This blog has allowed me to cover many things over the years I’ve been writing it.

Its primary focus is politics and public policy. I also choose to write about “life experience” and assorted other matters that pop into my noggin. I’ve shared with you how my wife and I have become parents to an adorable puppy named Toby; I post Puppy Tales items on occasion.

I also have been writing what I call an “occasional series of blog posts commenting on upcoming retirement.” I included that message in a sort of “editor’s note” at the start of those entries.

Today I announce the end of that feature on “upcoming retirement.” There’s no more “upcoming” about it.

It’s here. It has arrived. Or, shall I say it’s arrival is right around the corner.

Accordingly, you’re going to get a new series of blog posts. I’m calling it “Happy Trails.”

It will chronicle the adventures upon which we are embarking. They might involve travel in our fifth wheel RV; they might include a vignette about Toby the Puppy; they might involved preparations we’re making to relocate.

Or … they might simply offer some perspective on issues of the day from a retired individual who spent nearly 37 years in daily journalism, most of it commenting on issues, public officials or the community where we were living.

It was my goal at the Amarillo Globe-News to retire from that organization. I arrived there in January 1995 to become editorial page editor of the Daily News and Globe-Times. The papers merged in 2001 to become the Globe-News — which is what most folks in the Panhandle called it anyway; the afternoon paper, the Globe-Times, vanished.

Circumstances beyond my control didn’t allow me to retire from the paper. The publisher reorganized the place in the summer of 2012. He instructed all employees in the newsroom — and yours truly — to apply for any job they wanted. I looked at the rewritten job description, saw the few new wrinkles in it — and then decided to apply for my own job.

It didn’t work out quite the way I anticipated. The publisher decided to hire someone else, a former colleague of mine who worked under my supervision for several years before he had transferred back to another department in the newsroom.

I was — shall we say — stunned to get the news.

I quit the next day. Cleared out my office, went to visit with the publisher for a brief — and awkward — meeting. Then I was on my way.

All I wanted was to be able to retire, to leave of my own volition. I was unable to do so in quite the manner I envisioned, unable to retire from the craft I had loved for so many years. To this day, even though I resigned, I feel almost like a persona non grata at the Globe-News.

But … what the hey!

That was then. The here and now has arrived. I am going to retire — on my own terms — from the part-time job I’ve been working for the past three-plus years.

So, this blog is going to include a feature I hope you’ll enjoy reading as much as I intend to enjoy writing.