If you’re a raving fan who comes to Retired.Living every day, hits refresh, and sits back with a steamy cup of coffee, a cold beer, or whatever, to read the latest article, you’ve probably noticed it’s been a while since I’ve published anything new.

(“A while” being defined as three months.)

Or, if you’re a normal person who is only remotely aware of this website’s existence, it’s entirely possible you forgot it was here. Or assumed I’d abandoned the project. Ran out of things to write about. Given up.

Well, I’m back!

Not that it matters, but here’s the scoop on why I’ve been missing in action from this little slice of the internet.

My sweet Mama passed away.

I’m not ready to write much about this publicly. That’s going to take more time.

Mama spent the last seven-ish years of her 91-year life in an assisted living facility. She was mentally sharp as a tack until the last couple of years, when multiple strokes changed everything. It was difficult to see her like that.

When she entered hospice, she declined rapidly. Thankfully, she was pain-free. Bless those hospice nurses. It was really hard to watch.

We take comfort in believing she’s in a better place now. I miss her terribly, and I always will.

We moved.

As in, we sold our home in the coastal environs of Aransas Pass, Texas; packed up all the … crap we’d accumulated during 35 years of marital bliss (really!); and bought a new home in San Marcos, nestled in the lovely Hill Country of Central Texas.

That one sentence skips over several months of sorting, packing, selling, buying, waiting, second-guessing, coordinating, repairing, unpacking, and asking one another, “Why do we own this?”

Usually while holding an object neither of us remembered buying.

Yeah, I’ve had a bit of a rough go these last three months. But I’ve also learned a lot.

Retirement doesn’t come with a pause button

One common misconception people — especially non-retirees — have about retirement is that once work no longer dictates the calendar, time becomes abundant.

You know what they say… You’ll finally have room for everything you’ve wanted to do: travel, hobbies, exercise, family, reading, writing, volunteering, maybe even alphabetizing your DVD collection. (Don’t laugh. If you have a DVD collection, you know you’ve thought about this.)

Then life knocks on the door and invites itself in.

Loss, grief, and moving don’t check your employment status before arriving. Sooner or later, they find all of us. Retirement may change how you spend your days, but it doesn’t exempt you from the harder parts of life.

A move is work at any age. In retirement, it also forces questions that reach far beyond which box contains the good kitchen knives.

How much house do we want? What kind of community fits the life we live now — not the life we lived 10 or 20 years ago? What are we moving toward? And what, exactly, are we ready to leave behind?

Those aren’t real estate questions. They’re retirement questions.

Life questions.

Trading the coast for the Hill Country

Leaving the coast wasn’t a casual decision. We loved the water, the fishing, our neighbors, and simply the feel of coastal life. A place can become part of your identity, and ours certainly had.

Walking away from it felt less like changing an address and more like ending a chapter I wasn’t entirely sure I’d finished.

But retirement isn’t a museum exhibit. The goal isn’t to preserve one version of your life behind glass for all posterity. The goal is to keep shaping a life that works — one that offers new opportunities and helps you continue growing, even if you’ve already been at it for more than six decades.

San Marcos puts us back in the Texas Hill Country — the place where Francy and I got married and both our kids were born. It gives us a different kind of community and opens a new chapter, one full of blank pages.

We landed in a 55-plus neighborhood, a phrase that once sounded like somewhere I might visit my parents.

Now I live in one. I play in a dart league. I take cardio classes — in a pool — with 30 other residents.

There’s a golf cart in our garage.

Life comes at you fast. Retired or not.

The new house also came with a detached casita that has become my writing space: part office, part refuge, and part proof that solitude is easier to find when there’s a door between you, the unpacked boxes, and the world.

I have a bathroom (with a shower), a walk-in closet, and a fully stocked mini-fridge.

For the record, I LOVE it.

And Francy loves it for me. And I love her quilting room. 

What the last three months taught me

First, possessions multiply when no one is watching. Our 35 years of marriage have produced love, memories, and an alarming number of things that once seemed too useful to throw away.

I found a box still sealed from the last move, seven years ago. Francy said, “Obviously you don’t need what’s in there.” Au contraire, my dear! Turned out I needed everything in that box. 

Second, money decisions and life decisions are entwined. Selling one house while buying another touches cash flow, taxes, insurance, maintenance, opportunity cost, and risk.

To be honest, pretty much everything about it sucks.

A spreadsheet can help untangle numbers, but it can’t tell you how it feels to live farther from the water or closer to your adopted hometown (that’s an Army-brat thing).

The numbers matter, of course. They just don’t get the only vote.

Third, retirement is not a finish line. It’s a constantly moving series of adjustments. Some are planned; others arrive with a moving truck and a stack of forms requiring initials in 47 places.

And finally, good change can still smack you upside the head. You can be grateful for a new chapter and still miss the old one. Those feelings aren’t contradictory.

They’re just human.

So, what happens to Retired.Living?

It continues.

The original idea behind this site hasn’t changed: I retired at 57, I’m still learning, and I’ll share what matters.

Not as a guru perched on a mountaintop, and not as someone pretending to have solved retirement. I’m down here in the weeds with everyone else — making decisions, revisiting assumptions, occasionally getting things wrong, and trying to explain what I learn in plain English.

There is plenty to talk about: building a reliable retirement paycheck, managing taxes, making sense of Medicare and Social Security, handling the emotional side of major transitions, and figuring out what a good life looks like when the old schedule disappears.

The last three months didn’t leave me with fewer ideas. Quite the opposite. They handed me a fresh batch — some financial, some practical, and some deeply personal.

I will almost certainly write about life in a 55-plus community, although I reserve the right to deny everything if the dart league gets rowdy. The short story is that we are really enjoying our new community, lifestyle, and the friends we’re making.

Back to work (sort of)

So, yes, it has been three months. While that’s an eternity in internet time, it’s barely enough time to find the box containing the good kitchen knives.

Retired.Living was never meant to be a content treadmill. I’d rather publish something useful when I have something worth saying than feed the algorithm simply because the calendar says it’s Tuesday. (Let’s be honest, too. Since I retired, I don’t do well with calendars. Heck, at any given point in time I’m lucky to know what day of the week it is.)

The office is taking shape. The boxes are gone, mostly.

The blank page and I have resumed negotiations.

I’m back. Let’s see where this chapter takes us.

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Coming soon-ish