Honey, we're ho-ome!

Seems like I have organically settled on a heartbeat of about 1 post a month. It's not what I'd hoped for in terms of output. But it turns out retirement is hard. The term "hard" here is certainly relative. It's not quite as hard as having your latte served a bit too hot, but much harder than a breeze that's not quite cool enough on a warm summer day. 

During the last month's cone of silence* a lot has happened. Within a week of my last blog surface breach a great house came on the market that we had seen before but weren't in a position to move on. Luckily (a word that barely captures the repeated good fortune we've had) it never sold previously and reappeared at a point when we were thinking we might be looking for another 3-6 months to find the right place. We put together what we thought was a reasonably generous offer, but we also found out we were competing against 6 other offers. The overall picture our offer presented was just slightly better than the others and we entered into contract and just closed escrow last week. We are now homeowners again. We had to give the previous owners some extra time to move out so are still renting for a week or two. Also during the last month we spent a lot of time closing out the last vestiges of our infrastructure connections in the south Bay Area and migrating them to Napa. So we are now fully plugged into all the financial, medical, social, and recreational channels we need. 

Something that I only just recognized in recent weeks was that the mechanics of moving and rebuilding our lives in Napa completely subsumed all the concerns I had with what it meant to be retired. So where we are now is finally in a place to fully realize what retired life means. Up until now it was bit more like going from my old job at Google to my new job (modulo that relative definition of "hard" I brought up earlier). 

* Reference bait!