It’s never too late to improve

My husband says this all the time….

Someone asks him how he is doing….

“Well there is always room for improvement!”  he shouts back.

It became sort of a joke between us for awhile until I decided to put the phrase on our answering machine….“Hi, You have reached Crates Farms and Excavating… where there is always room for improvement.  Please leave a message.”

Our friends got a kick out of it.  Roger didn’t think it sent the right message to prospective customers.

This part is true, though.  It is never too late to improve or at least try to improve.  I retired about a year ago and suddenly my life was drastically different.  Sometimes it was in a good way and sometimes not.  If you work at a job or a career for many many years, it becomes a part of who you are.  So I found myself floundering a bit after retirement.  Oh, I still had many different roles to play but the one which had defined my life for the best part of 40 years was gone.

So I began to look for new things to do   I had been making the list for a few years.  Funny, though, some of the things on the list were quickly scratched off because they were just not as much fun as I thought they were going to be.   I thought I would read books every day and I even had a list of books I wanted to read.  I got a Kindle Fire for Christmas and began to download free books.  But after sitting a few days at a time in the recliner reading books and promptly falling asleep, I scratched that idea.

I also though I would really get my house organized for the first time in 40 years.    In 1971, about six weeks after Roger and I were married, we moved to the family farm.  Roger’s parents found a house in town and we took over where they left off.  Which put us in an unusual situation.   Roger’s parents left behind a lot of stuff!  And so we moved in around it.  As newlyweds we didn’t have a lot to start with so I was thankful for everything that was left behind.  Well at least most of it.  It just took a long time for the house to actually begin to feel like ours.  When we added on a family room and master bedroom  in 1979, things finally started to feel like it belonged to us.

But organizing my house after living in it for over 40 years seems kind of… well.  pointless.  Plus it wasnt really all that much fun and I quickly lost interest.  Scratch that off the list, too.

I am currently trying to improve my health and eating habits.  I just joined WW online and started swimming at the YMCA.  This came after a visit to the doctor to discover that retirement wasn’t really good for my blood pressure or for my weight.  Its time to get active again.  It’s never too late to improve.

 

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