Similarities and differences

Wife and I recently returned from two weeks in the states of Washington and Oregon. You can read about the first part of the trip on my Substack --  (1) 30 in 32 - Bob McKinney: What I Know  -- where I recount my time in Seattle visiting my last Major League Baseball ballpark. 

I will post a more thorough narrative from the entire trip here soon, with pictures, but for this brief post I want to share about a major similarity and a major difference I observed in this part of the U.S. when compared to where I live in Middle Tennessee. 

The similarity was in the people. The people we met in Washington and Oregon seemed to go out of their way to be welcoming and friendly. It seemed everywhere we went we encountered people who smiled, spoke to us before we spoke to them and wanted to know how we were and where we were from. 

In a town in Oregon (I forget which one), on a day when we needed to restock on some provisions, we went to a Target store. Conservatively, I would say a half-dozen employees greeted us with smiles and asked if they could help us with anything. For one item I needed, a female employee dropped what she was doing and walked with me to the aisle where the item was located. Whether restocking shelves or working the checkout line, they could not have been friendlier. 

This is largely what we experienced in stores, restaurants and hotels along coastal Washington and Oregon. Refreshing to say the least. They might have spoken with a different accent and inflection in their voices, but they were every bit as friendly and pleasant as the people I generally encounter in the South. 

The big difference? That would be the political environment. I live in a very RED state. Like many parts of the country, we are having primary elections. In Tennessee, that means Republicans are running against each other to see who will face a Democratic opponent in November. And around here, the person who wins the GOP primary, unless something just this side of a miracle happens, is already the presumptive candidate who will prevail in November's general election. 

For example, one of our current Tennessee senators, Marsha Blackburn, is running against two opponents in the Republican race for governor. She is heavily favored.  I guess there is also a Democratic primary, but I could not tell you who any of their candidates are. 

But I can tell you this: when Marsha wins the GOP primary, she will be pretty safe to start measuring for curtains in the Governor's Mansion. That's how red we are here. 

Her commercials and ads, like those of her Republican colleagues running for other offices, feature narratives of how she "stands with President Trump" and of course, Marsha has been fortunate enough (if you want to call it that) to literally stand beside the prez in the Oval Office and you can bet we see those images often. 

In Oregon, it is a completely different vibe. Whenever we happened to be in hearing or seeing range of a television, we saw commercials for Democratic office seekers promising how they would "stand up to Donald Trump" and the perceived ills he has brought upon their state and the country at large. 

Signage was similar, with promises to fight Trump and ICE. Quite the contrast with where I reside. 

It turns out we can learn a lot from a temporary change in geography.  

See you back here soon. 

Retirement update

 It has been five months since I worked my final day and entered the life of a retiree. 

For the most part, I was ready to retire. There had been management changes I was not pleased with. Had it not been for that, I would have probably worked longer. But things happen, and it was time. 

My biggest concern about retiring was not necessarily how I would fill my days, but how I would establish a routine. Although I do not have to follow a strict schedule, I function better having a bit of a plan, however casual that might be. 

To help with this, I purchased a paper calendar, one that corresponds with the electronic one on my phone. I realize this makes me a bit of a Luddite, but I can live with that. I like looking at my weekly schedule laid out before me, and I see it better on roughly 8 by 11 paper. 

My vision of retirement included volunteer work, maybe a part-time job, spending more time on writing and music, getting together with friends and, of course, spending time with family. 

Here is how this has played out: 

I generally get up between 5:30 and 6 a.m. which is no different from when I was working. If I happen to have allowed myself to stay up a little later the previous night, I might vary from this waking time, but in general, this is my practice. 

I do some reading and devotional time between 6 and 7. Around 7 I either go for a walk or go to the gym (the county recreation center where I have a pass), or a combination of the two. When I go to the rec center, I engage in some stretching and stationary bike riding, all to continue to the rehabilitation of my knee. 

I am usually back home around 9, and how I spend my days depends on what I have going on. 

I am still singing in a community choir, which I love. We meet on Tuesday nights, so during the day Monday and Tuesday, I will spend some time looking at the music for our upcoming spring concert (May 2nd) and listening to recordings of the tenor part for each. 

I enrolled in a couple of adult education classes, one of which was four in-person sessions that required nothing but going and listening for a couple of hours. This one, which pertained to government and the U.S. Constitution, is over. 

The other one is much more intense, much like a college course (but without tests and writing papers). It's on Christian ethics and is 100 percent online. It goes for ten weeks, and we are about to wrap it up. It has been great. 

I served for 16 years on the board of directors of a large Nashville non-profit, two years as board chair. I rolled off in 2020, but I still have a fondness for the organization and its mission, which is to help people through homelessness and addiction. The current president and CEO is retiring, and I have been asked to serve on the search committee for a new CEO. So far, those meetings have been online, but we will have some in-person interviews of candidates over the next couple of months. 

I have a couple of other volunteer commitments, one with a local food bank and another with a non-profit dedicated to helping solve the worldwide water crisis. 

I try to meet a friend for lunch once a week if it's feasible. Sometimes it is, sometimes it is not. Also, Wife and I recently joined a book club, but it has been a challenge for us to get there. It meets Tuesday nights, the same night my choir practices, so I either have to miss that or book club. We are hoping, once we have established ourselves in the book club a little more, we might be able to persuade them to change the meeting night. 

This past week I traveled to Montgomery, Alabama where I joined a group to visit the Legacy Sites, established by the Equal Justice Initiative, to call attention to the history of slavery and oppression of the Black race. It was a moving experience, and I'll write more about this soon on my Substack. 

I wrote on my Substack about a trip Wife and I took in late February/early March to Florida for MLB spring training. We also spend a fair amount of time traveling to Atlanta, Huntsville and/or Birmingham to see the family. We have a trip to Seattle planned in early May, where we will meet Older Son and his family and he and I will go through the turnstile of our last major league park, a quest we began in 1994 when he was eight years old. 

More to come on that. After baseball, Wife and I will take the opportunity to visit more of the Pacific Northwest, including Victoria, British Columbia and the Oregon coast. 

On days when there might be a lull, I have no problem whatsoever reading whatever book I have going at the time. Reading during the day is a luxury I have looked forward to. 

The part-time job has not materialized, but I have some thoughts and ideas after we return from Washington and Oregon in May. 

All in all, retirement is going well for me, with just enough meaningful activity to keep me busy, but at a slower pace than when I was working. In addition to all I just described, there is always plenty to do around the house and I am slowly cleaning out the basement, purging as much as possible. I have also promised to refinish a china cabinet for Older Son and DIL. That will also a be a top priority after the May trip, unless I can squeeze it in prior to that. 

Believe it or not, I do miss work sometimes. I mostly miss the people, but I also occasionally miss the intellectual stimulation. I will read something in the news about banking regulation and sense my pulse quickening a bit, only to remember this no longer involves me. 

Then, I quickly realize that is mostly a good thing, as it is someone else's problem! 

Still recovering

In my last post I told you about the ice storm we had. It's still a big topic of discussion around these parts. 

While we were four and one-half days without power, there were those who did not get theirs back for two weeks. As you can imagine, there is much finger pointing, mainly at local government officials for lack of preparation, and at the power companies (there were two different ones involved, and customers of one seemed to regain power much more quickly than customers of the other), also for lack of preparation but also for the slowness in achieving full restoration.

We stayed at the house one night without electricity. By the time our friend came and collected us (because at the time, there were still two trees across our driveway and we could not get out), the temperature in the house was hovering around 40 degrees, with our only source of heat being our fireplace with gas logs.   

We kept a steady drip going in all the faucets and I had covered the ones outdoors. I was advised by a couple of friends to shut the water off completely. The problem was, when I received that advice, the trees had been cleared and cut up and all the debris from that was in the front yard near the curb for pickup and chipping, covering the water meter where the water shutoff valve is located. 

On Thursday morning (the day power was restored), one of my friends told me he was on his way over to help me get to the shutoff valve so we could shut off the water.  He felt pretty strongly about it. Thankfully, before he arrived, power was back. 

As for the criticism of various local officials and the power companies, I am going to sit that out and let others talk about it. The mayor of Nashville has appointed a special committee to look into it, review lessons learned and make recommendations for how this might be better handled if, God forbid, this were to happen again.

I think that is a good plan. I am sure there is room for improvement, but that is always the case. I am grateful to have had power restored and that our damage was minimal. We needed those trees down anyway, so for me, there was a silver lining. 

By last week, temperatures were in the 70s. But I've been around enough to know false advertising when I see it. We were back in the low 20s last night, and snowflakes danced around for a short time this morning.