Early Retirement Week 5: The Election

Last week we tackled reader questions about my first month of early retirement and this week, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming of seeing what I am up to each week of retirement. Did I insert that AMA post so I’d have more time to craft these posts after the week is done? Maybe 😉 .

What Did I Do This Week?

I kept up with the 5 day US Election.

First, some background: Growing up, I was never active in politics. I was taught kind of a defeatist/”what’s the point”/”my vote doesn’t matter” attitude from the generations of my family who grew up black in America and experienced all the ways their voices had been (and continue to be) silenced. When I turned 18 in 2008, I started voting in the presidential elections…but that’s it.

That vote went to Obama and to my absolute shock: He was elected. A black man was elected to be the President of the United States and I must admit: I did not expect that to happen. I really didn’t think that this country, with its history of slavery and oppression, would ever do that. Someone that looked like me was serving the highest position in our nation. When I watched the announcement on TV I cried happy tears for the first time in my life.

That moment and a lot of the moments that followed, gave me hope for the first time for the future of our nation and the place I could have in it. I started attending protests and voting in every election – though I can’t take full credit for that last part. It was aided by the ease of voting in Washington state – everyone receives mail in ballots weeks before every election, so we can research each candidate at our leisure in the comfort of our own home before making an informed decision.

I didn’t realize that the hope that 2008 sparked in me would become a negative in 2016 when our nation elected someone with no political experience who routinely spews lies along with sexist and racist language and has been formally accused of sexual assault 26 times.

I couldn’t believe the bright America I had started to believe could exist in our future would do such a thing. It was a rude awakening and when I saw the news that day, it strangely felt similar to when I’ve lost loved ones in the past. The America I thought I knew was dead and my hope for the future was gone.

For those reasons, I was scared to allow myself to hope this election. I did not want to hope that truth, science and the pursuit of equality would win against misinformation and bigotry. So despite projections saying Biden/Harris had an 89% chance of winning this election, I did not allow myself that room to hope. However, hope somehow found a way to sneak in.

This entire week has been a frenzy of information. I’ve never refreshed websites like the 538 live election blog as many times or watched as much news as I have this week. Even when I intentionally tried to step away, I found myself flipping channels to see if all the news sites were providing the same information, refreshing websites to see when new vote counts would be reported and even waking up several times a night and grabbing for my phone to see if there was any new information. It was all consuming and I think it was because of that sliver of hope I had tried (but failed) to contain.

You will see below how this affected my physical, mental and emotional states, but if we’re recapping what I did this week: that was a huge part of it. Ironically, on Saturday after constant refreshing and doom-scrolling, I had decided to set my phone and the news aside and try to live in the moment again. I had assumed that we would have a respite over the weekend before restarting vote counting the next week.

I left my city for the first time since we arrived in Connecticut a week before, and was driving through the gorgeous Northeast fall foliage with a friend. It hadn’t even been 15 minutes since I’d left and I was happy to see that I had spotty coverage so I would be forced to resist the temptation to dive back into my information gorging (though normally just being around a friend would do that).

We had barely left my house when I got a text from my partner that Joe Biden had been declared the President-Elect. Kamala Harris, a woman whose parents were immigrants from India and Jamaica was declared the Vice President-Elect.

I once again didn’t believe it – but this time in a skeptical way. I started checking news sites starting with The New York Times and saw the headline “BIDEN BEATS TRUMP: Harris Is The First Woman Elected Vice President“. After checking a few more sites, I was convinced: It had actually happened.

I called my Mom to tell her the news, thinking she wouldn’t know since they had been taking a similar media break, but they already knew. They were dancing in front of the TV with my baby cousin while the announcement was being made. I hung up and then my (black, female) friend and I started screaming in the car. Love had won over hate.

That night, I watched the first presidential speech I’ve been able to sit all the way through in four years and felt a sense of relief. Electing two people is obviously not the end to this nation’s problems, but it’s a step in the right direction, especially when they’re talking about (and “walking the walk”) of moving towards a more united and inclusive nation. So that’s what I’ve been up to 🙂 .

😍😭😍😭😍 I can't even believe it. My heart is so full💜. pic.twitter.com/jjEqQaXgMW

— A Purple Life (@APurpleLifeBlog) November 8, 2020

I settled into Connecticut 🙂 .

As I mentioned in my last weekly update, my Mom and I finished our road trip, settled into an Airbnb and then helped my cousin move into a new place. The unpacking and cleaning continued this week. We made the space more livable and did an innumerable number of loads of laundry while helping to care for my cousin’s baby.

And when I say “we” the workload was actually like 90% my suspected robot/vampire of a Mom. She doesn’t seem to require more than 4 hours of sleep or barely any food and yet she’s a non-stop ball of helpful energy that is constantly moving. I feel like a weak slug in comparison because physically, mentally and emotionally, I burned out in less than a week.

As you’ll see in the sections below, I hit my wall pretty early and started needing some introvert time to keep myself happy and sane (I’m sure the anxiety of the lengthy election didn’t help there either…)

By the end of the week, I realized that separate from everything going on, the first week in CT felt kind of like when my partner and I moved to a new monthly Airbnb. It took a while to find my rhythm and adjust to a new normal. I need to set that expectation when going into new situations, even if they’re not a new home. I need to remember that things are going to feel weird for a bit 🙂 and that’s normal.

I started NaNoWriMo! NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and it’s every November. The online writing community gets together to accomplish a shared goal: write a novel (50,000 words) in 1 month. I haven’t attempted this challenge since college and have only successfully completed it once: in high school (and no, you’ll never read that book – it’s legit horrible 🙂 ).

I had assumed in the past that the novel had to be fiction since that’s what I think of when I hear “novel”, but according to NaNoWriMo’s FAQs non-fiction and blog posts count! Basically they just want people to write and get exciting about writing, semantics be damned!

So I’ve been getting ahead of writing on this blog and my new (ridiculously long) weekly updates have been accidentally helping me with that word count – to a shocking degree. In the first three days of November, I had already completed 20% of the challenge and written over 10,000 words. I guess I have a lot to say these days 🙂 .

I fought against 2 sites that stole my articles.

Through pingbacks on my site, I discovered that another website had legit copy/pasted some of my articles and passed them off as their own on their website. So of course I took to Twitter (y’all are so wonderful and helpful!) to ask what I should do:

Blogger Question: A website is reposting my blogs (and others) without my permission and has no contact information or social media listed. Does anyone know what steps I can take to get them to stop? No contact info is listed on https://t.co/ic5pPYOQnk either.

— A Purple Life (@APurpleLifeBlog) November 3, 2020

With the help of the community, I ended up using HostingChecker.com to find the host of the website (there wasn’t any contact info or social media links on the actual website to reach out to) and I filed a DMCA copyright complaint with the host. They got back to me in only a few hours and actually took the site down (I assume because other creators’ work had also been stolen and they had reported it as well). I breathed a sigh of relief – justice had been served!

But then, literally the day after, IT HAPPENED AGAIN! A different site had taken my words. I heard through the grapevine that this might be an inevitable consequence of blogging and that at least one big blogger doesn’t even try to claim them all anymore because digital word thievery is so prevalent. These sites didn’t seem to have any way they were profiting off my words, but I was pissed on principle that they would take what I wrote and slap their name on it. So of course I went after them 🙂 .

I filed a DMCA complaint with their hosting provider and hilariously…the next day, I got a notification that they had stolen two additional posts of mine. Wow. So I submitted a claim for those as well and am now waiting to hear back. I’ll keep y’all updated on this saga because since I don’t have work in my life anywhere, I have to get my drama somewhere 😉 .

Physical

Sleep

Understandably, my sleep was not great this week. I suspected that would be the case since I would be getting on a baby’s schedule for the first time, which also happened to be right after daylight savings time (when are we getting rid of that again?!)

As I’ve mentioned, I’m also a very light sleeper, so any time the baby makes a noise, (which was a lot – he seems to have quite vocal dreams 🙂 ) I would wake up. So I was waking up about every 2 hours. I didn’t want to put in ear plugs and miss my alarm or when he finally awakened fully, but after discussing it with my Mom, I’m going to start doing so. She doesn’t wake up at his slightest noise – just when he’s actually awake it seems, so we agree to let her handle that and I guess I’ll stop pretending I’m all that helpful 🙂 .

One positive in all this is that I continue to not have that stressed, angry feeling when I do wake up throughout the night. I haven’t had time to take naps in CT yet, but knowing I have no serious obligations has kept that feeling at bay, which is awesome. Also I’m happy to announce that my body has accepted it’s an East Coaster again 🙂 !

I was worried about that because I would usually come and work on the east coast for 1 month in the summer and 1 in the winter and at no point did my body change schedules – it still thought I was on the west coast. So I was concerned about how long it would take to adjust now that we’re on this coast for the foreseeable future, but it happened! Almost immediately actually – maybe it’s different when my body knows I’m not going back 😉 and I’m not working west coast hours.

Food

I kept forgetting to eat this week, which is not great. There was just so much going on! Also babies are quite distracting – who knew 🙂 ?!? We did meal plan with my family this week, which was awesome and my Mom has been a cooking machine to keep us stocked with dinners. We’ve been eating mostly keto with some snacks thrown in there.

It is a lot harder to stick to one type of eating when I’m moving all around and living with people with different dietary preferences who want to eat together. Also I suspected not having a routine would be different, but I didn’t realize how much it would change what I eat.

Even when it was just my partner and I moving to different Airbnbs our last few months in Seattle, I suspected we would eat out often to experience a new city and in doing so, I would still not stick to any type of carb or calorie count…and that fast and loose approach has continued as we keep moving around. I’ve decided I’m currently fine with that realization. YOLO as they say 😉 .

Fitness

Carrying around my adorable bowling ball of a cousin was basically the extent of my fitness this week. I did also accidentally go on a 2 hour hike with the friend I mentioned above and almost died (of course I’m not being overdramatic 😉 ). I had never hiked up a mountain with leaves covering slippery rocks and mud. It was a recipe for disaster for my clumsy self, but luckily I reached the bottom of the mountain without breaking my ankle or getting eaten by bears so that was a win 🙂 . Otherwise we’ve just been taking 30 minute walks around the neighborhood with the baby and his stroller. There hasn’t been time for much else.

Mental

Learning

Now, let’s get back to my favorite segment: Fun Facts Nobody Asked For! Here’s what I learned and explored this week:

Stargazing has been sadly less than usual because of the light pollution coming off New York City. I miss my tiny house backyard and its unimpeded view of the stars 🙂 . The trade off is worth it to see family though. However, Mars was so bright one night that I saw it despite the light pollution and the Moon has entered a new phase and is visible during the morning in the sun filled sky, which is fun to see! The free app Star Walk 2 continues to be my constant companion and I enjoy seeing the position of stars in relation to me on the app even if I can’t see them clearly in the sky 🙂 . I’m also realizing that all this research has made me feel a lot more connected to my world. I now know where north and south are and as a result, where in the sky to look for the planets and many stars. I know which ones are visible during certain times of the year – I’m basically the astronomer I dreamed of being in college 🙂

I remembered What Cold Feels Like…and I hated it 🙂 . I grew up in Georgia and Seattle very, very rarely goes below 30 degrees, so when my Mom asked if I would walk back from a rental car place with her – 2 short miles – I agreed. Little did I know, I had agreed to walk that distance when it was 30 degrees outside with 30 mph winds that tried to knock me over. It was horrible 🙂 and I’ve learned my lesson. I now bundle up more and only go outside if the temperature is more hospitable to my Georgia blood. I guess I should have remembered what the Northeast in November was like – oops.

Since I’m helping to take care of a Baby for the first time in my life, I have made some discoveries and observations like an explorer in a new land 🙂 . Here are the thoughts of a child-free person who has never babysat: Similar to adults, it appears that babies don’t need a lot to be happy. Even when faced with piles of toys, my baby cousin starts playing with the bag they came in instead…kind of like a cat 😉 . I also learned that brushing a baby’s teeth is hilarious and adorable. I never thought that they would need to for some reason… another great reason for me to not have kids 🙂 You’re welcome!

I learned that Tenant Laws seem to be different in CT because my cousin was told by the landlord that sending someone to check on a broken heater and dishwasher would be $150 out of their pockets even if nothing was wrong. In all my experiences, landlords foot all bills. My cousin is also working on buying blinds for the apartment herself, which I thought was included. Shows how much I know 🙂

I used the 1% Rule of Real Estate to discuss if someone buying a property to rent is a good idea. I guess I was paying attention to money principles that don’t even apply to me and it came back in a useful way!

During all of my Election Research, I discovered some weird and interesting things about my country that I had no idea about. I knew that the presidential race was determined by the electoral college (a dumb and last minute addition to our constitution that should be abolished ASAP), but I had no idea that two of our states (Maine and Nebraska) have a different way of doing electoral college votes. They don’t just give all of their electoral votes to one candidate like the other 48 states. I also learned that individual states have Secretary Of States and overall that I need to do more research about our political process 🙂 .

Creativity

Creativity has been a mixed bag. I was killing it with my NaNoWriMo distraction before the election, but was not inspired to write again until Sunday morning after the news broke and I was able to step my mind away from everything for a moment. I’m feeling good though and am confident I’ll be able to complete NaNoWriMo – and I might need to make it an annual tradition!

Money

Well despite all the turmoil of the week, the stock market is once again on a tear and I hit a new net worth high:

So basically, I have $38,166 or 7% more than I planned to at this point in my retirement. Of that amount, I have over $50,000 in cash instead of the $40,000 I was aiming for: so it’s time to make some additional investments!

That additional cash cushion came from fighting for the bonus my company tried to stiff me for, getting paid out for not using any PTO this year, and from the payment for my last day of corporate work. It’s getting kind of ridiculous over here. I’m starting to feel like Scrooge Mcduck.

I have continued to not even think about money. I was wracking my brain the last time I even spoke about it, and I think it was after my hiking trip when I told my friend to Venmo me for gas and anything else she wanted, but otherwise everything is on autopilot or pre-paid for and I’m just chillin’ over here on my pile of money 😉 .

Emotional

Stress

My partner asked what I was up to earlier in the week and I had responded “babysitting and doom scrolling” and that was very accurate. The stress I felt during the election strangely felt like the stress I used to feel at work. It was constant and there was nothing I could do about it. I was just on edge, waiting for the next shoe to drop or (in the case of my job) the next email ping. My heart was beating fast continually and I felt a bit sick to my stomach.

Feeling this ‘similar to work’ stress, was a great reminder of how that feeling overshadowed my life while I was working. Luckily, as of Saturday morning, my doom-scrolling became joy-scrolling. My stress melted away and I got back to my baseline of a generally stress-free retirement.

Introversion

After a week of being around people nonstop, including while I’m sleeping, my introvert light was flashing. As I mentioned, my Mom is a weird combo of a superhero, robot and vampire who seems to never get tired and doesn’t need breaks to function, so I felt like the weakest link when I needed to step away for a bit, but it was necessary to keep myself sane.

After the first week of settling in, I’m finding a better rhythm. Similar to whenever I visit the people I love, I was so excited to be around them (a rarity) that I went all in, but quickly realized, a more balanced approach was needed to avoid introvert burnout 🙂 . I’m on my way to that balance and with the support of my Mom, am going to demote myself from assistant nanny to “emotional support introvert.” We’ll see how this demotion affects my sleep and mental health going forward.

Conclusion

So that’s what I’ve been up to! It’s been a weird week, but I was immensely grateful that I had the time to reflect on what was happening and why I was feeling stressed and see if I could combat it instead of trying (and failing) to focus on work at the same time. The future is bright 🙂 .

If you’re interested in the other weekly retirement updates I’ve written, they’re all here:

Weekly

1. Early Retirement Week 1: The Freak Out
2. Early Retirement Week 2: The Vacation
3. Early Retirement Week 3: The Whiplash
4. Early Retirement Week 4: The Heartbeat
5. Early Retirement Week 5: The Election
6. Early Retirement Week 6: The Trophy
7. Early Retirement Week 7: The Train
8. Early Retirement Week 8: The Challenge
9. Early Retirement Week 9: The Question
10. Early Retirement Week 10: The Game
11. Early Retirement Week 11: The Recharge
12. Early Retirement Week 12: The Holiday

How was your week?