry. We are wearing things that we throw in the washer and dryer.

In the summer, those sweaty items after gardening, or yard work. In the fall, after leaf raking. No more fancy work clothes taken to the cleaners to be done. I wonder if we need to have the septic tanks cleaned more often than we used to, now that we are home most days.

Retirement is definitely changing what we do, and when. For example, today I started to run a few errands. Including my emissions test. Until I realized it was a holiday and they weren’t open. So, I bagged the trip to Costco, Trader Joe’s and the emissions station until later this week. When the working people went back to their jobs and left the stores relatively crowd free.

After almost three years, I really feel retired. Doing what we want when we want. Not constrained to the weekends. Besides doing errands, I need to use that last red envelope at Iron Bridge. Maybe lunch sometime this week. Beating those dinner crowds.

Ah, retirement. Loving it. Glad we decided to do it. It’s way more fun counting juncos for the bird count, than commuting in snow or ice.