He's trying to repair a relationship, or whatever.

No, he's not. He's willing to wait until I get over it. He's not trying to do shit.

OK, fair enough.

I'm sorry if my misunderstanding is making you crankier. I don't want to do that.

OK, I just flipped on PBS, and there was a landrover stuck in the sand. The voiceover said "and a clever bedouin trick got us free" as a visual of people stuffing weeds and twigs under the tires. Um, not to diss bedouins, but that's a basic automotive unsticking thing. If you don't know that...sheesh.

So my father's really actually retiring, has set a date and let the department know and everything, which I'm just finding... odd. I mean, great. But kind of odd. (Part of this may be from playing Sims 2 for the last several days, in which after you reach a certain age, you jump in the air, spin around, come down white-haired, saggy, and wearing frumpy clothes, and are then able to retire.) Also, weirded out by his talking about the experts at his retirement fund. It's like he's rich or something.

That oddity is in my future, as in the next decade or so. I just realized that my grandparents all were retired by his age. Different generation. I think the last my paternal grandfather worked was when he was 55. My maternal one, later, but that was just waiting for my uncle to take over the farm. I was born after they had retired.

Well, it's not clear that my mother will ever retire (mostly for lack of funds, though also academia's a different animal), so it's just... it's weird.

I think it will still be awhile before my dad retires, but like everybody else in his line of the family that is around his age is essentially retired or running toy businesses. More becuase they are all independently wealthy than because of age.

My mom will retire as soon as my brother is through grad school and is a little more financially stable (her salary is basically used as his safety net.) That doesn't weird me, because I know she'll still be working, albeit in a volunteer capacity. It's what she did the first half of their marriage.

My dad? Well, let's just say, no one has any idea how he'll cope or what he'll do. Including him. He's just looking forward to no more meetings.

My father retired and then went back to work as a consultant right away, no interruption of service. Then he retired-retired, and moved back home (he'd been living in Moscow up till then) and we thought he'd drive my mother insane. He works on a project basis now, and I think he writes for the paper sometimes.

Yeah, my dad not-quite-voluntarily retired at 62, and he spent about 5 minutes thinking he'd actually go ahead and retire. And then he spent maybe 10 minutes thinking he could consult, before starting to look for a new full-time job.