The Crotchety Old Man

Category: Habits

  • Making Lemonade…Really

    My beverage of choice is coffee. I drink several cups every morning and another cup or two in the afternoon. Later in the day, however, I want something without the caffeine. When an ice-filled glass of water or a soft drink won’t do, a refreshing glass of lemonade really hits the spot. In the past, lemonade rarely turned…

  • Priorities

    My father taught me anything worth doing is worth doing well. Of course, he never actually used those words. Instead, he’d berate me for being half-assed. Thanks to this early training (or an undiagnosed personality disorder), I don’t do things by halves. Nope. Not me. I’m whole ass or not at all. Insecurity nourishes my obsessive tendencies. To compensate for…

  • My Retirement Expenses

    Welcome to the third of four April posts about my retirement planning experience in honor of Financial Literacy Month. I wrote about my preparations for retirement over the years in the first post, and in the second, the sources of income I expect to receive in retirement. Now I turn to my retirement expenses. Figuring out…

  • My Retirement Income

    Last week I kicked off a four-part series about my retirement planning experience. I’m close enough to retiring to get serious about picking a date. Despite the reckless spending of my youth and some stupid decisions along the way, sticking with the plan cut my retirement age from seventy to sixty-five. I made a date…

  • Thinking about Retirement

    I got my first steady job in the summer of 1972 at an ice-cream store in a brand new shopping mall. I was fourteen. Except for a month or two in 1977 after my employer went out of business, I’ve worked at least one job ever since. Those early positions were more character-building than income-producing. Saving…

  • My Clean House

    Jennifer Senior, author of All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, points out in an interview I heard on NPR that the housewives and homemakers of the sixties have morphed into today’s stay-at-home moms. The emphasis has changed from keeping house to parenting. Staying home with the kids has become a luxury. Whether…

  • Tethered to the Coffeemaker

    I drank my first coffee — heavily laced with cream and sugar — a very long time ago. We’d spent the night with Uncle Don and Aunt Mary. Uncle Don got up hours before everyone else to make breakfast before he went to work. He kept his radio tuned to a country music station, and…

  • Ten Things I Never Do Anymore

    Change is a fact of life. No, I don’t mean nickels, dimes, and quarters. I’m talking about things being different than they were before, largely as a result of progress. Thinking about changes in my own life, I came up with ten things I don’t do anymore — some thanks to progress, others due to…

  • My New Fireplace

    Fireplaces have never impressed me much. I can’t even recall my first indoor encounter with burning logs. Until I was older, none of my relatives had working fireplaces. My first childhood home didn’t have a fireplace. The second — the house my father died in — didn’t have a fireplace when we moved in. A…

  • On Becoming a Gym Rat: Revisited

    January is the month for resolutions, and for lots of people, getting more exercise tops the list. We year-round gym rats see the influx of new faces every January. Some will stick around, but in a matter of weeks, most will give up and quit coming. Read on if you want to be around next…