It’s been what I suppose you might call an interesting week. Probably the kind of week that people all round the world have quite regularly and I should be grateful I don’t have them more often. I admit I committed that cardinal sin, common to all of us worriers, I rolled all my troubles together. I had to be firm with myself and tease them apart so I could decide what to do about them.
To do this I resorted to my dear old diary. Where would I be without this old friend all these years? I really can’t recommend having one at your disposal highly enough. Or at the very least a notebook of some kind, a tool for writing your troubles out of your head.
Sometimes it’s enough just to get them ‘out there’ but at other times you need a remedial action alongside each problem. In addition, seeing a ‘problem’ as a challenge, or an opportunity, often helps. The words you use, as I believe I have said many times before, to describe your situation is extremely important.
That’s a bit of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy creeping in there just to return to my old psychology days. I use it to stop feeling sorry for myself. It’s (things going wrong) a natural part of life I tell myself. Everybody has challenges which they can either respond to or sink beneath their weight.
I look at my challenges and decide they’re nothing really massive, quite minor by comparison with what some people have to bear. So get on and sort them out. And as Mrs Summerhouse wisely points out, if you will complicate (unnecessarily – her thoughts) your life, you can expect to have more things ‘go wrong’. Ahh, wise words, irritating, but wise.
So our week – Sunday, the car broke down in Derbyshire and had to be brought back by the AA. We had to come back by taxi with a taxi driver whose first words were, they didn’t say anything about dogs. An hour’s drive with a grumpy taxi driver is not to be recommended. As for the car, it seems that the head gasket has blown which is expensive and in fact might cost more to repair than the car is worth. I’m sure other people recognise this dilemma. I’ll let you know how this works out.
Which raised the issue probably for the first time, in our nearly eight years of retirement, of worrying about money. Simply put we can’t afford a new car. Nothing compared to many people’s financial situation in retirement, but a novelty for us. Lucky you, you say.
The reason we’re feeling relatively poor being the second item on my list, that of the Colorado cabin. There’s a whole set of challenges with this project and I won’t write about them here except to say we’ve just spent about £14,000 to get the project off the ground. So a big dent in our savings and more dents to follow. But, as Mrs SH says, it’s your choice or wise words to that effect.
The first item on the list above is the barn. Again this project, concerned with getting change of use for the barn, has hit the buffers (nice expression). The reason it’s top of the list is that we got the rejection notice on the day I wrote this entry. Again I’ll keep it brief but what really stings is the feeling that the planners have beaten us by cheating. I will discuss this with my planning consultant when he returns from holiday, so this may have more to come.
Finally in this brief retirement blog, I was expecting a call (they don’t do visits – me to them of course – any more) from the diabetic nurse and I knew from my own results and the doctor’s comments this wasn’t going to be a fun experience. So I put it on the list of my worries. But I needn’t have as she didn’t call. No doubt just delaying the event but grateful for small mercies in this week of challenges.
So there we have it, a brief retirement blog about trying to deal sensibly with the kind of problems one’s retirement life inevitably throws up. The question is not do we have these ‘issues’ but rather how effectively do we deal with them. More wise words.
PS Writing this retirement blog has also helped deal with my troubles.