semi-retired. I work here at the school 4 days a week, every Friday off. As far as the final retirement here, it gets a little complicated. The house is within a few months of being paid off. We have the boat and the YC membership and also a cabin on 10 acres up in the Allegheny Mountains that has been paid off for many years. The admiral and I talked this through many times and agree that although this not the best place in the world weather wise, we could never afford all of what we have anyplace else, especially San Diego. Many of our friends have done the snowbird routine, keeping boats at the club in the summer and living in Florida in the winter. That has a small appeal to us, but also seems like a total PITA.

The back thing looked good with another surgeon promising a fix-it procedure about 6 weeks ago. He requested several tests, MRI's, x-rays etc. which the admiral did. The final meeting at his office was that he couldn't make good with the fix-it promise at all, the best he could offer was a dice roll surgery which she opted out of.

October.......speaking of dice rolls. From a weather standpoint it's hard to say. There are times when we have snow before Halloween, other years it is pleasant and warm. From a boating standpoint the mast is down the last weekend of September and we are usually out of the water by the first weekend in October, second weekend absolutely for sure. Go back to the weather, you never know what will happen and trying to shrinkwrap and winterize in the wind and rain does not work out well. With fall sports and kids back in school, most people are wrapping up the season, some as early as Labor Day. At our club the people still in the water mid-October are the ones that never use their boats anyhow and come out because they have to. The club shuts off all power and water to the docks the last Sunday of October. The navigation aids in the basin are pulled and all the equipment winterized. On the bayfront all the marinas and clubs except for EYC shut down at that time as well. The CG begins pulling navigation aids in the bay and replacing them with winter buoys, floating docks are pulled and ice dams in place by mid-November. For us, this time of year is time at the cabin not the boat. We will be in the mountains every weekend through early December when we close up the cabin for the winter.

Winter is the recharge season for us. Come March we are back up at the cabin until mid-April when we start getting the boats ready.