Yep, I still want to retire

I spent last week living the life of a 30-year-old retiree. We escaped the toil and drudgery of our McJobs for a week and got away from it all at our beloved seaside condominium. O, what a glorious week! For seven days there were no alarms to wake up with, no co-workers dropping in asking me to perform some last-minute miracle, no insipid 8-year-olds backtalking my wife, and no wasting hours of my life in a cubicle. It was exactly the way I would live if I had the means to retire and live at the beach: relaxing, slow-paced, easy, and on no one's terms but my own. It was essentially the same as being on a cruise ship, eating, drinking, and amusing ourselves all the time, except we prepared most meals ourselves. Here's the day-by-day account:

Saturday: Arrived at the condo about 3:30 with the 4runner overflowing with a week's worth of luggage and provisions. Dined on take-out pizza. I was pleased to find a new unprotected wi-fi signal to leech off of that was much stronger than the one two floors up that I had used on previous visits.
Sunday: Spent the day reading and watching TV. Dinner was homemade chicken chili.
Monday: Made it out onto the beach, where it was so windy we had to wear coats and long pants. We managed to sit out there for a few hours until we couldn't feel our own hands anymore. Dinner was leftover chili.
Tuesday: Rained some in the morning but it blew over by lunchtime. Finally finished Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, which I had started reading last June and hadn't picked up since October. We ate lunch at the Mexican joint on the corner and had dessert at the frozen custard place, then went for a nice leisurely walk up the main drag all the way to the pier, where the peckers charge a dollar to walk out onto the pier. Dinner was grilled pork tenderloin.
Wednesday: Couples massage at the big shopping center on the mainland, followed by a visit to the Barnes & Noble and a snack from Wendy's. Dinner and drinks at our favorite restaurant.
Thursday: More beach-sitting. Much warmer than Monday. Dinner was leftover pork and entertainment was the American Idol results show.
Friday: Still more beach-sitting. Cool enough to wear long pants and long-sleeve shirt, but not bitterly cold like Monday. Dinner was at the seafood place across the street, where I had mouthgasmic Low Country Mac 'n' Cheese. Got pretty tipsy at our favorite place up the street on 3 rounds of rum & Coke before retiring at midnight.
Saturday: Got up at 9, packed up and left. Stopped in Raleigh for lunch with the in-laws, then visited Granny for a bit. It all proved a very nice way to break up the 3.5-hour drive back home. Went to a friend's little birthday/housewarming party that night.
Sunday: Spent the morning and afternoon watching the first 7 installments of The Kennedys on Reelz, the miniseries that the family bullied The History Channel out of showing. The day was much too short. Supper was Papa John's, one last hurrah before returning to our banal day-to-day lives.

We had a heapin' helpin' of television last week, taking advantage of our access to HBO and Showtime. We watched the premiere of The Borgias, a 15-minute preview of Game of Thrones, plus several movies we'd never pay to see in a theater, such as Just Wright, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, MacGruber, and an old favorite, Pootie Tang. I even had a 6-hour 1990s nostalgia orgy consisting of SNL in the '90s and VH1's top 40 one-hit wonders of the 1990s.

This week-long respite also helped me refine my skills in packing light. I thought I had packed the bare essentials for 7 days' journey, but I wound up not even wearing three shirts, one pair of pants, and a sweater I had packed. I found the most useful and versatile article of clothing to be my stone-colored safari shirt, which I wear very infrequently in the city. Being a collared, button-front shirt, it's quite smart-looking and appropriate for the finer dining establishments at the beach, but its slightly shorter tail allows for it to be worn untucked for an easy-going, I'm-on-vacation look. The chest pockets are handy for carrying a small camera and a mobile phone. My replica WWII army officer's summer cotton shirt was OK for cooler days on the beach, but I favor the safari shirt for its slimmer tailoring. I think I've finally hit on what makes for a good one-size-fits-most travel wardrobe, and plan to acquire a couple more safari shirts and a couple pairs of cargo pants. I may go so far as to get a safari-style jacket, probably a replica of a WWII UK army officer's summer cotton uniform coat. I hope to have all these things in time for our return to the highland games this summer.

On this last trip I finally screwed up the courage to wear my pith helmet on the beach on that windy Monday. It did shield my delicate pate from the sun, but stronger gusts threatened to knock it from its perch. I'm afraid that the most sensible, least troublesome headgear for the beach is the lowly baseball cap, which also best serves the traveler who is interested in packing light. This time around I brought too damn many hats, including the pith helmet, a straw wide-brimmed number, my brown felt fedora, and my green tweed driving cap. In the future I'll just pack a baseball cap. I'll have to find or design one that fits in with my vintage-inspired wardrobe. Perhaps I'll have one imprinted with the logo of some long-defunct 1920s airline.

The only thing at home I really missed was my library, which fueled my desire for a high-capacity iPod on which I could store every book, or at least my favorite books, in digital format. As of right now, the process of digitization is slow and tedious, and I just don't have the free time for it. I have so many books I'd want on an iPod; I don't know how I would ever have the time to digitize them all. I've been working on scanning Our Dumb Century, and even that seems to take an hour for every 30 pages. At least I found a digital copy of my book about WWII U.S. Army uniforms.

The one disappointing part of the trip was the vigilance of the beach ranger patrol. I felt even more uneasy than last summer as his Dodge pickup slowly rolled up and down the strand, his suspicious eye on the lookout for alcoholic beverages, which are prohibited on the beach. In years past it wasn't enforced if you made a half-assed effort to keep it out of sight, but ever since last year when he stopped and asked our friend what she had in her cup (which was empty), I feel like I can't even sip a margarita out of a plastic screwtop bottle anymore. I did come across a method of disguising a beer can by wrapping it in a cut-up soft drink can, and came up with the idea of sipping our concoctions from styrofoam take-out cups, which seems to be the sneakiest and most effective strategy.

As you can see, I spent my vacation days just the way I would if I could only get a huge cash infusion and quit my shitty day job. The fact that I'm typing this in my little gray cubicle indicates that I have not yet won the lottery jackpot I am entitled to. I had hoped God or the Universe would provide this during my vacation so that I would be in a quiet, relaxing place where I could plan for the future. Strike one against my faith in any sort of higher power. I still expect that by May 1 of this year, I will, at the very least, have the '08 or newer Toyota Sequoia I pine for, in black, preferably with tan leather seats and second row captain's chairs with the nice center console, and money left over to outfit it with rear headrest monitors and a TV tuner. I'm still sticking to my ultimatum to God, to provide that jackpot or similar retirement fund by the end of May this year. It may sound blasphemous, but I've been waiting and praying long enough. I've been hanging on for about five fucking years now. The time to retire is NOW! I've already cleared out personal items from my cubicle and removed any sensitive personal stuff from my computer. I'm ready to leave that resignation note and get the fuck out of here the morning after the next drawing. May 29, the day after the last lottery drawing before Memorial Day and the start of the summer vacation season, will be the day I either confirm or abandon my belief in God or any other higher power.