I’m loving the idea of going through old cookbooks and magazines and somehow reinventing recipes to share.

I started with an old Gourmet magazine, November 1990, and I was blown away by the complexity of the recipes and obscure ingredients. We make a few complicated dishes, but we’ve simplified our cooking and eating over the years. Back in the day, Dale and I used to joke about recipes that started with, “Have your fishmonger …”

The guy at Safeway is as close to a fishmonger as we ever got.

There’s a section of the magazine called, “You Asked for It.” People write in about some specific thing they ate in their travels, and could Gourmet possibly get the recipe? I read this one out loud to Dale:

At the wonderful Hotel Romazzino on Sardinia’s shimmering Costa Smeralda, we had a dish of baked noodles and lobster, covered with pastry, that was almost too good to believe. Was it a dream, Gourmet, or can the recipe be obtained?

We had a good laugh over that one.

Still, the same magazine features Pumpkin Cheesecake with Bourbon Sour Cream Topping, and I have actually made that. Twice! Thinking about making it this year for Thanksgiving.

I’m not dissing the magazine. It gave us many years of pleasure, and I’m still excited to dig in and rediscover nuggets from the past. It’s a good retirement hobby for me, but I doubt I’ll make enough changes to call them my own. I will be lucky to call them edible.

Have no fear. I’ll continue to write about food in some form or fashion because it’s practically all I think about, and it’s important to enjoying life, especially in retirement. But even if a fellow retiree is inclined to cook fancy food, I hardly think they will be stopping by to get tips from me. There are too many great resources already out there.

My progress on getting over the need to accomplish something was also a wee bit overstated. I mean, it has been less than two weeks since I decided to focus on the little things that make me happy. Although cooking makes me happy, in hindsight, reinventing 40 years of recipes sounds a wee bit driven to me.

As for retirement pursuits, it’s kind of like being a kid trying all the sports until you find one you actually like and are good at. Sometimes you have to take big bites. Go ahead, do it!

Donna Pekar is an aging badass (for real) who lives in California and writes Retirement Confidential.

 

Shopping these days is certainly becoming a novel experience for baby boomers. We grew up with a whole host of brick and mortar stores, from Sears and J.C. Penney, to E.J. Korvette and Kaufmann’s. Shopping meant putting on decent clothes and getting in the car to go downtown. Ladies supposedly wore white gloves to have lunch in the tea room at Hutzler’s in Baltimore. Urban renewals across the country killed off a lot of downtown shopping but the stores just moved to the shopping centers and malls on the edge of town. New locale, same stores and brands.

Small independent stores used to make up the bulk of the retail landscape. Around sixty per cent in the 1960s with chains accounting for twenty-nine per cent. Now, independents barely account for seven per cent. Mergers of chain stores happened so fast that the change barely registered. But look around now. Sears is in bankruptcy, Macy’s is failing, and many other department stores are struggling to hang on in the face of online shopping.

Now we don’t have to get out of our pajamas to buy whatever we want from Amazon Prime and have it the next day, or soon in an hour via drone. Groceries can be ordered online and delivered to your door. We do our own product research via customer reviews and probably know more than the sales person on the store floor. Sixty-seven per cent of millennials prefer to shop online. Forty-one per cent of baby boomers do as well, while only 28 per cent of seniors prefer that method. Those seniors may not be able to fight the trend much longer.

One type of shopping that has prevailed is catalog sales. Around holiday time our mailboxes are filled with pages plastered with delights. Food, clothes, gear and toys are still be hawked the old fashioned way in a catalog. The ordering, payment and delivery options have all been updated with quick and easy online systems, but the wishful thinking still begins with a paper presentation. It’s amazing that consumers still enjoy shopping that way.

What’s next? Drone delivery has already been mentioned but trips to a live entertainment driven retail venue could also make a comeback. Going to the mall is still a form of entertainment, so perhaps creative retailers can draw us back to a physical marketplace. Some place where you can feel the cashmere, sit on the bicycle, taste the brie or try out the fishing rod. Just maybe.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.

 

 

When I was 14, my friend, Susie, invited a few of us for a sleepover on Friday night. Her backyard was an avocado grove that sloped to a drainage ditch we called the La Branca. It had rained heavily that evening, so the next day we took Styrofoam boogie boards and rode them down into the ditch, where we happily paddled downstream.

Of course, it was dangerous. I can hardly believe I did it, and now I envision being sucked into the sewer or wherever that little ditch goes. My mother was horrified. I remember her telling my dad, “Donna played in a ditch Saturday morning.”

In recent years, I’ve been pretty tame. I avoid bad weather and hunker down inside. Until today.

We have a regular Tuesday golf group and most canceled because of anticipated rain. I was the first one to arrive at the golf course, and it was deserted. This was about 9:30 a.m., and my tee time was 10:04. It was sprinkling off and on, but the big rain was expected around 12:30 p.m. I putted a little bit and checked my emails. Two more had canceled. I thought, I could wait around another 30 minutes and be the only one here. I’m going for it.

I asked the guy in the shop if I could go out alone, and he said sure, he’d tell anyone in my group who showed up I got an early start to try and beat the rain. Rain, you can’t stop me! I was dressed in multiple layers with a rain jacket over it all. And a good hat.

Not that golf is dangerous in the rain unless there’s lightening, but it’s kind of a mess. I’ve been sort of a fair weather golfer lately, but I was ready to begin the adventure. I usually walk, and I considered taking a cart, but I figured wet is wet. A cart won’t save me, and my pull cart has an umbrella.

It was so much fun. I had the course to myself, and I felt like a kid again. It did get pretty wet out there, but I managed to walk 18 holes in three hours … before the big deluge. But it was fun! If I weren’t retired, I might have felt ripped off, but I have plenty of time, and I like to stay active. That said, as I’ve gotten older, I’m pickier about enjoying the outdoors in less than ideal conditions.

As I walked up to the golf shop, I saw the rest of the group. Just three brave souls. They quit at the turn, where they were happy to see the club house, and we decided gather inside for a bite to eat.

And that was my only mistake. Sitting there for an hour in wet clothes gave me a chill. On the way home, I put the car heater on high and heated up my seat, too. I really didn’t warm up until I got home and took off those wet clothes. My golf junk is soaked and drying out in the garage.

I’ve come to think whatever your sport, whatever your weather, if you’re properly dressed, a little nastiness won’t hurt you. What do you think? Ride it out inside or go for it? For me, it was just plain fun, and in the future, I will be more open to getting outside when it’s wet.

But super cold weather? Let’s sit by the fire and talk about that for awhile.

Donna Pekar is an aging badass (for real) who lives in California and writes Retirement Confidential.

 

I know it’s coming but I hope not too soon.

I’m talking about that time when I will have to downsize. Inevitably. Move to a smaller home, or maybe an apartment.

What got me thinking about this was an old lady I met who told me about her mink coat. By old, I mean 90-something. By mink coat, I mean full-length politically incorrect coat that she can’t wear anymore because she’s shrunk so much it drags on the floor, and she now lives in a climate so warm that she’d melt under its weight even in January.

She showed me the coat and told me how proud her late husband had been to be able to save enough to finally buy it for her. I couldn’t help but think about what the coat must have actually cost the family if it was so hard for them to afford it. But she loved having that coat and she loves it still. Even though all it ever does now is catch dust in her closet.

And I thought about how many useless possessions I’ve acquired in my life. Items I love that no one else will care about when I’m gone. Do I really love them? Are they really important? Were they ever? Some day I will have to cut back. On something. And where will I start? And stop?

This is not meant to be a sad story. By realizing that I may need to move on to smaller digs, I’ve come to really appreciate what I have now. To savor the view of the mountains on my daily walk. To think about the things I have: How much do I love them? Could they maybe serve a better purpose if I pass them on to someone else? Now. Or in a year or two, after I’ve loved them for a while longer. I’m less inclined to take what I have for granted. I know how lucky I am. And when I find a sweater I haven’t worn for five years I no longer think that maybe I’ll wear it some day. I think: someone can use this now. I can give a gift that costs me nothing and would mean a lot to someone else.

Maybe this is part of growing up. Or growing old. However you want to look at it. But it makes me more happy than sad. It’s a good new chapter.

Norma Libman is a journalist and lecturer who has been collecting women’s stories for more than twenty years. You can read the first chapter of her award-winning book, Lonely River Village, at NormaLibman.com.

 

The workplace is still a gray place as baby boomers hang on to jobs and careers. How long can they hold out? That depends upon their ability to change and adapt.

Over 40% of baby boomers stayed with the same job for more than 20 years. And 18% stayed at least 39 years. And you thought the days of working for the same employer for your entire work life went out with your parents’ generation.

But now everything has changed. There is no loyalty to an employer. Millennials make up 35% of the workforce and they are mobile. Not only do they work from anywhere, they may well work for six or seven employers during their worklife. Five years might be considered a long stint with the same employer. They are less focused on making a product and more focused on being part of a team that solves problems. Bottom line: boomers are not in Kansas any more.

Many companies now consider age a disadvantage and an obstacle to rising talent. Ouch. What happened to the eminence gris thing? We were supposed to be the knowledge base that could be tapped when you needed that whole “experience thing.” Now days, not so much. It would appear that experience has lost its cache and maybe boomers were just kidding themselves when they thought that corporations really needed that understanding of solutions that used to work.

Boomers who are kicked to the curb have only a few choices if they want to keep working. Some are getting the training they lack to be competitive with younger workers, a reboot if you will. Many more boomers are going to work for themselves. About 16% of seniors are now self-employed. Not only they happier, they also say they have more job satisfaction than they did when the worked for “the man” in the corporate world.

As the title of this post says, our only option now is to hang in there. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer noted that “once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.” Of course that could mean we are moving faster toward our own demise, but I’ll take the more positive spin on this one.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.