Annual Evaluation - 2014

Another year has gone by and isn’t it a wonderful thing when you can look back on 2014 and say “wow, that was a terrific year”?

I had 9 months of routine, with working in an industry that was going through a crisis.  I worked with my brother on a number of construction projects around the homestead and I prepared for my new farming venture from getting day old chicks and raising them up to be star producers, well ahead of their peers.  I learned a new craft (card making) and started a new health regimen.  I took a chance on myself and went into early retirement and after three months I can say I am quite successful.  No crying over spilled milk for me.

I did not do any travelling this year and yet I feel as though I have had a lot of adventures, perhaps by living through my friends’ experiences.  I’ve done a lot of reading about Poland in anticipation of my trip next summer.  I’ve also done a lot of reading of “old time” books, and pondering the question of old time values, wondering why society has strayed so far from those values.  I’ve spent a lot of time this year just wondering about world events, media coverage, the complete blitz of celebrity love-ins, a lack of society’s moral compass, and what an ordinary person can do to effect change.  I don’t have any answers except one, be the best person you can be, let the rest fall in place.

For the last couple of years I have found myself irritated at the constant stream of awards that the entertainment industry gives itself.  It seems to me that it starts in January and doesn’t stop until Christmas.  There must be a dozen different music awards, then there are the television awards (daytime and night time), then there are the People’s Choice Awards, the Golden Globe, the Oscars, all the Canadian award shows, until I am so fed up I refused to watch any of them even the Oscars.  I think it’s time the industry slows down and takes a look at itself and I think it’s time people start to consider if it’s healthy to hand out awards because a celebrity hiccupped in China. 

And to top off my thought on this year, I say shame on Hollywood for making a movie about assassinating a real person and calling that entertainment.  Not your best moment.

2014 at a Glance

Winter renovations; quarterly blood donations; spring break in B.C.; niece graduating from fashion school; Henriettas arrive; Bambi sprints through our life; birthday celebration; first egg; golfing; one of many retirement parties; becoming a farmer (or lady of leisure):                                   
 


Powder Room to Jewel box




Quarterly Blood Donation

                                        







Spring Break in B.C.

Niece Brit at April Grad









Henriettas are born




 





First Egg
 



Retirement Brunch with colleagues

Farmer Sanne

 

Contemplation

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I got to this stage of my life, Early Retirement and still have no real answer.  It’s as though one day I just thought ‘carpe diem’ and went ahead and did it.

I’ve certainly been planning and preparing for this time of my life for a considerable length of time, a good 8 or 9 years I believe.  I am aghast when I hear of people who retire even later without any plan.  A friend of mine mentioned a chance encounter with a 71 year old gentleman who had recently retired, without a plan and persisted in asking her (a philosophy student) “what is the meaning of life”?  What an incredibly naive question to come from someone at that stage of their life!  Even if my friend had an answer, that answer would only be valid for herself, not for anyone else. 

After our conversation I thought about this gentleman and all the other people who go through life thinking retirement will give them all their dreams, almost as though it were a pill that constant dieters wish for, that “instant gratification”.  Well folks, I am here to tell you that there is no magic bullet that comes to you sudden like at age 65.  Recalling Barbara Walters’ summation on her special about Living to 100, she felt that what all her subjects had in common was a joy of living.  Perhaps for some that is “too cheerful” so I will modify my thought into saying that what makes life interesting is just that, finding that there is something interesting in the world every day.  That could be meeting someone new who has interesting conversation, it could be a terrific new book, it could be an experience you’ve been wanting to do all your life but either didn’t have the time, means or opportunity to test.  The worst thing a person can do for themselves is to sit in a rocking chair and let life pass them by, figuratively and literally.

Not everyone may have satisfaction in a structured day, week or year but one should have a purpose in getting up in the morning.  Last night I was thinking about my mother’s generation of housewives, women who married, raised children and kept house.  They didn’t have any sort of a retirement plan; they just continued doing what they had always done, well past the age of 65.  Then I got to thinking about my generation which is perhaps the first generation of women who almost universally left high school to either go to college or go directly to work, with the thought of working after marriage and after children.  We are the first complete generation of women who have worked for over 40 years and are now entering retirement age and there is not a lot of information about “how to do it”.

I am still studying and thinking about retirement for women and have not made any conclusions but I have a feeling that the format being used for men is not really the right format for women.  Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, remember?

 

Merry Christmas and Happy Birthdays

My first Christmas Eve in Canada was spent at a neighbour’s home while my parents were at the hospital awaiting the birth of their daughter Jill.  A year later Little Sister died of pneumonia and ever after Christmas has been very difficult for my mother as she always remembers the little daughter that is no longer with us.  For years none of us even knew the birth date of Jill so we had no way of understanding why Mom was a bit of a Grinch at Christmas time.  It wasn’t obvious when we were really little but by the time we older ones were teenagers we were aware of “something”.

Today I would just like to send out a special message to all our loved ones in Heaven.  Gone but never forgotten, we love you.

Copyright Alert - My Poem

A Woman of a Certain Age

I am a woman of a certain age

Life demanded I earn a wage

Now I begin to see eyes pass me by

No longer young, no longer spry

I am a woman of a certain age

 

Mirrors of the soul tell no lies

I’ve let the laughter, and the cries

Etch themselves upon this face

Living and working at a hectic pace

I am a woman of a certain age

 

Spring, then summer, now it’s fall

Looking back, was this life too small

Faded cheek, sagging jowl, tiny lips

Little bulges here and there, yes

I am a woman of a certain age

 

I am a woman of a certain age

I’ve crossed thru life, it’s been my stage

No rehearsals, no reversals

Living with mistakes, living with joys

I am a woman of a certain age

 

Yet don’t write me off just yet my friend

It’s only the autumn, not yet the end

There’s still a dance left in these feet

My life’s not over, I accept no defeat

I’m a woman of an interesting age! 

Sanne         Nov 15/2011

Jumping Jehoshaphat

Either I am getting old or my fall off the ladder last January was so traumatic that I was rendered amnesiac as to what I was doing on the ladder in the first place.  Just to go back to the beginning of this observation, all was calm on Friday morning as we prepared to start our Christmas baking and decorating the house for the festive season.  After making a lovely “statement floral arrangement” I wanted to put my Christmas angel on the buffet to counter balance the drama but do you think I could find my box of Santas and angel?  I searched high and low for 3 days, triple checking every rubber storage tub I had, crawled under beds, climbed up on ladders looking on shelves, including the one where I subsequently ended up finding the items!  I could see nothing because I was looking for a box.  This morning my brother looked up on my bedroom shelf and asked “what’s in those bags at the back” and a glimmer of a memory came back to me.

Ranting, raving, and feeling utterly baffled for three days now I feel relieved but also a little concerned, is old age catching up to me or can I put this on the fact that when we were cleaning up that shelf last year I ended up crashing off the ladder and whacked me knee so badly that I hobbled around for almost 10 months?  I’m kind of going with the latter but I can’t help being a little doubtful.

All I can recommend is “mark everything down and don’t, I repeat, don’t lose the list”!