This is the latest in an occasional series of blog posts commenting on upcoming retirement.

I was walking down the street this afternoon toward the cluster of mailboxes in our neighborhood when the thought occurred to me: No longer do I feel strange puttering around the house at mid-day during the middle of a work week.

I think I’ve turned yet another corner. Actually, I likely turned that corner some time ago, but the thought came to mind consciously this afternoon.

It wasn’t always the case.

I worked for a living until I was 63 years of age. Then it ended. Quickly, although not without some warning. I smelled something fishy when my boss announced in the summer of 2012 a “company reorganization” at the Amarillo Globe-News. The smell grew more pungent when, after applying to keep doing the job I had held at the paper for nearly 18 years, a former colleague and I were called back for a “second interview.”

Then the news came from the guy who held a newly created title at the paper: the vice president for audience. “There’s no easy way to say this, but we’ve offered your job to someone else. He accepted,” this VP for audience told me one morning.

I walked out of the building, bid goodbye to a couple of friends, came back the next day, cleared out my office … and resigned.

For some time after that — even as my wife and I departed for a vacation on the East Coast and then returned home — I would feel a strange sense of disorientation. Suddenly, I wasn’t busy during the work week. I was free to come and go pretty much as I pleased. It felt strange.

I got over it fairly soon after the end of my working life.

Since then I’ve learned there truly is life after full-time work.

I have just turned 67. Full-time retirement is still a ways off. It’s coming on, though. I’m quite prepared emotionally for the moment it arrives.

I know this because my disorientation has vanished.