In spite of the fact that I had a week off from work at the end of last month I didn’t get a chance to and/or feel inclined to do any blogging.
Spring is normally a great time to be outside working: not only is not too hot yet, but the bugs (namely mosquitoes) have yet to arrive. In addition being out and about relieves us of our cabin fever, especially after a long winter like we just had.
But the poor weather continues. It’s easy to forget (or mentally block out), but less than a month ago we had a snowstorm, so I shouldn’t be complaining. But we’re now stuck in a cycle of rainy spring “monsoons”, and during my week off it literally rained every day which prevented me from working on many of the outside projects I had on my (lengthy) list.
Some of the storms have been nasty, and Elko made the local newspaper when one storm on May 19th had especially strong wind gusts. (The next day a related storm system spawned the deadly tornadoes in Moore, Oklahoma.)
The wind uprooted a tree in the horses paddock, but it wasn’t until two days later that we realized that the top ten feet of one of our blue spruce trees in the back yard had broken off during the storm as well.
One of the projects I wanted to finish during my time off was the removal of the tree next to the house on the north side that I wrote about last entry. I identified the tree as a White Ash.
Before the streak of rain started I had begun trimming the branches off the tree on the house side. I started off using my tractor work platform for some of the lower branches, and then transitioned back into the tree climbing gear for the higher branches.
(I hadn’t considered using these guys’ technique…)
However, the project stalled when I found there was no easy way to both get at and assure the branches wouldn’t hit the house when they were cut off. I debated about how to accomplish the task, but eventually simply trimmed the branches off as high as I could so (in theory) they were small enough that they wouldn’t damage the house if they fell on it.
That tactic worked well enough (two branches did indeed hit the house) and after trimming off all the branches on the house side I had to move them out of the yard into a burn pile. They were trimmed into manageaable sizes and I used the tractor with the pallet forks to shuttle them up the driveway to a brush pile west of the barn that I will burn later.
On one of the last trips as I was driving the tractor up the driveway, I was startled to hear one of our guineafowl squawking and saw it flying towards the tractor from my left. I continued to drive and watched it fly over the hood of the tractor, but realized something must have flushed the bird out, so I looked back to my left to see what it had flown away from.
There, standing maybe 20 feet away was a coyote, staring right back at me!
It took me a moment to comprehend what I had just seen, and by the time it registered with me and I had stopped the tractor the coyote had headed out. We knew coyotes were around and we’ve heard them often at night but I was freaked out by one so bold that it was wandering around during the day (it was about 6:30 PM) and while I was making noise and driving the tractor around.
Hoping to document the encounter I grabbed the only camera I had with me (my cell phone camera) and started recording video.
I first headed towards where I had seen the coyote, then realized it likely had headed northwest as it’s the only route towards more open areas that’s not flooded with water and is clear of buildings and lots of fences. Sure enough a few minutes later I spotted the coyote in the adjacent field northwest.
It was looking back at me and didn’t seem in any big hurry to leave. But I stayed and watched (and videoed) until it wandered out of sight over the hill to the north. (The zoom on my camera phone is poor enough that the animal in the video is barely recognizable, let alone identifiable, so I won’t bother posting it.)
The next day Kim reported that one of her chickens and one of the guineafowl had disappeared and we knew who the culprit was. After a conversation about what options we had the animal lover in Kim didn’t see eliminating the coyote as an option, so she resolved instead to assure the birds were locked up earlier in the evening.
I put out a wildlife motion camera (it’s Kim’s dad’s camera he won in a drawing) in the hopes of catching a decent photo of the coyote eventually as it’s assured it will be back.
That evening the monsoons started, effectively ending more work on the tree or other outside projects.
It was during the tree removal that I started experiencing allergy symptoms again. I first had them a couple of years ago when removing trees for the new building site clearing but before that I had never had any allergies. After a couple of miserable days of trying to cope with the allergy symptoms this time I started taking antihistamines and found that Claritin worked and didn’t disqualify me from working air traffic. I’ve been taking Claritin every day since then.
By mid-week during my time off I was starting to get frustrated that I couldn’t work outside on the projects I had wanted due to the rain and/or mud, so I realized I needed to adjust my attitude and work on what I could. By the end of the week I imagined my daily routine was likely what I would be doing in retirement.
Of late I’ve been waxing philosophical about retiring from my air traffic control job. I’m now only about five months away from retirement eligiblity. I haven’t committed to a date to leave yet, but it will be before next summer at the very latest.
Some of what I consider my “generation” of controllers are reaching mandatory retirement age (age 56) and/or eligibility, so some of us have been discussing the topic quite a lot at work. (Curiously some of those discussions have even turned contentious.) It surprises me how many seem to not be prepared for (either financially or mentally) for retirement. It’s not as though age 56 sneaked up on them…
I on the other hand, am looking forward to retiring. I have lots of other things I want to do with my life (although admittedly I’m not sure exactly what that is; I just know it doesn’t involve air traffic controlling), and I’ll trade six more years of working for “the man” earning a little more money for the time I’ll get to do other things.
My retirement won’t really be retirement though – I’ll be starting another career (whatever that might turn out to be), albeit (hopefully) one with fewer/better working hours, more flexibility and less job frustration than what I currently experience. The plan is to be self-employed in an increased capacity for both our dog grooming business and probably some other computer related work.
There’s also plenty of other things I have always wanted to do but never found the time for (like vegetable gardening).
Initially though I’ll be working on our home improvement and the new building projects for a while. But after that who knows?…
That’s not to say the prospect of retiring isn’t a bit scary though. Once I retire I’ll be starting a new life; for the past 25 years my life has been structured around my job. It’s a transition into something new and unknown (and likely something with less income).
Thus, while I approach what will be our new life with much anticipation, I also have some apprehension (including over how long it will take for OPM to process and pay me my full retirement annuity – in 2012 it was taking them 156 days to process but I suspect the delays now, including those due to sequestration, will be greater).
While they process my retirement, they’ll pay only a partial annuity (exactly how much that will be is unknown). That means we’ll have to leave a fair amount of cash in reserve to cover the shortfall from my full annuity: cash that we otherwise could have spent on our many projects.
Meanwhile gas prices in the upper Midwest spiked due to the simultaneous closure of three refineries, two of which were for scheduled maintenance. In May we had the highest gas prices in the nation. The prices started rising in our area abruptly not long before Memorial Day (the following photo was taken on 5/17/13; it looks like I was lucky enough to have hit the pumps when the price peaked).
Pardon me for being one of those guys who see the simultaneous refinery shutdowns as more than just a coincidence…