If I had had sufficient funds to retire when I was, say, 45 years old, I would have done so without a second thought. But now, somewhat older, I’m thinking I don’t ever want to retire. I want to be out there in the world, contributing as I am now. I want to be part of the team.
And, besides, I have a wardrobe full of beautiful clothes — which I wouldn’t wear very often if I didn’t go to work. And I just couldn’t be one of those people all dressed up with nowhere to go.
I suppose that is why so many people do volunteer work after they retire: it gets them out of the house.
Maybe what really scares me about the “R” word is the loneliness factor, especially if I were to be single then. I need more than the smiling faces of the clerks in the grocery store once or twice a week.
Such grey thoughts on this grey morning after an exhilarating evening launching the new Gazette. It has been such a huge team effort, and our newsroom had a lot of executive visitors from the mother ship, Postmedia, last night who were there to witness the historic occasion.
Today there will be more hoopla, but for most of us, we’ll get right back to the basics of putting out the news on our various platforms, as we do every day.
We call it the daily miracle, and I plan to be part of it for as long as my limbs will carry me to the office.
The “R” word is not part of my vocabulary.
— Jillian
P.S. Check out the Gazette’s home site. It rocks! And when my blog is back up and running there, I’m going to do a piece reflecting on the evolution of the newspaper, and of the blog . . . and something else quite special. I’ll point to it from here so you can have a read.
Jillian Page 
R is for ‘Reboot’. Never give up!
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Exactly … “R”, for us, is reinvent! Our lives, while working, were stress filled and we tried to jam work, rest, relaxation and commitments into a single weekend … it only added more stress.
Retired … we reinvented our lives and we stay busy enjoying our grandkids, leisure time, us time and time separately with our friends. We don’t make the same about of money but our disposable income has actually increased with spending less than we did while we were working!
You can look at retirement two ways … re tired = being tired over and over again, taking naps everyday, sitting on the couch watching TV … sitting on the porch in a rocking chair ..
or re tire = as in a new set of tires to hit the road and keep moving! This is the road we took and continue to take. Keeping busy isn’t about continuing to work. It’s about staying active in other things besides work. I think Americans work to long and too hard. When you do finally retire … you’ve got nothing else but work because you’ve spent too much time doing that … you don’t know or do …anything else. 😉
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It IS beautiful and splashy (if one stays long enough to find out), but I think your ‘newspaper’ folks forgot one basic thing: ‘above the fold’. The site opens to the top half of a photo and ads, nothing but ads.
It does have the (small print) top bar, then a field of ads everywhere. As a busy web user, I would likely leave immediately since there’s apparently little content to offer and I don’t care to wade through endless ads to see if it’s worth staying. That’s part of what killed print newspapers.
Online papers need ads for revenue (profit), of course, but cost virtually nothing to publish compared to print publications. A flood of ads is just as annoying online as in print. And then they want to CHARGE me to see those ads? Uh, uh, ain’t gonna happen.
Google has options to find most anything that Gazette has to offer, for free, without all the ads.
No intention to be mean here, just offering a consumer opinion. 🙂
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