Merry Christmas!
Like seemingly for everyone, 2021 has been a year of significant change.
The biggest for us personally was both taking advantage of early retirement from the workforce, Mary at the end of December last year and Pete on March 1 this year. It certainly is a leap of faith but we’ve been planning for this for quite some time. We both know how lucky we are to be able to do so and have been enjoying our free time with hiking, kayaking, and some travelling. We have a big trip planned for the near future and hope that travel restrictions don’t change between now and then. Keeping our fingers crossed!
Our household at Rott’n Manor is now Mary, Pete, and our German Shepherd Bailey. Another (literally) big change this year is Mary’s new crew cab F150 pickup truck. Mary loves her new truck. It has been fitted with a large wire crate in the back seat area for Bailey. Now, the three of us can start exploring the southeast together and might try working in some longer road trips. We intended to be doing road trips already but Bailey needed knee surgery in September to repair a ruptured ligament and is happily almost back to unrestricted activity.
In a typical post-retirement fashion, a major effort we’ve had underway is simplifying our household. We are well into cleaning out the 27 years worth of “oubliets”, stuff we stashed to deal with later. Pete even reduced his VW collection by two! Now we only have the 57 Beetle and 74 Thing for him to tinker on. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. There is also the 67 Mustang coupe stored out back that Pete intends to get working on in 2022.
We were grateful to make two Maine trips to be with family this year. The circumstances for making the trips were sad, both for memorial services for Mary’s Mom Elizabeth Richards and Pete’s Step-Mom Fay Clukey. However, the time being together with both our families was very much needed after such a long time apart. We hope to see everyone more often now that our schedule is VERY flexible.
We wish everyone the best in 2022 and hope to see you soon!
Clukey's Blog 