In search of control

Today is our actual anniversary, which is double the pleasure because it’s also the winter solstice. I struggle with the winter blues, and gaining a bit more daylight every day makes me happy. I’m trying to be chill, but there is serious shit going down out there. When the going gets weird, I tend to seek order and control by tidying up and possibly creating a spreadsheet or two.

Did bathrooms and floors yesterday. Next stop was tidying up my digital house. As one reader suggested, I called to cancel my New York Times subscription. I’ve been paying $15 a month, and they offered to reduce it to $4 a month for 52 weeks. I said no. By this time, I had a new mindset and scrapped the whole thing.

As another reader suggested, I found it for free anyway. You need a New York Times account, but you don’t subscribe to anything. Then you go here to get this little code and – magic – free NY Times for 72 hours. There is no limit on how many times you can do it.

I thought canceling my subscription would help me back away from the news, but that’s a lost cause. Readers have different opinions about what’s going on in the White House, so I won’t list my complaints, except to say the stock market is making me crazy. Most retirees can relate to that.

Yes, it will come back, but it’s hard to see money disappear in the blink of an eye. My investment strategy is conservative, so I believe everything will be OK, but I still hate the drama.

If it gets really bad, I wonder about going back to work. The idea does not appeal to me. I love retirement, I love playing golf, taking long walks, hunkering down with a good book, cooking. There really is enough money in our retirement account to ride this out, but I tend to be a worrier. 

It occurred to me if I had to take a job, I wouldn’t pass a drug test! More and more companies no longer test for cannabis, so that’s good. I might have a shot. Certainly not in my former industry, which was defense. For me, cannabis is medicine, and now that I’ve experienced the benefits, it would be hard to give it up. I’ll just worry about it instead.

Writing about my worries helps me put them into perspective. I imagine myself three years from now wondering why I wasted all that time fretting when everything turned out OK in the end. I was like this with cancer, too. I spent years worrying about it returning but then started imagining a future where I said, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I wouldn’t have spent so much time worrying about dying.”

I have to get there with retirement. Trust that we planned well. There will be ups and downs, spendy years and frugal years, but we’re fine. In the end, we’d like to die broke, but after a lifetime of saving, the most likely scenario is not spending it while we can enjoy it.

In the meantime, I’m hunkering down in the kitchen and on the couch – a bit of cooking and reading to lift my spirits.

I’m probably going to make Dal Makhani tonight. This recipe from Urvashi Pitre is the best, although I add a couple of Serrano peppers for heat. I also want to experiment with some sort of cannabis bath product. I’ll be perusing The Cannabis Spa at Home for ideas.

As for reading, I just finished The Woman in the Window. I would call it a psychological thriller. Hard to put down. I’m enjoying the Molly Murphy historical fiction series by Rhys Bowen. A young Irish woman lands in turn-of-the-century New York City and blusters her way into solving crimes. First in the series is Murphy’s Law.

I’ve started a spreadsheet with books I want to read and list series in order. I have a column for author, character, title, library/buy and status. I have access to two library systems, so I check to see which one, if any, has it and if not, I list it as a buy.

Of course, much of what we experience in life and retirement is out of our control, but every little bit helps. If it gets any worse, I’ll probably have to clean the refrigerator. Maybe create an inventory?