My Retirement To-Do List: Fill & Download for Free

Civilization VWhen I was a single loser, living alone in the early 2000s, I played Civilization II for hours on end. I beat the game hundreds of times, mainly by stacking dozens of units on the same tile, and crushing my opponents.But somewhere between Civ II and Civ V, they took out that option. You can’t stack your units anymore. What the fuck?I’m sure I could still beat the game even without that option, but it takes too damn long. I only get an hour here or there to play now. I’m a married man with children and responsibilities. I’ve had games going for months, but the total time I’ve spent playing them is like 10 hours, and I’m nowhere near winning.Actually, it’s not the game that frustrates me, so much as it is the fact that I can’t dedicate entire weekends to playing it anymore because I’m a responsible adult. I’m putting “play Civilization V for hours on end” on my retirement to-do list. Somewhere between “visit Grand Canyon” and “bungee jumping”.

I have a long list of programming projects I’d like to do if I had time. Partly that’s because I need certain artifacts that don’t exist, but another good part is because for me programming is fun. Designing and implementing a program is a creative activity like building a chair or fixing a car or building a radio or planting a garden. All of these are things that some people consider to be tremendous fun (and others consider to be boring labor).Of course, even for people who enjoy them (and often seek out jobs doing these things) doing the wrong kind of work can take all the fun out of it. There are plenty of boring programming tasks. And if I had to do it all the time I’m sure I’d get tired of it. But certainly I can envision taking some time each week in my retirement to work on a little programming project.Right now, my job gives me nowhere near enough time to do the programming I’d like to do. So I look forward to the day when I can do more.

If true, it’s an indication that a lot of couples took advantage of the extra time they had due to the lockdown to get some things from their “to do” list done.I’m a teacher, and I got my will done recently. It has nothing to do with worrying about going back to school. It’s just because my wife and I have been meaning to get a will done, and we both have a lot more free time now thanks to the lockdown, and we’re trying to use our time wisely.We also finally got some life insurance, set up automatic payments into our retirement accounts, remodeled the master bathroom, purged our basement of a decade’s worth of clutter, built new flower boxes for the house, and put some recessed lights in the basement. All of those are things that we’ve been discussing doing for years, but we finally found the time to do them in the last few months.I’ve got a month left of summer vacation, and I’m literally struggling to find new things to add to my “to do” list, because everything else on it gone done for a change, thanks to the lockdown. I’ve added “organize Legos and rebuild original sets” to the list, mainly to give me something to do.