I don’t think think I’ll ever “retire” in the traditional sense.

My thought was to always have a severe mental breakdown around 50 and run off to the woods to build a log cabin and grow my own food. My wife knows of this plan but I’m pretty sure she thinks it’s a joke. It’s not.

I have a couple pear trees in my back yard that I planted for my son when we was a baby. When my wife and I had a miscarriage on our 2nd and 3rd try we burried what we could with the pear trees, when out best cat died we burried him there, when my lizard that I’ve had for 12 years and went through hell with me died we burried her there, when my grandma died I burried some of her trinkets there.

I don’t mow much back there and let the grass grow, just keeping the base of the trees clean. Sometimes I like to go sit in that overgrown grass under the trees. It feels safe and comforting, the bugs keep me company, one time I had a garden snake sliver over my shoes and just sit there for a while.

I used to love these. I always wanted to be the last one running. One year another kid and I ran so long the bell rang so we ran some more and got to skip the next period all together.

I had to go to urgent care the other day and the only way to check in was to scan a QR code and fill out a god awful, half broken form on a random third party website. There were no error messages. The site would timeout if you spent too long on one page, so you’d have to start over. The amount of people who had all sorts of issues is nuts.

This was “an upgrade”