Early Retirement Week 7: The Train

by A Purple Life, posted in Early Retirement, Early Retirement Updates, Finance, Fitness, Food, Hobbies, Spending, Travel
This post may contain affiliate links. For more info read my disclosure.

Welcome to PurpleMas! I’ve got a special treat for y’all. After the success of my NaNoWriMo writing challenge: I’m going to publish 2 posts a week during the month of December! So get ready for a lot more Purple in your life every Tuesday and Thursday 🙂 .

I stole this “PurpleMas” idea from one of my favorite YouTubers Smokey Glow. I discovered her last December when she did her annual “Glowmas” where she uploads a video EVERY DAY (Wowza). I absolutely love her videos – even though they’re mostly about makeup and I don’t even wear makeup 😉 .

She’s just super interesting, smart and relatable so I’ve been watching all of her videos during the last year. If you’re looking for smart analysis, thoughtful commentary or beautiful makeup looks, feel free to check her out. And since posting daily like her is way too wild for me, I hope you enjoy double the amount of Purple in the coming weeks. Now, for this Tuesday: Let’s get into it!

What Did I Do This Week?

I explored Connecticut. It was my last week in Connecticut so I did some driving around the state. During one of those drives with my friend, I think we found Stars Hollow! It looked similar to the fictional Gilmore Girls town and was super cute. In fact, I did some research after getting home and Stars Hollow was inspired by actual towns in Connecticut so we could have been stumbling upon one of those.

In one town we stopped for some warm beverages and bakery goods. I posted about it on Instagram (below) and one of the commenters said that’s the town their family is from – WHAT?! So random and such a small world.

I took a sleeper train down the east coast! After trying to figure out the best way to get from Connecticut to Georgia in the most pandemic-friendly way possible, I settled on taking a sleeper train and it was an awesome time! In case you missed it, at y’alls request I live tweeted the experience below. I’m planning to write a full post about what happened with more information, pictures and even a video (woooah 😉 ) so stay tuned for that.

I continued writing for NaNoWriMo…but I must admit, it was slow going. I was quite distracted knowing that this was my last week in the Northeast and put family time and exploration over my word count. Oops! Below is where I stood a week before Thanksgiving. There was still work to be done!…Lots of work.

I had a fun internet troll encounter. Check this out:

It’s been almost a year since a troll comment bothered me. These days, they just make me laugh. I stand by the “don’t feed the trolls” mantra so if someone is being mean in an unproductive way (compared to offering actual criticism), I delete the comment from this website. My blog, my rules! So far, that’s had an awesome side effect of trolls stopping after a while. If you don’t feed them, they wander off to find another meal.

Anyway, for this particular person, a Twitter follower suggested I post this comment to /r/niceguys to see what they would say and then send it to this person in the hopes this dude could see the error of his ways. I don’t want any further interaction with this person so I’m not sending him anything, but here’s the Reddit post and what others said if you’re interested.

I was featured on some podcasts…and forgot to tell y’all. Oops! Better late than never right 🙂 ? Luckily, recording one of these during my time up North justified me lugging my podcast microphone up and down the country 😉 . Here are the episodes in case you’re interested:

Physical

Sleep

This week I was tired AF despite the fact that I intentionally took more time to rest and was trying to sleep 8 hours a night. However, instead of expanding my rest schedule further, which would make me feel even less helpful than I already was 🙂 , I decided to give up on sleep chasing until I’m free of a baby’s schedule starting next week. After that, I’ll work on getting back to a less tired baseline.

There’s too much to do and with my time in Connecticut counting down, I don’t want to waste any of it napping or doing all those other silly things my body needs to recharge (when are we becoming cyborgs again)? Besides, helping to take care of a baby and keeping up a home, I also forgot that in addition to those things, I’m attempting to write a novel in a month – complete with my hand cramping this week from writing so much. That’s quite a feat that I keep discounting. So, overall, I’m tired and coffee is currently my best friend, but once I get back to Georgia, I’m going to sleep for a month straight 🙂 .

Food

I’ve continued to eat group meals and explored the local area by eating treats as well. Overall, food still just involves going with the flow and having fun retirement thoughts like these 😉 :

Fitness

This is the last weekly update where my fitness will boil down to carrying a baby and walking a stroller…though after doing so for a while, I’m curious if baby carrying should be an official sport – especially if the baby is an adorable wiggly menace like my baby cousin 🙂 . Though on the fitness front, I did technically hike the Appalachian trail…for like 10 minutes, if that counts 😉 .

Singing

So I used to be in the choir in school and took voice lessons. I’ve been complimented on my voice at random times like when singing karaoke – and I absolutely love singing. BUT, I don’t think I’m particularly naturally talented (I worked at it) and I don’t like the formal way of learning – similar to how I don’t love the traditional ways of learning languages or writing.

Basically, I don’t give a shit about the rules because the rules don’t seem that important 🙂 . In fact, when learning languages for example, rules hinder me. I start formulating a sentence for multiple minutes in my head to make sure it’s perfect and by the time I’m done creating the perfect sentence, the conversation has moved on. I prefer being fast and loose – with languages and with writing (can you tell 😉 ? ).

My thoughts on singing are similar. I’ve studied the theory and the scales and learned to read music, but I prefer to learn and improve my range and skill by listening to songs and then just – singing them myself. So I’m leaning into that more informal learning technique.

This week I’ve been singing over and over “Hello” by Adele until I was able to hit all the notes. I’m thinking about recording myself so I can play it back and give myself notes for improvement because it’s far from perfect, but it’s a start! I was able to hit the notes created by one of the angel voiced women of our age!

I’m now working on learning to sing “Wait For It” from Hamilton, which has a special place in my heart:

After I nail down the belting portions of that song, I’m planning to move onto “Satisfied” from Hamilton – that’s going to be a beast 🙂 .

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:

  • I got an alert on my awesome Stargazing app Star Walk 2 that all the planets would be visible in the northern hemisphere that week. There are a few I can’t see with my naked eye and the air pollution near NYC was still messing with me, so unfortunately I didn’t see much, BUT this re-ignited my curiosity about buying a beginner’s astronomy telescope. One awesome sighting that did happen however, was when I awakened in my sleeper car while traveling south, I saw a bright spot in the sky and correctly guessed that it was Venus 🙂 . I’m excited to see more of my stars again down south.
  • Birding was pretty fun this week. My Mom used to find birds annoying, but this week she yelled for me and texted me to “come quick” because a big ass Red Tailed Hawk was perched on a tree in our backyard. She now admits that my curiosity about birds has fed her own and that’s so amazing to hear 🙂 . We also had a Black Capped Chickadee land on our porch. I was watching it with my Mom and cousin and then identified it with my Audubon App and showed them how I did it. It was a fun activity to do together. Then when we were on a baby stroller walk, my Mom and I saw some Tufted Titmouses (Titmice?) fighting and I was able to identify them by sight without looking it up! On that walk, we also saw several Mallard Ducks and earlier in the week I saw a Rough Legged Hawk chilling in a tree. There seem to be a lot of birds around our Connecticut place and I think it’s because of a neighbor’s bird feeder, which made me jealous and led to this tweet:

  • Also on the nature front, I identified Purple Pore Bracket Mushrooms while on my Appalachian Trail ‘hike’ and realized that looking at mushrooms seems to ignite something similar to my trypophobia so I’m going to stop with the mushroom identification for now *shudder*

Languages

As I mentioned, I hung out with some college friends while up north. One of them was going to pick me up (masked 😉 ) and when she was texting me about the pick up, she only wrote to me in French. This made me realize how bad my French has gotten over the last 15 years since I stopped learning it after 4 years straight in high school.

This friend of mine has another friend who is a UN translator and speaks 10 languages. They say that listening to the news or a show is the best way to learn a language. Hilariously, I used to have that goal on my annual accomplishments for 2020. I was going to learn Spanish and Thai before going to Argentina and Thailand this fall/winter, but obviously those travel plans are not happening so I stopped the prep as well.

However, I want to add learning languages back into my life so I’m going to change the audio on a few Netflix shows to a language I want to learn and get back into that…though maybe I’m kidding myself because I haven’t been able to even really watch a show since retiring. There have been a few movies with others here and there, but overall retirement has MUCH LESS TV watching than was advertised. Maybe being more intentional about it will add this very important aspect of retirement back into my life 😉 .

Nail Painting

I talk below in the money section about how I went a little wild buying fancy nail polish this week. Well, in advance of those arriving, my cousin found some nail polish she wasn’t using and I decided to get my nail painting skills back up to snuff before using ‘the good stuff’.

So I tried painting my nails for the first time in maybe a year and remembered (1) How long one layer takes to dry (2) How impatient I am (3) How me being bad at nail polish application makes it look real bad 🙂 . There were bubbles when I was impatient and just layered the polish  on thick (I also had no nail polish top coat so maybe that didn’t help either).

Then I tried to apply a thinner layer multiple times and it looked better. Even a nail polish bottle seems to be trying to teach me patience…we’ll see if it works 😉 .

Choreography

So I haven’t written a choreographed dance since college (to High School Musical of course) and before that, I hadn’t since middle school if not earlier. It used to be something fun to do and then I would perform my dance with my friends or family. It was a time before the internet so what else was I supposed to do 😉 ?

Since it’s been so long since I’d choreographed anything, I was surprised when I felt the urge to do so this week. And it wasn’t a cure for boredom. I’ve been busier than ever between the baby and NaNoWriMo, but here I was wanting to choreograph dances.

This urge was inspired by this song:

Different ideas for how a troop could perform this song kept flashing through my mind so I started writing down my ideas and then tried to perform the moves myself only to discover…I’m not as limber as I used to be 😉 . I guess I need to be a professional instead of the definition of an out of shape amateur…and that’s also why this is in the mental instead of physical category 😉 .

Creativity

As you can see above, creativity overall is going great and manifesting in a myriad of ways. One more typical one is my writing, specifically the mini movie reviews I put on Instagram (example below). My creative juice to do this kind of thing ebbs and flows and it seems to currently be back, so I might take advantage and do mini-reviews of my favorite Christmas movies that we re-watch every year. Let me know if that’s something you would be interested in.

Money

I’ve been throwing dough left and right. As I mentioned above, I stopped in a random Connecticut town and got a fancy latte. While ordering I saw that they had pecan shortbread I’d never seen before and bought it for my family. I also bought a bottle of wine at a local shop for them as well.

Previously, I wouldn’t have done this without thinking or if I did, I would be searching for the best deal, but instead, I just grabbed the bakery good I wanted and picked a wine based on the type, region and label. I just took what I wanted. What a concept 🙂 .

While on an outing with friends I noticed that one of them had on this cool nail polish that changed color from purple to green. I complimented her on it, asked where she got it and then went home and bought two types of Holo Taco polish:

This is also not like the old me, but I saw something, I wanted it and I bought it. Boom!

Emotional

Response Time

So I didn’t realize this, but apparently my career affected how quickly I responded to…anything: texts, personal emails, social media messages etc. At my second job, my boss told us that she expected us to respond to any email within 24 hours. That wasn’t actually a problem for me since I would respond within a few hours at the most – and only if I had been in meetings during that time (though at times I answered emails during meetings let’s be honest 😉 …)
At my last job, the team that is run by that problematic colleague, expected her team to respond to every email IMMEDIATELY – no matter what you were doing. This is obviously ridiculous and doesn’t allow people to do their best work if they’re rushing in fear of her reaction if they take a second to think.

Anyway, I didn’t realize this training had bled over into my personal life, but now seeing how slowly I respond to things in retirement, makes it quite clear. I used to respond to texts immediately and any personal or blog emails the same day. Similarly, with blog comments or social media mentions. Now I’m not doing any of that. In fact, a friend texted me 5 days ago that I need to respond. I can’t think of the last time I took that long.

It’s similar with my email inbox…and I even have one reader email in there that’s a month old (sorry dude!) Overall, it seems that in addition to retirement changing how I perceive time, it’s also changed my expectations for my personal response time and so far, no one has complained so I’m going to keep it 😉 . It’s a much less stressful way to live.

Conclusion

So that’s what I’ve been up to this week. After 3 weeks of wonderful family time in Connecticut, I am sad to go, but also excited to be back to my less chaotic life. It’s been lovely, but having basically no alone time has caused my introvert warning light to start blinking. So, though I’m sad to leave, I am looking forward to some hardcore slugging and alone time back in my Georgia tiny house. Having no responsibilities again will also be fun 😉 .

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

What did you do this week?

18 thoughts on “Early Retirement Week 7: The Train”

  1. Wow! That’s great that you are doing so much! Judging by the way you write and the amount you write, I think you are a natural writer. I agree that there is no right way to learn anything. You learn the best way you can because everyone is different. I hope you finish your book. And as to your last question of what did I do this week, I actually published my biography on Amazon that I finished writing 6 years ago. Can’t wait to see what you will publish!

    Reply

  2. These updates are awesome! Thank you for continuing to share your FIRE journey with us. It’s cool to see what you have time for now, and how your outlook and pace of life is changing. The crazy thing is it’s still early days, only (?!) 7 weeks in. You’re nailing this!

    Babies and sleep aren’t generally compatible, true, but at least they’re cute 😉 stargazing is wonderful, the night sky is gorgeous, and I at least find it a nice reminder of how utterly insignificant I am in the grand scheme of the universe. Perspective can be everything sometimes.

    Reply

    1. Yay I’m so glad you’re enjoying them! I’m not trying extending to 12 weekly recaps. I’m not bored of it at all. I’m with you on babies and stargazing 😉 .

      Reply

  3. Great to hear your latest news! I’ve been given the same advice about watching a show in another language to help learn but have also been dragging my feet on this since I hardly watch TV. My coworker who is a native Spanish speaker highly recommended ‘La Casa de Papel’ on Netflix since it is originally in Spanish and she always says it is a fantastic show. This has been on my to-do list for months without progress but if you have time to check it out, let me know what you think 🙂

    Reply

    1. Oh wow that’s awesome! I’m adding it to my Netflix queue and will let you know when I’ve tried it!

      Reply

  4. I love traveling by rail. It’s so nostalgic. My family used to take the overnight train between Bangkok and Chiangmai when I was young. It was a ton of fun. In the US, I took the Coast Starlight from LA to Portland. We also took the train all over Europe. The train is so much better than flying/driving.

    Reply

    1. That’s awesome! I wanted to take that overnight train when I finally get to Thailand. My friend took it last year and loved it. And yeah I definitely prefer it to driving in general and flying during a pandemic – though I have taken trains around the UK and Europe and really enjoyed it. The flights were so short it didn’t make sense and I wanted to see the countryside.

      Reply

  5. And I still go troll free! Am I not troll-worthy?

    Funny thing is I saw your Insta post about net worth and I thought I’d read it here but I did not, I realized. I would say the bump is crazy, but I figure politicians in both parties seem to serve Wall Street first, since they get those giant speaking fees once they leave office, so the stock market is always a good bet through index funds. Today I was a hair’s breadth away from hitting six figures finally. Didn’t think that was going to happen this year!

    But since it has been getting close, I was debating whether to put it out in public or not. I am not anonymous. What do you think?

    Reply

    1. Haha I guess not. Or maybe based on what you said about female journalists and harrassment you should change your picture to that of a woman and see what happens 🙂 .

      As for revealing that kind of info online, it’s obviously up to you. My family and friends read my blog so they know my net worth, but I don’t feel comfortable with some random person googling my name and seeing my monthly money updates. It’s all about what you’re comfortable with.

      Reply

  6. i’ll be interested to see you the amtrak trip goes. i took it one time across ny state and it took 2 days to get there and 2 days to get home on a route i could drive in 4 hours. the east to west one just doesn’t seem to go on time much. but you have a sleeper so you can just chill i guess. how much was the ticket?

    Reply

    1. The full post about it is coming out next week. And 2 days for a 4 hour drive?!? What the hell happened?? My ticket was $503 we were on time.

      Reply

  7. Fun stories, as always Purple.

    Really enjoyed the Amtrak tweet thread w/ the sleeper car. Looks like you had a good time with it and managed to stay safe. Sorry to those NJers 😉

    Hope you waived as you passed through VA!

    Reply

    1. I’m so glad you enjoyed the post and the tweet thread and lol for NJ. I did indeed wave when I passed DC if that counts!

      Reply

  8. I agree completely about learning languages! I liked learning the structure and rules in school (because I’m a nerd…), but then I would freeze up whenever I had to speak the language because I was so worried about my grammar. Then I studied abroad and lived with a host family and learned a new language that way—it was definitely hard but I would do it again in a heartbeat.

    Now I say that I speak fluently—not perfectly! I don’t have any hesitation, but I know I’m probably mis-conjugating a verb here or there. As a total perfectionist in other areas of my life I also think it was really good for me to be forced to make mistakes and realize that my goal was communication so the mistakes weren’t as important as the goal.

    Good luck with your language journey!

    Reply

    1. Yep – you sounds very similar to me 🙂 . I also realized that I don’t even speak English perfectly so putting that kind of pressure on myself with a new language is a little silly. I love your approach!

      Reply

  9. FWIW…

    -a rental car is much safer from a pandemic perspective than any form of mass transit, although driving is higher risk for accidents
    -planes are probably safer than a train unless your compartment was hermetically sealed and the train was mostly empty (plane trip is shorter and planes have more air exchanges)
    -Cleaning surfaces is hygiene theater; this virus is mainly transmitted person-to-person via aerosols and droplets, not from surfaces
    -I would definitely quarantine after a train trip and get a swab on day 5 before seeing a non household member and quarantine for at least 7 days until said test is resulted

    I work (in PPE) with Covid patients all day, have done so since March, and would consider a train trip, indoor dining, and going to the gym too high risk for my taste.

    This is not to scold or shame, just to give facts; we all have things we absolutely have to do, me included. Please do consider helping us in healthcare by avoiding high risk activities for the next two months. We are really overwhelmed, and there is no room at the inn.

    Reply

    1. Thank you for that information and those suggestions. This trip happened over 2 weeks ago. I’ve been hunkered down since then and am not going anywhere. I haven’t been in a restaurant since February and am not planning to anytime soon (the same for gyms etc). Thank you for all you do!

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *