Tag Archives: retirement

Happy Trails, Part 187: Yep, they were tough

October 16, 2020 kanelis2012

ABILENE, Texas — Our retirement journey brought us to a community that is proud as the dickens of its cowboy/Wild West heritage.

Show the city shows it off with a museum called Frontier Texas. We visited it and came away with a keen appreciation of just how tough the folks were who settled in this region. Not only that, we came away understanding a little better the nature of the Native Americans who were here long before the Anglos arrived.

What did we learn? Let’s see …

We learned about a woman who married four or five times after each of her husbands met untimely and gruesome deaths at the hands of outlaws and of Native Americans. I found myself wondering: Why did she keep seeking love when she had encountered such tragedy? Oh, and her daughter and granddaughter died prematurely and violently, too!

Then there were the bison that were hunted to near extinction by “buffalo hunters,” which is how the museum identified them. “Buffalo killers” would have been a much more apt description.

There is a brief reference to the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon between the Army and the Comanche warriors. The museum mentions that the Army captured 1,400 Comanche horses and then “slaughtered” them. It doesn’t tell you that the soldiers stampeded the animals off the canyon rim.

I have long resisted trying to imagine whether I could live in that era. We cannot control the time we come into this world. I was born in 1949 and I am glad I entered the world at that time. Had I been born, say, in 1849, well, I would have coped with life in that time.

Still, as I look back at the folks who lived in this part of Texas and coped with life and death, I come away amazed and astonished at the grit and courage they exhibited.

It’s just yet another discovery we have made on our journey through retirement. I am quite certain there are many more to find in this big ol’ world.

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Duty overtakes blogging

September 27, 2020 kanelis2012

By JOHN KANELIS / [email protected]

For those of you who might be waiting for a full-scale, full-throated, front-on return of this blog, I am making an announcement.

It will return in full and frequent force just as soon as I clean up our house.

You see, household duty has pulled High Plains Blogger away from the usual frequent fare of commentary on this and that. I have climbing up and down ladders, step ladders and step stools for the past few days as we paint the interior of our home.

We just completed the first phase. We’re going to take break, collect our thoughts and decide what color we want to plaster on the remainder of our walls.

Now I get to return to something I love doing, which is offering commentary on issues of the day.

Hmm. Let’s see. I think we have a few topics to discuss.

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Puppy Tales, Part 87: Earning his spurs

September 11, 2020 kanelis2012

By JOHN KANELIS / [email protected]

TYLER STATE PARK, Texas — You know by now that Toby the Puppy is nearly perfect … if not actually perfect.

One of the aspects of his perfection is that he barks only for a reason. He doesn’t just yip and yap at nothing or nobody. Hardly. He barks when people approach our RV, or our house when we’re at home. He knows when one of us is away from the house and when we return that he doesn’t need to bark; Toby the Puppy simply assumes it’s either his Mother or me.

OK, that all laid out there, here’s a tale of how he put his bigger than expected bark to good use.

We were parked at Tyler State Park. We noticed a raccoon walking through our area. We watched as the ‘coon walked up to an RV a few spaces away from ours. This all happened just before dusk.

Then the sun went down and, without warning — and it was startling to hear — Toby the Puppy went absolutely ballistic. He barked, he snarled, he made noises that we had never heard him make. He was looking out the door of our RV into the dark.

I grabbed a flashlight and looked everywhere in our camp site at what might have caused Toby to go berserk. I found nothing. Then it occurred to me: Toby the Puppy scared that raccoon away!

I cannot prove that the raccoon ventured into our site that evening. I am left only with circumstantial evidence. We saw with our own eyes the raccoon snooping around our neighbor’s rig. Then it got dark and our pooch began snarling at a mystery object outside.

Two plus two does equal four, yes?

There you have it. Toby the Puppy has earned his keep as a supreme watchdog.

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Puppy Tales, Part 86: Reading lips? Really?

September 9, 2020 kanelis2012 4 Comments

By JOHN KANELIS

[email protected]

TYLER STATE PARK, Texas — Spare me the derisive laughter when I reveal the latest wonderment involving Toby the Puppy.

I was sitting in our recreational vehicle; the air conditioner was blasting cool air throughout the RV. It was making a lot of noise.

Toby was lying on the floor next to the bed in our bedroom. He and I made eye contact. Then I turned to my wife and I whispered to her: Do you think we should take Puppy for a walk?

As the Almighty is my witness, the moment I said the word “walk,” Toby jumped up and ran toward us. His tail was wagging. He wanted to go on a walk through the Tyler State Park campground.

My wife offered a potentially plausible explanation for what we both witnessed, which was that Toby is blessed with exceptional hearing. I won’t accept her rational thinking … just yet.

I want to make it abundantly clear that I spoke to my wife in that moment in a voice that couldn’t possibly be heard above the roar of the A/C. Yet our puppy responded immediately after watching me say the operative word.

Not long after Toby the Puppy joined our family, my wife and I learned to avoid saying certain words in his presence unless we were prepared to act on what we had just said. In other words we didn’t say the word “walk” unless we intended to it in the moment.

It’s a good think we could act on it when I mouthed the word “walk.”

I will take greater care from this day forward.

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Happy Trails, Part 186: Not missing the land line

September 3, 2020 kanelis2012

When you retire from the working world, I have found that you embark on a series of new customs. You at times forsake the old way for the new way and then hope the new way feels as comfortable as what you had all those years ago.

So it has been with my phone service.

My wife and I disconnected our land line several months before we moved from Amarillo to the Metroplex. We moved into our fifth wheel and lived in it while we prepared our house for sale.

We both had been tethered to the land line since we were children. My parents had no choice, naturally; neither did hers. We found ourselves with that kind of choice our parents never had.

So we disconnected our land line. We rely exclusively these days on our cell phones.

Let me stipulate that I do not use my cell phone for many tasks other than speaking to people. I do take pictures with it. I use a number of apps on the device, such as the Google app that guides me to unfamiliar locations. There are some others as well.

What I find myself doing, though, is leaving my cell phone at home if I take off to run a local errand. I look at the device this way: If someone wants to talk to me, they can call my cell phone, leave a message and I’ll answer it when I return from my errand. Hey, it’s like the old days! Except that the phone isn’t hooked up to a wire coming out of the wall.

So I am able to pretend I have a land line when I don’t. It works out well for me. Even when I have the cell phone with me, I am able to say with a clear conscience that I do not miss the land line.

Adaptability is all it’s cracked up to be.

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Happy Trails, Part 185: Comfy in my own skin

August 16, 2020 kanelis2012

The farther my wife and I travel down the road on our retirement journey, the more comfortable I become in my own skin.

I never felt discomfort in who I am, or what I did for a living. I was a proud practitioner of my craft as a print journalist. I believe I enjoyed some modest success along a 37-year ride through four newspapers in two states.

It ended less than happily nearly eight years ago.

Retirement was thrust upon my wife and me. What I find interesting now that I have traveled down the retirement road is my total comfort in going about my business each day as a retired individual.

There actually was a time not long after I retired that I felt a bit strange telling strangers that I am retired. I say “strange” only because I had been a working guy since I was 16 years of age. So, the word “retired” didn’t flow out of my mouth with quite the comfort it does today, at this moment in my life.

To be clear, I am working part time … on my own terms as a freelance reporter for a weekly newspaper in Collin County. It’s a blast, man. I get to cover a city council and write the occasional feature story to which I get get assigned by my bosses. The gig keeps me fresh and keeps me enjoying a part of the career I cherished pursuing.

Maybe it’s a natural progression for those who move from working life to retired life. Given that I have no prior experience, I only can offer conjecture to what I am experiencing.

To be frank, I rather like the feel of my own skin these days.

Retirement feels more right than ever.

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Blog streak goes on and on

June 23, 2020 kanelis2012

I feel like bragging for just a moment about this blog I write.

High Plains Blogger has posted musings for the past 357 days. That’s at least one per day for nearly a year.

Why is that worthy of a bit of braggadocio? I guess it’s just because I feel like bragging about it.

The blog once surpassed a year in the number of consecutive days in which a blog item had been posted. Then technical difficulties got in the way. I had to go a full day without posting a blog item while the hosting outfit I hired worked through the problem. They fixed it in short order and so I started a new streak.

I hear occasionally from friends of mine who say they “marvel” at the volume of items I post. Well, that comes from friends. My adversaries don’t offer that kind of comment. That’s OK. I get it.

I am blessed — or cursed, depending on how you might consider it — with an abundance of time. Retirement allows me to vent, to rant, to pontificate, to offer a perspective on this or that. And so … I do.

I am not into writing daily just to keep streaks alive. I have quite a bit to say on a number of topics. The president of the United States, quite clearly, occupies much of my time these days. I’ll stay on his a** for as long as it takes.

Meanwhile the streak goes on.

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Happy Trails, Part 182 : COVID shortens our leash

June 5, 2020 kanelis2012

Our retirement journey has been reduced, narrowed, diminished a bit. We aren’t calling a halt to our recreational vehicle travel. We’ve just been placed on a dramatically shortened leash.

Damn you, coronavirus pandemic!

We had intended to spend a good bit of our summer months tooling around several states with our fifth wheel hooked up to our pickup.

Then the pandemic arrived in all its viciousness. It forced state parks to shut down. It has shuttered businesses that cater to folks like my wife and me.

I want to stipulate that we love the home we purchased in Collin County, Texas. We enjoy spending time working in the yard, arranging storage space to make it more usable for two retired folks.

We also enjoy greatly our RV and getting out of Dodge for a spell.

Except that this summer our travel will be restricted. Neither of us wants to push our luck visiting places that might become COVID-19 “hot spots” while we’re in the area.

Our plans now as summer approaches include a number of Texas state park visits. We’ll be spending some time shortly in Atlanta, Texas, at the state park in the northeast corner of Texas. Our new home puts us in close proximity to a number of state parks.

We had sought to get into a few of them closer to the house. We couldn’t get in; it turns out a lot of other Texans have the same idea and those parks were booked to the max.

We found some space at Atlanta State Park, so off we will go.

Retirement remains a whole lot of fun. We are hoping for an end to the health crisis that has limited our time with our precious granddaughter.

It also keeps us on a short leash. The open road awaits. It’s just not as lengthy as we prefer it to be.

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Happy Trails, Part 181: On the road again … finally!

May 7, 2020 kanelis2012

LAKE MURRAY STATE PARK, Okla. — It took far longer than we wanted, but we finally pulled our fifth wheel out of storage.

We awoke the vehicle we nicknamed “Sally” from her winter of hibernation and arrived at a wonderful state park near Ardmore. We flushed the anti-freeze out of the plumbing and have enjoyed a brief respite from the housebound life in this era of the coronavirus pandemic.

To be sure, we are keeping our distance from our campsite neighbors. We holler at ’em from some distance, extend greetings and good wishes. We discovered that two of our neighbors right next door, a husband and wife, hail from Frisco, a mere chip shot away from us in Princeton.

Indeed, a key discovery I’ve made during our visit to this marvelous place is the enormous number of Texas license plates on the back of the RVs through the park. The Texas Parks & Wildlife Department remains closed to overnight campers, while opening only for day use. I reckon those other Texans skedaddled across the Red River to a state that hasn’t shut down its park system.

The Oklahoma state park system isn’t exactly wide open, though. If you travel into Oklahoma from a state such as, oh, New York or New Jersey — which have huge numbers of COVID-19 infection — then you will be quarantined for two weeks. Fortunately, we ventured just a little way and near as I can tell we’ll be able to hook up and head for the house in the morning.

It is good to get out of the house. It is good to come to a quiet place. It is good to relax and to prepare for the next stint of homebound living. A return to “normal” isn’t in the cards for us just yet, although this brief outing has been quite therapeutic.

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