We've been retired now for over a month - and the predominant feeling has been that of waiting. With covid lockdown, everyone has been waiting to a greater or lesser degree; especially waiting for lockdown to end (which it now has, after being locked down more than any other city in the world). We have felt very fortunate to be living in regional Victoria which has been less drastically locked down than Melbourne has been.

But we've had other waiting:

Waiting for the council to grant a planning permit for the re-alignment of the boundary between our 2 houses in Castlemaine, so we gain a larger block and are able to sell Finsbury house, and thus stop being Airbnb hosts (which has been fine, but tends to tie us down and make life more complex, when we want to make it simpler.) The permit was granted last week, which now leads us into waiting for the surveyor to come and do what he needs to do to get the titles altered, so we can build a fence along the new boundary and then wait to sell Finsbury.

Waiting for the motorcycle to sell. It had been on bikesales for nearly four months with very little interest; I was wondering what to do about it, when I had an enquiry from someone in Rockhampton, Queensland. He's returning to motorcycling after his children are grown, and he saved me the trouble and cost of getting it a roadworthy certificate; so he's getting a present of a lot of my riding apparel and bits and pieces. I'm happy it's going to someone who will appreciate it; it's a fine machine.

Waiting to see whether we could go on our next trip, to Flinders Island - a supported walking trip booked way back in March. But this week we found we couldn't; Tasmania's border is closed to us until 17th December. So that's off. We've re-booked it for about the same time next year.

Waiting to see whether we could go overseas again. It appears that things are opening up, so we have re-booked the trip we were going to do in Yorkshire and Scotland in 2020. Now we're going in June / July 2022, doing basically exactly what we planned to do then. Walking the Dales Way, West Highland Way, and Great Glen Way.

Waiting for floor coverings. After living in Castlemaine for over 10 years, and with a very irregular floor under the carpet in the front room, one of Alison's first actions on retirement was to pull up the carpet to see what lay beneath. It turned out to be much better than we had feared; reasonably good floorboards, with adequate space beneath. But she went further and pulled off the strange mantelpiece it had, and then a piece of wall to enable the electrician to run a cable from the fuse box into an existing conduit to supply the shed, whose electricity supply currently comes from Finsbury.

But it's not been all bad. Neither of us feels a big hole in our lives where work was. We certainly don't miss the bureaucracy of it. And we had a lovely couple of days away, going down to Yuulong and the western end of the Great Ocean Road. Melbourne was still locked down, so the whole area was really quiet; we drove into huge car parks made for hordes of visitors, to find only one or two other cars there. Loch Ard Gorge, the Twelve Apostles; we had them all nearly all to ourselves.

We have not got bored - and hope we have not become boring.