Retirement Parties

I’m going to a retirement party this afternoon. It’s for three people, and sadly, not one of them is me.

I wouldn’t mind retiring, although I’m still young enough that, if I did retire early, I would take a huge penalty on my pension. Said penalty, by the way, is age dependent and permanent. The age dependent thing isn’t awful to think about, although the permanent bit certainly is.

And, there is the double whammy thing happening, too. Clara retired on January 12th. Fortunately, that’s long enough ago that she’s stopped gloating for the most part. I can live with the odd little zinger sent my way. You know, complaining about how cold it is when it hits -40 and then saying, “Oh. That’s right. I don’t have to go the work this morning… but, you do.” The worst one was, “Do you know the hardest thing about retirement? You never get a day off from it.” I’ll concede that the last one made me go down to the basement and have a little cry…

So, I’m going to head upstairs to the cafeteria in a little while and give best wishes to the three people who are getting ready to move on to better things and are not taking me with them. But, really, I’m still not ready to retire. After all, I’m still, for the most part, having fun. Notice I did qualify that with “for the most part.” However, the college is kind of neat in that the things that happen that aren’t fun are always really entertaining….