Tag Archives: retirement

local news

Happy Trails, Part 14

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I have made no secret of our desire to relocate, to move from the home we’ve owned for the past 21 years.

We intend eventually to move much closer to our granddaughter, about whom you’ve also read on this blog.

We have many hurdles yet to clear, many tasks to perform, many issues to resolve. I’m trying, though, to figure something out regarding High Plains Blogger.

I’ve grown quite attached to Amarillo, where we’ve lived for two-plus decades. You might say I’m a community booster and I’ve been unafraid to speak cheerfully about Amarillo’s future as I see it unfolding.

But when we settle downstate, I no longer will be as attached to Amarillo as we are at this moment. We no longer — to borrow a phrase — will “have a dog in that fight.”

We don’t yet know where we’ll end up. But I like using this blog to offer commentary on our community. I’ve used it as well to refer to the community where we lived prior to moving to the Texas Panhandle. Beaumont, Texas, remains near and dear to both of us. We made many great friends there and I miss them to this day.

I suspect we’ll lug the same kind of emotional baggage from Amarillo to wherever we end up.

But my intention will be to keep this blog focused on “politics and public policy,” even though I’ll likely be unable to comment with the same commitment on matters relating to Amarillo’s growth and development.

I do hope, though, to settle in a community that is moving forward, just as I have perceived to be occurring in Amarillo and — for that matter — in Beaumont. Indeed, that might become a criterion for my wife and me to use as we decide where we want to live for the duration.

Rest assured, though, whichever community becomes our home also will become fair game for this blog.

Decisions, decisions …

local news

Happy Trails, Part 13

I recently told a longtime friend of mine that I am now “fully retired” and he responded with an observation that he hadn’t met any retired individual yet who didn’t enjoy retirement to the hilt.

Today, we got some good news and some great news in the mail. It all relates to our retired status.

The tandem bit of cheer arrived enclosed in a single envelope from the Potter-Randall County Appraisal District, the entity that assesses the value of property in the two counties that Amarillo straddles.

The good news is that the assessed value of our property has escalated significantly in the past year. That didn’t surprise me, given all the commercial/business construction that’s ongoing not far from our home.

The great news is that our estimated property tax bill remains the same as it was last year. Texas state law allows old folks like me to have their property taxes frozen in perpetuity. Ain’t it cool?

That brings me to another point, on which I’ll dwell only for a moment. It’s that taxing entities that seek additional revenue to pay for brick-and-mortar projects — which they submit to voters in the form of bond issue elections — often run into resistance from the least-affected constituency group: elderly homeowners.

For instance, a school system wants to build a new school. The entity calls for a bond issue election, but it might get defeated because older voters reject it. They claim they don’t want to spend more on property taxes; therefore, they reject these bond issues because they don’t want to bear the additional burden.

Except that they don’t bear any additional burden! State law freezes their property tax bill!

But … I digress.

I’ll just salute the state for giving old folks such as yours truly a break on their tax bill, while allowing the value of our property to increase.

Indeed, that increase will come in handy, too, once we get ready to put our house on the market.

Growing older isn’t so bad … you know?

business news, local news, media news

Happy Trails, Part 12

My mind has this habit of wandering backward.

Yes, it goes forward, too. It’s been moving ahead in this post-retirement phase to the next great adventure that awaits my wife and me. When it’s not thinking ahead, it occasionally drifts into the past.

My mind did so again today as I began thinking about two colleagues of mine who died within a week of each other under quite different circumstances.

Buddy Seewald died in an auto accident north of Amarillo. He wasn’t ready to leave this world. It happened. He was gone. Just like that.

Then came news of the death of Virgil Van Camp, a much older gentleman, who died of natural causes at the age of 87.

I wrote about them in September 2013. Here’s the link to that earlier piece.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2013/09/there-goes-another-good-man/

I tend to reminisce in my own mind about my past, about the career path I chose and the people I met along the way. Buddy and Virgil were two men who affected me greatly during the time we worked together. They were contributors to the Amarillo Globe-News opinion pages, which I had the high honor of editing for nearly 18 years.

My memory of them reminds me of how much tried-and-true fun I had pursuing this particular craft.

They enabled us to keep the newspaper more relevant in people’s lives. They would share their world view on particular issues. They would debate them between themselves and share their differing perspectives with Globe-News readers.

This was just on the eve of the Internet Invasion, before newspapers — the printed version that carriers would toss onto our porches — began losing their relevance.

I was proud to be a part of that era. It saddens me at some level to see all the changes that are occurring within the industry. Newspapers are printing fewer copies each day. They’re moving toward what publishers call the “digital product”; as an aside, I detest the word “product” to describe a printed newspaper.

While I am somewhat sad these days, I also look back with great fondness at the journey I was allowed to travel.

Friends and associates like Buddy and Virgil made it all the more fun.

media news

Happy Trails, Part 11

We have been doing some housecleaning around here lately.

Moving day will arrive eventually as we prepare to launch ourselves into a new adventure. Retirement has given us time to do some serious evaluation and re-evaluation of what we possess and what we should keep or discard. Those of you who’ve been through this get my drift.

I have been rifling through my home office desk and I’ve come across three items that — strangely enough — I just cannot discard.

Two of them involve tools of the craft I pursued for nearly 37 years. Old-line journalists will know of what I speak. The newbies out there, well, listen up.

One of them is a pica pole. It’s like a ruler only with a specific newspaper-related purpose.  A pica is a unit of measurement. Six picas equal one inch. The pica pole has inch markings on it, but when you’re working with this device in a newsroom, you rely on the pica measurement.

It tells you how wide to make your photographs, how wide your columns of type will be, how deep the stories will run along a page of type.

Pica poles are relics of the past. To my knowledge, they have no practical use today in this age of desktop publishing.

I actually have two of them, one of which I am certain was issued to me at the first full-time journalism job I had, at the Oregon City (Ore.) Enterprise-Courier. The E-C, as we called it then, also has gone dark. It no longer publishes. The building has been wiped off the slab at its downtown Oregon City site.

My boss at the time told me to “guard this with your life” when he issued it to me back in 1977. I have done as he said.

The second item is a proportion wheel. We used this item to measure the size of pictures we would place on our news pages. You line up the inner wheel measurements with the outer wheel measurements and you determine by how many percentage points you want to expand — or shrink — the original print to make it fit the space you have on the page.

That’s all done electronically now.

The third relic from my former life? That would be a luggage tag I collected on the trip of a lifetime I took in November 1989. It’s a Thai Air tag that went on a piece of luggage from Bangkok to Hanoi — yeah, the city in Vietnam.

I was among a group of editorial writers making a fact-finding trip to Southeast Asia. The National Conference of Editorial Writers arranged for this trip that originated in Thailand, then to Vietnam, then to Cambodia and back to Vietnam.

Once the official NCEW portion of the trip concluded, I was able to travel to Da Nang with two of my colleagues and visit the place where I had served 20 years earlier as a member of the U.S. Army. A life-changer? You bet it was.

I am not sure why I kept the Hanoi bag tag, but I am glad I did.

It is one of those wonderful — if small — reminders of the many great things I was able to see and do pursuing a craft to which I was deeply devoted.

That was then. The here and now beckons my wife and me to places still to be determined. I’ll keep you posted.

local news

Happy Trails, Part Nine

More than two weeks into this full-time retirement life and I’ve made a bit of a discovery.

I am suffering not one bit, not a single hint of separation anxiety from my previous life.

That’s right. I do not miss waking up early each day, getting myself cleaned up and throwing on clothes suitable for the workplace. Nope. None of that has overtaken me.

I retired officially from the final part-time job I was working in late March. I clocked out, shook a couple of colleagues’ hands, hugged my boss’s neck and said goodbye.

Then my wife and I hit the road the next morning for the Hill Country and then motored west with our pickup and fifth wheel to Ruidoso, N.M. We have two more road trips already planned out and are beginning to formulate a travel plan for one or two after that.

I had anticipated some angst after leaving the working world. I hit it pretty damn hard for nearly 37 years in a pressure-packed environment. I lived by deadline working for four daily newspapers: two of them in Oregon, my home state and two others in Texas, where my family and I moved in 1984.

But it hasn’t occurred. Not a single time have I missed the grind. Not once have I wished, “Man, if only I could be back on the job reporting or commenting on this or that issue.”

It hasn’t happened. I don’t expect it will.

I told a member of my family this week about that lack of separation anxiety. My family member has been retired for a number of years and she has adapted quite smoothly to a life of relative leisure. I am not sure she quite gets why my own transition into this new life has gone so smoothly. Her expression seemed to suggest: Well, what in the world did you expect?

I believe I’ve just answered that question. I expected to miss my former life more than I do. I am glad, though, that I do not.

Three of the four part-time jobs I worked since leaving daily journalism were media-related gigs. I don’t expect any of them to return, although one of those jobs might — I want to stress might — return in some form. If it does, it will have to be right. It will have to be something that will make it worth my time and effort.

In a perverse way, my time actually has gained even greater value as my wife and I continue this journey toward points unknown.

local news

Happy Trails, Part Eight

I am happy to report that our first full-retirement excursion was an unqualified success.

We returned home after spending about 10 days on the road in our fifth wheel RV.

We spent the first part of it in the Hill Country of Texas visiting family members: my wife’s brother, two nieces, our “nephew in law,” and two great-nieces.

Then we headed west, toward Ruidoso, N.M.

But first we had some wind with which to contend. We pulled up in the Davis Mountains region, then trekked northwest toward El Paso and straight into some gale-force winds that kicked up a whole lot of dirt.

Our fuel mileage plummeted as we powered through El Paso and then headed north toward Ruidoso.

But we got there and spent a couple of nights at a campsite next to my sister and brother in law, who had driven in from their own vacation spot in Mesa, Ariz.

We had a serious blast with them. They departed and we stayed on to trudge along some mountain trails, which we did each day until our departure this morning.

Here’s the best news: Neither of us was particularly anxious for our journey to end. And this feeling, I venture to speculate, will accelerate as we move more deeply into this retirement life.

We came home, plan to do some laundry and then we’ll refocus on our next journey to, oh, hither and yon.

environmental news

These bikers tend to their ‘track’

GRINDSTONE LAKE, N.M. — You meet the nicest people on occasion while trekking through the woods.

So it was when my wife, Toby the Puppy and I encountered three men raking twigs, pine straw and removing rocks from a trail in front of us.

“Oh, you must work for the park,” I asked one of the young men.

Oh, no, he answered. He is a member of Ruidoso Bike Club and trail maintenance is part of their gig, the young man added. He said the club has a sort of memorandum of understanding with the city parks department to maintain the trails’ upkeep throughout the Grindstone Lake complex of hiking-biking paths.

They do their job quite well.

We trudged about 6 miles from the trailhead near the shore of the lake that is backed up behind a dam. We spotted the young man near the end of our hike and inquired about the vertical elevation we had just endured. His answer? It’s about 800 feet, he said. “You go up and down a lot,” he said, motioning with his hand.

We were impressed with the quality of the trail we hiked. We chose to hike the easier route, given our age and understanding our limits. You won’t see us scrambling up steep grades on our hands and feet. We choose to remain upright on both feet while walking.

The quality is enhanced, I should add, by the absence of litter along the way. Indeed, we saw a good bit of that on several of the hikes we took in this part of southeastern New Mexico.

The mountainsides remain scarred by the wildfire that ravaged this region about five years ago. We learned the blazes burned nearly 50,000 acres and destroyed more than 200 homes. The young man we met earlier said the area remains quite dry and if it doesn’t get some moisture soon, the forest area might close to all visitors.

But there’s good news. Grindstone Lake is up about 100 feet from its level a year ago, according to the biker/trail maintenance man. “It was almost dry last summer,” he said.

All that said, this is a lovely place to relax and unwind from a moderately successful career.

Believe it. Retirement does agree with both of us.

And Toby the Puppy, too.

local news

Happy Trails, Part Seven

AUSTIN, Texas — One of our nieces asked me at dinner: How does it feel?

Retirement? Yes.

Well, I don’t quite know yet. I’m still quite new at it, unlike my wife, who called it a career three years ago. She’s adapted nicely to being fully retired.

I’m still finding my way emotionally.

Don’t misunderstand me. I do not miss the daily grind. Nor do I miss the pressure of meeting deadlines. I damn sure don’t miss coping with the pressure of a changing media environment; I’ll leave that to the young bucks.

My gut tells me it’ll take no time at all to become totally acclimated to full-time retirement. After all, isn’t that what all of us strive to reach, that era of our life when we are free to pursue what we want, to not have to answer to anyone — other than your much better half?

I’ve crossed that threshold.

I cannot yet find the words to describe how I’m supposed to “feel” about retirement. I’ll recognize the words when I hear them in my head.

When I do, I’ll be sure to let you know. For now, I’m deriving too much joy just from awakening each morning when I feel like it.

local news

Happy Trails, Part Six

The thought occurred to me on this first full day of full-time retirement.

My wife and I were tooling down the highway this morning and I kept making a reference to not having to go to work, that neither of us is tied to an actual paying job.

The thought took me back more than 45 years when we were newlyweds, and I’m sure other newlyweds have said — and are still saying — the same thing to each other.

We kept referring to each other as “husband” and “wife.”

“Hey, you’re my wife,” I would say. She’d respond with the “husband” thing.

Those of you who are married know of what I am speaking.

We’ve gone a long way down the road together since then. But now we’re tooling down an new highway of life.

She’s been retired since 2012. I kept working a number of part-time jobs since I left the Amarillo Globe-News in the summer of 2012. I had some media jobs; I toiled for a time as a juvenile supervision officer at the Youth Center of the High Plains, aka the “juvenile detention center”; I just retired from another part-time gig at Street Toyota.

Rest assured I won’t bore you with continual blog posts about retirement. It’s so damn new at the moment, you know?

Now we’re both retired. It’s a new feeling and a new experience … kind of like getting married.

local news

Happy Trails, Part Five

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It’s done!

I finished my work shift today at Street Toyota, said goodbye to a few of my colleagues and friends and then came home.

But first I had to pick up a couple of things.

I had mentioned to a few folks there that I never got a cake when I left the Amarillo Globe-News in August 2012. That’s all I wanted: a sheet cake with a “Good Luck” message … and a corner piece with a healthy layer of frosting.

Today I got six cupcakes from Belmar Bakery, which I took home to enjoy with my wife.

Then I received another very cool gift.

It’s a sketch portrait from Benny Hill, one of my friends at Street and a fellow with whom I worked at the Globe-News.

It’s a very good likeness. It has several good wishes written by friends throughout the dealership.

So, there you have it.

That’s all she wrote, man. I wept when I left my job at the Oregon City (Ore.) Enterprise-Courier; I did so again when I left the Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise; and, yes, I wept when I departed the Globe-News.

No tears this time. It is a happy day.

Now the open road awaits my wife and me … and Toby the Puppy.