So, this was a pleasant day, at least in this part of the world. It was mostly sunny, and the temperature got to about 60. I did a little light outdoor work, but I was probably “resting” 2/3 of the time. After all, "gardening" is just an excuse to sit around outside, don't-ya-know. It should stay nice for both Sunday and Monday, so there is time for more gardening and plenty of resting.

Here are some taste-of-spring photos for you. All are my pictures, from various years.

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I got up at 3AM local-time today. I was feeling a little achy from the gym-trip yesterday, and I prefer to just get up rather than toss-and-turn in bed. I’m a (very early) morning-person anyway. One of the nice things about retirement is not having to worry about traditional wake-sleep cycles. If I get tired in the middle of the afternoon, I’ll just take a nap.

 It should be a nice day today in SE-Pa. The forecast is P-sunny with temps near 60. I’m sitting in my living room at the moment with the sun coming up in the east, sipping another coffee, and watching a wild turkey foraging for breakfast through the farm-field across the road.

 I think that my major project for the day will be walking the through our property (10-acres, mostly wooded) and cleaning up any winter tree-falls from the trails I have out there.

 It is my personal policy to try to stay home on Saturdays. There is always an impossible crush of those poor workin’-stiffs jamming up the roads and stores and trying to cram in all of their week’s errands on this one Crazy-Day. I have no idea why any retired-person would ever try to go out on a Saturday or during rush-hour. Avoiding all that crap is one of the great rewards of surviving it for so many years.

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There was an article in the WSJ today (one of several online “newspapers” that I look at daily) that was talking about the therapeutic value of writing a personal “memoir”. The point of the article was; this is a good idea even if you don’t have some grandiose dream of publishing the thing for the world to read (let’s Keep It Real here). Such a project is just intended for yourself, and for organizing and Making Sense of your own life.  I have been doing something like this for years.

My initial reason for writing about myself was the recognition that as I get older, my memory fades. I don’t want to forget what I’m doing here-and-now, and what my life is like in the Right Now, so I started a daily journal or, yes, a diary. I’m doing this so that I can go back and read about myself in the future when I am a totally different person in a totally different place. I have been doing this for almost 6-years at this point, and although I am not absolutely faithful to it, especially in the beginning, I do write something almost every day now. In keeping with the notion of a “memoir”, I have also gone further back and written some entries about my childhood, parents and distant past as well.

What do I write about on a daily basis? Anything. The point here is to put words down, and eventually your feelings will follow. I often start with observations on the weather, just to get my fingers going, or my plans for the day, a shopping list, or the onerous (or pleasant) tasks that I have pending in the near future. Upon occasion I’ll even make comments on current events, for the historical context, or make observations on the chronic absurdity of the human race (some of which are too radical for public consumption). I’ll often write about frustrations, and maybe vent irritation about my wife (rather than vent at her, which is ill-advised), and when I am feeling especially sanguine and languid I will write about the utter beauty and joy of life in this world.

My daily diary is intended to be completely private and personal, but I do keep it online and nothing online is ever totally private, so I recognize that someday this could escape into The Wild. For this reason, there are a few things that I don’t put in there (NO, I’m not going to tell you what those are). Would anyone be hurt if they read my deepest personal thoughts about them? Probably – but this is why the diary is “private” and my feeling is that if anyone intentionally breaks through that shield-of-privacy, they’ll deserve what they get for that betrayal-of-trust.

As I said, I have been doing this for almost 6-years now, which may not sound like a long time, but in that span a lot has changed in my life. All of those changes are underscored and made more vivid by this diary. I went from semi-retirement, to a new job, which then morphed into a daily-grind, and then became full-retirement in a flash-bang. We bought a new house, moved and sold the one we had lived in for 23-years. Interests and activities have come-and-gone, as well as people we know, and major life-altering decisions were debated and decided in those words that I can go back and review at any time. It is also useful to be able to go back and look up life’s details that everyone naturally forgets, like the final cost of that renovation we did in 2014, or the name of that person we met at that party a year ago. It chronicles my physical activities and the growing limitations of age. With the perspective of this diary I can see a “rough patch” in my relationship with my wife back in 2013-2014 when her mother was dying, and we were going through the stress of moving and selling a house, but it also shows how our “issues” evaporated once that stress was gone. I can see how the hopes and dreams of the past have come to full fruition here in the present, and how my prayer that everything would eventually work-itself-out has been fully answered. 

I use a major free blogging site to host my diary; Blogger.com, which is a component of Google. My greatest fear is that I’ll wake up one day and the hosting-site will have gone out of business and years of effort will be lost (it has happened to me before), but this should be less likely with a behemoth like Google. I have defined a blog there with only my account (theoretically) as contributor and reader, and I have made it (theoretically) invisible to searches too. This should mean that only my logged-in ID and password can have any access to this stuff. Nothing is guaranteed fer-sure in the online world, but this should keep it safely private from casual “accidents” at least, and that makes it better than a paper-diary or publicly accessible online place.

Anyway, for hours of enjoyment (both writing and reading) and cheap therapy in the comfort of your own home, I definitely recommend a diary (or “journal”, if you are squeamish about the word).

Tags: writing blogging diary journal memoir

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I want to do a quickie survey to see if there would be any interest in a new Group that I’m considering setting up. There are several groups in the photography section for sharing photos, which is great, but I’m wondering if folks would also like something a little more technical too.  

My feeling is that you cannot create art with a camera (or any other tool) without first understanding how the tool works and what its capabilities and limitations are. I am not a professional photographer (and my apologies to any out there who are) but I have been a “serious amateur” for 50-years, and this is something that I know at least a little something about. What I am thinking of is a place to discuss the basic nuts-and-bolts of how a camera works and what the various settings do and some of the tricks and techniques needed to achieve specific results.

If you want to see a resume, here is a link to some of my work.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/john-pa/

Anyone interested, or is this a yawn?

Tags: photography groups

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A few years ago, I heard a spot about “Happiness” on NPR that stuck with me. They had an interview with a guy (who happened to be a Buddhist monk) who observed something that we have all probably seen. There are some people in the world who always seem to be upbeat and cheerful and content with their lot no-matter-what, even in the midst of what we think of as hardship. Then there are other people who appear to be living “The Perfect Life” who are miserable and unhappy all the time - no-matter-what. So, what’s the difference between them?

The monk said that we usually assume that the happy people are grateful for their happiness and sanguinity, but he declared that this was actually reversed. He said that it was BECAUSE these people were “grateful” in the first place, that they were happy. In other words, happiness (as others have said before) is a state-of-mind, not a state-of-being, and “gratefulness” is the direct cause of happiness.

Now, the word “grateful” is a little too anthropomorphic for me (it seems to require a target), so I prefer to say that I “appreciate” life and all it contains. If you can just stop for a while every day to acknowledge and marvel in (or be "thankful" for) how blue the sky is and how warm the sun is and how sweet the springtime smells and how pleasant the chirping birds sound; then you ARE happy. It really-and-truly is as simple as that, and anyone can do it at any time. There are lyrics to a song that I like that sums it up;

Don’t think about all those things you fear
Just be glad to be here
(“Hayling”; FC/Kahuna)

So, if happiness is really this basic, and it is just a matter of perspective, what is its opposite? The opposite of Happiness is Self-Pity. Life may be “random”, but if you constantly dwell on how “unfair” you think fate has been to you, and how everything could be so much better “...if only...”, and pray that a higher-power intervene on your (or someone else’s) behalf to make things better for you, then you are actively causing your own unhappiness.

The bottom line is; True Happiness is simple and anyone can achieve it at any time (short of medically diagnosed clinical-depression, which is based in physiology). If you really want to be happy, just lose the self-pity and step outside and enjoy the sunshine for a few minutes.

Tags: happiness philosophy

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So, let’s see what this place is like.

 I am not usually a fan of Social-Media (I’m one of those rare weirdos who is NOT on Facebook), but I did have an account years ago in a place called “Eons” that I found enjoyable (before they went out of business), so what-the-hey.

 I’m not finding much in the way of a “personal intro” section on the Profile Page, so I’ll do that here.

 I retired last September from a 40-year career in IT. My last job was as the network manager for a small liberal-arts college in SE-Pennsylvania. I am married (34-years) with no children, or any other family for that matter. We do have a cat, however (who is very much “my” cat).

 I am a home-body and to me there is nothing finer than puttering around the house cleaning and cooking and doing yardwork. I could probably go for weeks without laying eyes on another human being and be perfectly happy.

 My primary hobby is photography, and I have a pile of nice pro-grade gear. I am also the “house photographer” for our local community theater, which is a great little volunteer gig. It lets me exercise my hobby and also see lots of theater productions for-free too.

 I am here at MyBoomerPlace because I’m looking for a bit of “community” without having to compromise personal identity too far (though nothing is perfectly secure). The problem with most other Social-Media is that it based on who you are IRL, and I am very suspicious of that. I worked with computer systems, networking and IT for 40-years, and I KNOW that anything you put “online” is necessarily public-domain. The number-one rule is; if you don’t want the whole world to know it – DON’T put it online in the first-place no matter what the privacy-settings are.

Tags: introduction hello newbie

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