Tag: retirement wardrobe

Pieces of My Mind: books, chocolate, deliveries, clothes

When the flotsam and jetsam of my brain don’t warrant a whole post of their own.

Book Festival

Our local Public Broadcasting station and an area university celebrated literacy and the love of books this past weekend by hosting a Book Festival. It did my heart good to see the large number of people at the event. Yes, there were a lot of gray heads in the crowd, but also a decent number of young people, making me a bit more optimistic about the future.

Crazy for Chocolate

I don’t know where I first heard about Dubai Chocolate, but the combination of rich chocolate, creamy pistachio, and a crisp pastry layer sounded delightful… until I saw the price: about $15 for a 150g bar. As I was looking at the store display and wondering who was crazy enough to pay that much for chocolate, a young lady walked by, grabbed a bar, and said, “Wow, I have never seen these this cheap!” So, of course, I had to buy one too. And, yes, it was yummy, but no, I’m not crazy enough to buy another one.  

Delivery Options

An item my husband needed was only available online from a big box home improvement store. He had three options of how to have the item delivered: 1) It would be delivered to the store for pick-up, shipping was free but it would arrive in several days; 2) For an $80 shipping fee, the item would be delivered either the next day or a day of his choosing; 3) The item would be delivered to our door the next day for no shipping cost. His choice was obvious… I wonder if anyone chose option 2?  

The 80/20 Wardrobe

We are in the middle of a house project that required me to empty my closet. I am lucky to have a large closet, so normally it is fairly tidy, but now my clothes and shoes are stowed all over the house, stuffed in other closets and piled on various flat surfaces. In addition to feeling twitchy about the disarray, I am confronted with the fact that I have far too many clothes. Some of them are now in my “to be donated” pile, but I realize that I need to be much more realistic about what I’m likely to wear going forward. Like many, I probably only wear about 20% of my wardrobe and, especially in retirement, comfortable and casual wins. I have no illusions that I can offload 80% of my clothes, but I’ll be busy this weekend seeing how close I can get.

How about you? Any fun plans for this weekend?

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Dropping Ballast

I was going through my husband’s closet the other morning helping him find something (yes, I found it… I always do) and realized that he has a bunch of clothes that he has very little use for just taking up space. Since retiring two years ago, he has seldom, if ever, worn one of his several nice suits. He’s had little need for a sports coat, and I’m pretty sure he hasn’t worn a tie more than a handful of times in many years. His current attire mostly consists of jeans or shorts and a comfortable shirt. He wears khakis once in a while, but often with flip-flops. Now that he’s taking culinary classes (for fun), he heads to school wearing funny striped chef pants and a chef’s jacket.

I suggested that we make some time soon to weed through his clothes. He will keep a few remnants of his past working life for those more formal events that come up now and then, but I hope we can get rid of a lot of items that no longer fit into his life.

In anticipation of my retirement, I stopped purchasing work-specific clothes awhile ago. No more pencil skirts, no more pumps; nothing that tends to function only as business attire. That’s not to say that I envision a retirement wardrobe entirely made up of “play clothes,” but I think the items I will reach for most often will be on the casual side, and definitely comfortable.

I plan to donate many of my work-specific clothes and shoes right away. Those that I can’t quite let go of yet, I will box up—with a date indicated on the outside—and store them somewhere convenient, but outside of my closet. If I go one year without needing the clothes, they will be donated too.

When my husband and I remodeled our house years ago and added the upstairs master bedroom, I got my own, rather large, closet. At first, the clothes I had barely took up half the available space, but, over the years, I’ve managed to fill it up… and then some (I’m much better at intake then I am at outgo).

Culling our belongings is an initial goal of our grand retirement plan. We are looking forward to acquiring more experiences than possessions, and putting greater value on traveling light and often rather than being burdened by schedules and obligations.

Of course, clothes are not the sole focus of our efforts to clear out the cutter. We have too much crap stuff in general and I think it is getting in the way of our ability to enjoy a calmer and more organized home. We are by no means hoarders, but let’s just say that, as we’ve navigated through our life together, we’ve picked up a few barnacles along the way. Many of the things we’ve acquired to complete our home are now just bulk we no longer need to balance our lives.

It will take some time and effort, but we need to scrape off the hull and empty the bilge. Life is too short – and getting shorter. It’s time to drop some ballast and sail on.