My glide path
Thinking about retirement is what happens when you're married to someone who is already retired and getting better at it every day. (Elise has been retired for five years after teaching Spanish and German for 34 years).
Here's my favorite metaphor: I am on a glide path toward retirement. After two years of gradual descent, I am now flaps-down, wheels-down and only about 200 feet above the runway. In other words, I am working at about 20% throttle. Soon, I will be devoting all of my time to such ambitious activities as making music and making sawdust. Lots of sawdust.
Thinking ahead about retiring
One of the most important -- but most often unanticipated -- challenges of retiring is figuring out how you're going to spend your time. Many people retire and are surprised to find themselves restless and unhappy because they don't know what to do with themselves. Even if you're tired of working -- sick of the bureaucracy, clients who make bad decisions, bullshit office politics, money worries, hassles, STRESS -- there are subtle sources of satisfaction at work that will be absent in retirement. Rank and privilege, for example, in an organization. People reporting to you. A predictable routine. Adjusting to the loss of all this can be hard. This is why I have throttled back slowly and thought ahead about what I really want to do when I stop working and get back to life. Playing the guitar. Building websites for such deserving people as artist Michael Bashkin (bashkinguitars.com). And making sawdust.
The sweet smell of sawdust
Spending time in my little shop is incredibly relaxing. After a lifetime of impossible deadlines, thrilling assignments and appreciative clients, there is nothing better than to slow down, work for myself (and Elise!) and focus on such things as perfecting a sliding dovetail joint or figuring out how to build a cherry jewelry box using no metal fasteners at all, even in the hinges. How cool is that?
Living in a place like ours, there is always another shelf to build for a bedroom or a manifold to build for the drip irrigation. But more than anything else, I love to build gifts for family and friends. There is nothing like the look of surprise and excitement in the eyes of someone you care about when he or she unwraps a gift that represents hours of work, clever design and a lot of love -- and looks reasonably good, too.
Looking for retirement ideas? Gift ideas?
Here are few recent project-gifts that may inspire you. Making projects like these is amazingly entertaining, and they don't require a $20,000 investment in tools. Let me know if you're interested. I'll help you figure out what you'll need to get started.
This is a classy version of the traditional pizza peel -- you know, the paddle used to slide a pizza into and out of an oven. If you have a pizza stone in your oven, this is a fabulous tool for getting the uncooked pizza into the pre-heated oven, onto the stone...and out of the oven to applause. I made this recently for a couple of young friends who were getting married. Elise chose a very cool book on contemporary pizza-making to go with it. This pizza peel is made with some classic cherry, purple heart (a beautiful Central American wood), cherry with outrageous grain, walnut and maple.
Projects for Kids and Grandkids
Children and grandchildren provide endless opportunities to make sawdust. Elise and I thought of this gift when our second grandchild, Mae, was born last year -- two height charts in the form of wooden skis. This was perfect for our kids, since Brendan is a devout outdoorsman and Hillary is his intrepid partner on skis, hiking trails and frightening rock faces.
You start by finding old wooden skis. We found these in a small antiques shop in Podunk, New York. No kidding. It's near Ithaca, and we were visiting last Thanksgiving when Brendan was in school finishing his MBA. They were in crappy condition, but they're easy to restore with a little elbow grease. We shipped them back to Colorado for a makeover -- then shipped them back east for Christmas.
The measurement marks and text are actually easy. After making stencils, you apply ink with "paint pens." Then you seal the surface with a clear finish. Beautiful! A great gift for a new baby.
This scarf rack (sitting in this photo on a kitchen counter, not yet mounted on a wall) was a gift for my spectacular daughter-in-law when she and Brendan and Company were living in the frigid winters of Ithaca, New York. Against a background of sustainable mahogany, the wave is composed of walnut below the surface of the sea and bird's eye maple above. The scarf-post ornaments are reclaimed, antique drawer-pulls.that Elise found in a flea market. They'll actually support more than just scarves, but coats, hats and 3-year-olds doing chin-ups are explicitly excluded in the warranty.
If you're interested in getting into sawdust, contact Don Condit: dcondit@conditmarketing.com for some ideas and resources. You might also check out such printed and online publications as Fine Woodworking magazine.