Musings about life in retirement from academe
I wrote recently about completing my bucket list generated by Majella last year. The final item had presented a challenge because it required getting at least one of my children to a movie with me. A plea for help had attracted responses from all three and resulted in a trip to see the most recent Jurassic World release with Jane,...
This time last year Majella conspired to create my bucket list of 10 items. Dutiful husband that I am, I’ve been working through that list, ticking off items through the past year and had ticked off all but one.
It has taken a while to get to this item from my bucket list but I think I can now claim to have done enough to tick it off. As with other items on my list I wanted to have something specifically for this purpose rather than something historical. I’ve mostly tended to avoid ongoing commitments to community groups. That may...
This item from my bucket list has been waiting for a solution. Unlike some of the other items, sporting events do not feature frequently among our activities. Neither Majella nor I have much interest in sport. We don’t often participate in sports as players or spectators. Majella sometimes watches cricket or, less often, tennis on television but other sports broadcasts...
That must be mission impossible. If I waited to complete this task I would never be able to tick it off on my bucket list because so long as I continue to take photos more organising will be required, to say nothing of the backlog of older photos awaiting organising. In the interest of getting through my list I decided...
We don’t often get to the beach. Toowoomba is a couple of hours drive from the nearest beaches and when we do go there it is mostly to visit family and friends rather than frolic on the beach. In any case, for some reason I’m not a great fan of sand in my bodily crevices or salt crust on my...
Another of the items I pulled out in the draw for my ‘bucket list‘ was “Walk in a rainforest”. I didn’t think that was likely to happen in Europe, though now that I’ve taken a moment to check it seems there are some fragments of temperate rainforest in Europe, including around Loch Maree which we passed by on our drive...
The activity that generated my ‘bucket list‘ was driven by Majella, perhaps with some assistance from the other wives, so it was no real surprise that one of the items was ‘take your beautiful wife out to dinner’. That seemed like an easy inclusion for me, especially since we were planning to travel for 3 months and would need to...
Another of the items on my ‘bucket list‘ was to ‘visit a waterfall’. I didn’t expect that to be a major challenge because we have always enjoyed short walks in the forest to visit waterfalls. At the same time we were going to be away for 12 weeks and had no specific plans for waterfall visits in that time unlike...
Reading a novel was one of the 10 items on my ‘bucket list’ that I expected should not be challenging in retirement. Thus it was one that I decided to tackle early. The lucky break I had with Emily’s quinoa cake took care of trying a new food so I had already ticked off the first item on my list....