One of the unexpected trials of retirement

If you're like me, as retirement approaches you plan and spreadsheet and imagine and worry and anticipate, so that by the time it arrives you think you've either got it figured out or know what bits you're going to have to learn as you go.

All except one thing.

After retirement; when you're living the good life; when you're waking up in the morning grinning because you no longer have to join the daily rush to the office; what the hell are you supposed to do with all your used batteries??!!

At the office there was a small recycling can in every break-room. You killed a battery, you just threw it in the can and forgot about it.

When you retire you expect them to take away your paycheck, and your badge, and your parking spot, but you forget that they're also going to take away that small can.

One person from the old office has been threatening to come visit ever since the day of my retirement party. I warned her that the price of admission is taking our stash of dead batteries back to the office with her and dumping it in one of those small cans.

So far, two and a half years later, no visit.

But don't think too badly of her. We're just not the kind of people that generate visitor traffic. In that same two and a half years we have had less than a half dozen people other than ourselves come through the gate, and to get to that number I had to include the two guys that delivered our new mattress and the woman that came to fetch her dog after we found it wandering in the woods. . .