Where Am I?

     I'm on vacation. Yes, I know, some people ask: How can you be on vacation when you're retired? Well, trust me, pre-retirees and other people still working, and as my fellow retirees can attest . . . you can.

     I was in Florida for a week or so, then met up with my wife for a few more days in Florida, and then we started driving. I won't say how far we drove, because, as a test of your geography skills, you can try to figure out where we are from the directional signs below.

     In case you can't read the sign, we are 619 miles from Cleveland, and 4270 miles from Amsterdam. I have not verified these distances, but I'm pretty sure they are reasonably accurate.

     If it helps, we are also 7369 miles from Tianjin, China, and 8100 miles from Guam. But, for sure, we're still in the U. S.

     Don't ask me why the homeowner chose these landmarks as a reference -- except, as far I've heard, a lot of people from Ohio do like to vacation here.

     If this is not enough to go on, I ran across another house about a mile down the road that has a more comprehensive series of signs. From this next one, you should surely be able to triangulate where I am spending my time.

     We're 765 miles from Toledo -- see, I told you a lot of people from Ohio come here -- and 832 miles from Ann Arbor, Michigan. We're also 382 miles from Knoxville, Tennessee. And for you Anglophiles, we are 6548 miles from London, England. And then a dead giveaway, the arrow points south to Savannah, Georgia, which is 113 miles down the coast.

     So, yes, we're at the beach. But mostly we're here to visit our children and grandchildren. Is there any other reason for us grandparents to go anywhere, anytime?

The Re-entry Cold

      I've developed a terrible disease. No, it's not Covid. I've been careful with the masks. I've taken all the vaccinations, avoided crowded indoor spaces.

     But there's another disease out there. And we are all vulnerable, especially since we've masked ourselves away from the usual bugs and germs that live in our environment. It's the simple, old-fashioned cold.

     The background: In February we came to Charleston, SC, to visit children and grandchildren. The kids have been careful. They have all been vaccinated. The grandchildren don't even go to the playground for fear of being exposed to Covid. They do go to preschool, but both teachers and kids wear masks.

     However these grandchildren are age two and four. And if you know anything about two and four year olds, you know they have runny noses. Pretty much all the time.

     So my wife is wiping their noses. And pretty soon she's wiping her own nose -- and coughing and hacking and feeling terrible. She tested for Covid, but the results were negative. Just a cold. She spent three or four days confined to the house, two of them never even getting out of bed. It was the worst cold she'd had in ... well, she couldn't remember when. She's mostly better now. But it's been two weeks, and she's still coughing.

     When she came down with the cold I took no chances. I moved into the guest bedroom. I used a different bathroom. I washed my hands about every ten minutes. Just maybe I could avoid getting this disease.

     But still, we ate dinner together, watched TV together, and when she started getting better we spent some time together in the car. And sure enough, by last Wednesday I could feel something. By Thursday I knew I had the cold. But it wasn't too bad. Sometimes, we thought, the second person in the household to catch the cold doesn't get it as bad.

    Wishful thinking. I spent Saturday in bed, popping DayQuil and listening to my wife cough in the distance. On Sunday I could barely move. My throat was raw from coughing. My head ached from the fluid in my sinuses. It was horrible.

     I thought I might have turned the corner by Monday. But then ... why couldn't I muster the energy to roll out of bed? I couldn't eat a thing. I tried to drink water. You're supposed to drink water. Man, I felt like I was drowning.

     Now it's the end of the week. I am finally starting to feel a little better -- just in time to go home. I feel like I wasted a good portion of my vacation -- didn't see the grandchildren for a week -- and of course the days I was in bed were the days when the sun finally came out and temperatures started to climb into the low 70s.

     Was this a particularly virulent strain of the cold virus? Maybe. But we wonder if all our social isolation, all our mask wearing, meant that for two years we were never exposed to any germs. Our immune systems were out of practice. They forgot how to respond to a normal, common virus. So when a garden variety cold comes along, we are sitting ducks. We have nothing to fight off the virus. And we were laid low.

     The consolation is that now, hopefully, our immune svstems are back in shape. We've had our re-entry cold. Now we're ready for real life when we'll be exposed -- and able to fight off -- the normal germs and common colds.

Where Am I?

     Theoretically, you should be able to triangulate from this sign to figure out where I am -- assuming the mileage figures are accurate. So can you make a guess?

     I'm 619 miles from Cleveland, 7368 miles from Tianjin and 4270 miles from Amsterdam. To help you out (in case you can't read it) I'm also 8100 miles from Guam. I'm not even sure where Guam is. But that's what it says.

     One thing you can tell for sure. I am not in the snowbelt.

     And I'm near the beach.

     And . . . not to stereotype or anything, but I'm in the South.

     I'm about ten miles outside Charleston, SC, where the weather these days is . . . well, it's a lot better than home, but with a high in the 60s it's more playground weather than beach weather. But that good. We are visiting grandchildren, and spending more time at the playground than the beach. Some grandparents -- the lucky ones -- live near their grandkids and get to see them all the time. But our kids moved away. So we have to go find them. 

Good News, Bad News

     I got my first Social Security deposit of 2022 last week. The good news: the gross amount has increased by . . . 5.9% is what they tell us.

     The bad news: The deduction for Medicare has risen by twice as much or even more. Net result: My take-home has gone up by all of $34 per month. As they say, don't spend it all in one place. Right?

     The good news: Last week we embarked on our annual trip south to see grandchildren and to get a taste of warmer weather. The bad news: It involves a 700-mile, two-day drive down I95, fighting traffic, negotiating the Washington, DC, beltway, dueling with 40-ton semi-tractor trailer trucks the whole time.

     The good news: For whatever reason, traffic on I95 was noticeably lighter than normal -- maybe because of Covid, or the weather, or because we drove on Saturday and Sunday when there's no rush hour, and fewer trucks menace the road.

     Despite our expectations for warmer weather, we saw snow on the ground all through North Carolina and into South Carolina. But the good news: Today, here outside of Charleston, SC, it's 30 degrees warmer than it is at home in  Pennsylvania. The bad news. It's still only 52 degrees outside. 

View from our rental -- nice but chilly

     The good news: Back in Pennsylvania the incidence of Covid is now going down. According to the CDC, Pennsylvania saw 113,000 cases last week, down from 162,000 the previous week.

     The bad news: The disease is still raging in South Carolina. The air is thick with Omicron.

     South Carolina is one of the worst states in the nation right now, behind only Alaska, Oklahoma and one or two others. The incidence of Covid in Charleston County is 294 cases per 100,000, compared to only 85 at home in Bucks County, PA.

    The good news. We got to see the grandchildren yesterday. We played with them outside. They are healthy and Covid-free, and so are we.

Does Anyone Know What's Next?

     B and I have been busy lately. But we've also been wondering: What's the point? Are we doing anything meaningful? Are we making any difference?

     To be honest, B worries about this more than I do. Still, I look at my calendar for the week. I see that it's full of activity. But at the end of the week I wonder: Have I accomplished anything?

     B is busy volunteering at her church and doing yoga at the YMCA and visiting with her new friends. I keep busy doing my blog, playing weekly golf with a group of retired guys, going to table tennis at a local club.

     Fortunately, neither one of us has to spend too much time on doctor appointments. She had her cataract surgery. I go to the orthopedist now and then for a checkup on my back and my knees. We joke about how as we get older, it takes more time just to take care of our daily routines -- stretching and doing our exercises, making an effort to eat right and take our vitamins,. and ... er ... it seems we spend a lot of time looking for reading glasses, searching for car keys, and fiddling with something that's gone wrong on the computer or the phone.

     Now both of us have started in on our new semester at the Center for Learning in Retirement, held at our local college. I'm taking a history course on the Civil War and a literature course on James Joyce's Ulysses. Also, B and I for the first time are leading our local chapter of the Socrates Cafe. We hope that will be interesting, and not too challenging.

     But still, maybe because it's September, and even though I've been out of school for decades, there's still that feeling that we should be starting something new. That somehow we should be moving up to a new school or at least a new grade. Or maybe starting a new job.

     One reason for this feeling -- this low level of floating anxiety -- may be that we've spent the last four years finding our place in retirement, relocating our home and establishing new lives. That has been a big project, and through it all we knew there was an overarching goal to our efforts.

     First we spent a year decluttering our old house, fixing it up and putting it on the market. Then we spent a year living in a one-bedroom condo and traveling around four or five states looking for the place we wanted to resettle. Then, after we finally bought a new house, it's taken us two years to fix it up and to find new friends and new activities.

     But now most of that has been accomplished. We're done with the house. We're settled in. We'll still be meeting new people, trying out new activities -- I'm thinking about joining our local photography club, for example -- but the major items have been accomplished. So what's next?

     B is leaving in a few days to go babysit her two grandchildren in Charleston, SC, while the kids go away for a few days. She's looking forward to that. Then we're planning our November trip to see my daughter who's expecting my first grandchild.

     We'll be going back to see my daughter in February, after the baby comes. We don't know how long we'll be staying at that point. We don't know how much she'll need us, or want us. But then it will be on to Charleston again. Even though our grandchildren live hundreds of miles away, we want them to know who we are, and that means we have to visit for more than a few days once or twice a year.

     We have used Facetime to talk to our oldest grandson, who's 2 1/2. He's old enough now to recognize us on screen, and to interact with us to a small degree. Anyway, he's happy to see us, if his laughter and his antics are any way to judge.

     I wonder: Just as we have settled here, with our focus on our new house and our new community, is our focus now going to turn once again . . . to our grandchildren and what they will mean for our future lives? I don't know. But I guess I'm coming to realize, once again, that we do our best, we try to make some impact, and then life moves on.

What's in a Name?

     I'm on day eight of my ten-day trip to Florida. The weather has been "iffy" at best, and cold and rainy at worst.

View from the back of my airbnb

     I really hate it when my friends tell me, as my golfing buddy who winters in Florida did the other day: "Tom, this is the first day it's rained since we got here at the beginning of January."

     And then my sister who lives here said on the phone, "Oh, you should have been here last week; it was sunny and in the 70s every day." My sister is the one who, whenever the weather is bad in Florida, accuses me of bringing the snow and the rain down from the Northeast. (Maybe she has a point: it's 23 degrees today back home in Pennsylvania.)

     I played golf with a friend from home on Friday. It was chilly in the morning -- long underwear chilly -- got warmer during the day, and clouded up before we finished. Then Saturday I met up with an old friend from New York, and it started drizzling on the first tee. We nevertheless trundled down the fairway, hoping for the best. It cleared for a little while, then started to rain again. Afterward, with wet feet, we stopped and had a drink at the clubhouse. When we came out it was pouring. So . . . I guess we were lucky.

The windswept beach

     On Sunday it rained all day, temperature 55 degrees. So I did the wash and cleaned up my room while watching the Australian Open on TV. As I told my sister . . . exactly what I'd be doing if I was home.

     Still, although the weather hasn't been great, I got to play two rounds of golf so far. And I also went the Bonita Springs Rec Center and played a couple of hours of table tennis -- and the good news is that both my arthritic knee and my arthritic ankle survived the session.

     But I am staying in an airbnb one block off the beach ... and it's only today that I went to see the Gulf. The weather report predicts that tomorrow, when I head up to Jacksonville, FL, the temperature will be in the 30s. Too cold for me to go out on the frost-bitten fairways (although some intrepid souls, some older than I am, will go out and actually claim to enjoy it).

Nobody's sitting outside today

     So my snowbird effort has not been perfect, so far. However, I did play golf; I did spend time with some friends; I will see my sister and her husband. I played table tennis, and may possibly make a comeback in my Ping Pong career -- with ankle braces, Advil and a nightly icepack.

     And then it's on to the historic city of Charleston, SC, where I will meet up with my more immediate family -- my wife and her son and his wife and their son, our grandson.

     He's our first grandson and just starting to talk. My wife wants to be called Grandma B. They want to call me Grandpa, but I'm a bit uncomfortable with that. I'm not really the boy's Grandpa; I'm Grandma B's new husband. And also . . . I just don't feel old enough to be a Grandpa. Maybe Uncle Tom will suffice -- whaddaya think?