Are you ready to retire?

 I retired 25 years ago (Oct. 2025), and I've lived through a number of down turns in the stock market, which now is my income. Dot com bubble hit just as I was planning what I'd do with all that time. Remember that one? It was during the Clinton years, although he wasn't responsible for the bubble or the burst. I was just learning how to read the WSJ and follow the stocks! Checking daily could make one faint. For those of you about to retire, here's a reminder.

"The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Internet, resulting in a dispensation of available venture capital and the rapid growth of valuations in new dot-com startups. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, investments in the NASDAQ composite stock market index rose by 800%, only to fall 78% from its peak by October 2002, giving up all its gains during the bubble."

Repeat. Giving up all its gains during the bubble.

If you sold anything since April 2 and the tariff announcements because you were listening to the legacy media, aka the "sky is falling and it's Trump's fault" media, then you're just not ready to retire yet.

An old, old story

 Social media--e-mail and Facebook and Instagram--will never give you joy in memories 80 years later--those pixels will be long gone (unless you've printed them), and the next time I get a new computer, most of what I saved from my sister, cousin, and friends will be gone. But generations before this had the post office. I've seen the letters that my great-grandfather received from his parents in Pennsylvania after he settled in Illinois in 1848. And until recently when I repacked all my old letters, I had a birthday card from my mother written in 1995 that I would re-read. She died in 2000 so I loved looking at her handwriting.

Sept. 18, 1995

Dear Norma--This card will probably be late for your birthday, so we can look at the date this way.  You were born several days--one or two--early.  Dr. Dumont gave me the hurry-up treatment of castor oil and something on the evening of the 19th so the baby would come quickly and allow him to go on the fishing trip scheduled for the next day.  There was no harm done and one or two minutes before midnight you were on the scene.

Of course, that quick journey  left you a most beautiful baby, not red and wrinkled.  So you became "Peachy" at a very early age and you probably would have had September 20th or 21st as a birthdate!

Monday Memories--The Methodists are Coming, June 1995

The Methodists were coming to Lakeside for their Annual Conference in June 1995--thousands descend--first West Ohio and then East Ohio, or the other way around. One used to be German speaking the other English, but I don't remember which is which.  It is the only time we rented, and it meant Spring cleaning and putting all our personal effects away.  I must have gone up and down the basement steps 50 times (would have been smarter to just go to the laundromat) with bedding, blankets, rugs, and towels. The house is tiny, but the basement is even smaller, and the steps are at a terribly steep pitch. And spiders love it there, so I also swept and debugged the basement. The plastic cover on the deck furniture looked scummy, so I washed that in the machine with Clorox, then the deck looked sort of greenish in spots so I scrubbed it with a Clorox solution. Bob spent the day mowing, clipping, weeding and washing windows. The closets and drawers were stripped and their contents go into the cedar chest. Phoebe and Mark had a few items stashed under beds, so those were removed to a box on the front porch. Two shelves in the linen closet were emptied for the guests, and the medicine cabinet cleaned out. Cupboards were emptied so the Methodists have room for food, and somehow, it is just a good time to make a clean sweep of things, which meant 4 bags of trash. How we accumulated so much in a house we don't live in, I don't know. We finished about 6 p.m. and cleaned up and walked down to the Patio Restaurant for dinner, because I'd had to clean out the refrigerator, too.

The cottage was Grand Central Station that June day in 1995. I decided I should get hot, sweaty and dirty more often, because company shows up. Mike and Donna Conrad had purchased a lovely wooden bench at Wal-Mart and couldn't get it in their car, so I drove Mike there in our van to pick up the bench. Bob had to measure a cottage for which he's doing construction documents, and two unhappy clients showed up (not unhappy with him but with the contractor). And a contractor stopped by. Then Mike showed up with a plate of cookies from Donna, and a another neighbor brought over a kitty litter container she thought we'd like. Her husband, who is an auctioneer, had picked up a bunch of them.

So I've decided what I need in Columbus is a visit from some Methodists! Once a month, say the 15th, I'll declare it "The Methodists are Coming" day, and I'll do one area a month. Five areas upstairs, and seven areas downstairs. I haven't seen my kitchen counter since Phoebe and Mark's wedding, so in honor of the Methodists, I'll probably start in the kitchen. Today I washed 175,000 margarine tubs. I could swear they reproduce. I didn't start buying soft margarine until after the kids were gone, but those babies sure do accumulate!

On Memorial Day Week-end, Mark's parents had stopped by at Lakeside, so we had 8 for dinner. We created a "children's table" on the deck and Phoebe and Mark and Phil and Tiffany sat out there, and Paul and Marylyn and we sat in the kitchen. Marylyn is going to a workshop for choir directors the last week in June, so they had driven over from Cleveland to look for a cottage to rent.

(Notes from a letter to my parents in June 1995)