Back in School

Just watching the Yankees get pounded by Tampa Bay. The Yankees always seem to be on ESPN over here (I’ve probably said this before), but it’s baseball anyway. If I had a chance to come back, it would definitely be as a ball player. One of the things that I am willing to pop for next year when we are living on a restricted retirement income is a subscription to Indovision or the new company that I came across in Bali a few weeks ago. The idea of being able to watch baseball every weekend without having to worry about getting papers graded sounds like heaven. And, with an internet connection, I can just get online to check on players’ stats when I need to. Yeah, definitely heaven.

So the first week of school has passed by somewhat quickly. It was good to see my homeroom class once again after the four week break. I’m going to miss teaching, but not the other stuff that goes along with being a teacher. It’s going to be an interesting year.

On the retirement front, I’m “running the numbers” (as I call my compulsive playing with my proposed retirement budget) again, and things look fairly good. I still have to make a major saving effort this last year of work, but if we can do it, we should be able to live fairly comfortably on the retirement money. My wife thinks that we can rent our house out in Sumbawa rather than sell it, and she’s pushing me to take that route. Financially it makes sense if we can get what she says we can because we can stretch out our first retirement fund from lasting two years to lasting three and a half which means that we can stretch the second retirement fund out to three years from the original plan of two years which means that we don’t have to use the third, and last fund, until I hit the age of 66 instead of 63 which means that by that time we could have reached the stage where our interest and my Social Security will be sufficient to last indefinitely. So this is what I spend my morning breakfast time doing everyday before I go to school. Of course, it would be easier if someone just gave me a couple of hundred grand, but it wouldn’t be as much fun.

There’s a lot of excitement about the “early” retirement – certainly from me, but from friends and family as well. On my part, I suppose that it is comparable to the feeling when I know that I’m leaving a job in one country and moving to another. The sense of the unknown with all the mystery, hope, fear, and risks jangling the nerves and heightening the senses. I can remember how keyed up I was before my first move overseas back in 1989, and then again in 1999 when I moved to Pakistan, and again in 2003 when I moved back to Indonesia, although that was a bit less because it was returning to “home.” This time, I’m as jacked as when I moved to Pakistan. Bali, where my other home is, seems just as exotic as Pakistan once did.

I spend a lot of daydreaming time doing the “next year at this time, I’ll be …” One of my friends replied the other day to my comment that I had so much to do in Bali during my three weeks there recently. He said, “Yeah, but you were there for three weeks, next year it will be forever.” Right, good point. I need to constantly keep that in mind, although my plan of announcing to the faculty and my students that I’m retiring is to put me in a box, so to speak, so that I can’t get cold feet at the last moment and back out thinking about the security of a nice salary and comfortable surroundings and doing what I love doing. I need some new challenge and some juice to get these old bones moving.