Ready or not, the new year is coming. To give myself time to recharge, I will be taking the week off between Christmas and Near Year's. Look for a fresh post on January 2nd.
A little over a week ago Betty and I loaded up the RV and our dog, Bailey, and headed to the southern Arizona area around Patagonia. About 3 hours from our home, it is the perfect spot for a 4 day getaway. Patagonia Lake State Park is about 10 minutes south of the small (920 residents) town, and 20 minutes north of the border with Mexico. Yes, there is already a wall there. It runs right through the middle of Nogales, dividing the town into American and Mexican communities. Border patrol check points are common on the major roads in and out of the area. Seeing a white and green Border Patrol truck perched on a ridge line is par for the course. The American side is lined with massive warehouses, trucks coming and going at all hours with produce and products bound for one side of the border or the other. I imagine a tightening of the border or a change in NAFTA would hit this part of the state pretty hard. But, all that politics aside, we came to relax, give Bailey the ch...
A reader posed an interesting, and important question to me a few weeks ago. She is wondering about retired couples whose desires aren't always in alignment. What can be done if one half of a couple wants to go in one direction, while the other person doesn't. She cited travel as a good example of this type of conflict. One person really has his or her heart set on seeing the world, or at least someplace farther away than the local shopping mall. The other is a homebody and resists travel requests. Why? Health issues, financial worries, fear of uncertainty,....there are all sorts of reasons why travel is a turnoff for someone. This type of disagreement is important to resolve. Travel may be one obvious point of contention, but probably not the only one. In a post a few weeks ago, I wrote that loosening the purse strings is difficult for many of us. Downsizing or moving to someplace with a different climate, eliminating or adding possessions, redoing th...
Ask a retiree about hobbies and photography is quite likely to be on that list. Especially with the quality of cameras now part of all phones made within the past four or five years, it is very easy to point and shoot. Type "photography blogs" in Google and thousands pop up. Try the same thing on Amazon and find almost 7,000 books about the hobby. Unlike some other activities, photography lends itself to specializing in different areas. Focusing (pun intended) on nature, family, wildlife (birding, for example), flowers and landscapes, travel, food preparation and presentation, home decorating, even classic cars or train engines....anything that piques someone's interest can become the subject matter. And, therein lies a problem: storage and viewing. All those photos have to be put somewhere when you download them from the phone's memory. If you are even semi-seriously involved with photography as a way of capturing memories and expressing yourself. you are likely t...
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