May 11, 2013 Greetings My Friend, I am up and about for the second time today. I woke up around 7:00 and went back to bed around 11:00 to finish off the night’s sleep. I do this often and it is one of the reasons I wanted to retire because sleeping all the way through the night is not something I do often anymore. I tend to sleep a few hours wake up, eat breakfast, look on line and then head back to bed for several hours. I don’t like it but it is what my body does so I am rolling with it. If I try to stay up I find myself napping on and off all day so I go back to bed and sleep the last of the night’s sleep and then I am able to begin to function better. So I go back to sleep wake up often times late in the morning or in the early afternoon. Most days it doesn’t matter now because I don’t have anything scheduled to be at. I find that I enter into my morning routine upon waking up and I slowly find my way to enter into the day. I don’t function like I once did right away when I wake up. Yesterday I did not allow enough wake -up time before church so I did not make it to Sunday school. I did meet Junior for services so I was happy about that. We then went to evening Bible study and I enjoyed that as well. I do like being with Junior and learning and growing in the Lord. Junior is good about letting me get my night’s sleep in as well. He won’t wake me unless I have to be somewhere and then he will try to convince me to wake up. If I don’t cooperate he just makes another appointment and lets me sleep. He is a gem. I had always envisioned I would be the person who was awake real early in the morning….kind of like what Junior does. He will only sleep 6 hours and then he wakes up for a few hours. For him this is a way to avoid nightmares from the war. He wakes up naturally and then later in the morning he lays down to sleep for a few more hours. Me….I tend to go to bed around midnight and sleep a few hours then I wake up for a couple of hours and then I am back to bed for the rest of the night’s sleep. At first I was getting upset with this routine. Lately I have decided to accept it and move on. When I tried staying up I found myself falling asleep in my chair all day long. These days I go back to bed and sleep the remaining hours of my night’s sleep. When I wake up I begin my day from that point and it is working. I have to get into a cooking routine and that so far has not settled for me. I know that the day is near though and I will once again make our big meal for lunch time and dinner will be a small meal. I am so grateful to be retired because this allows me to sleep the way I need to sleep. I don’t have to be mentally alert to do a job anymore and for that I am grateful. I am finding I use my brain time to be with my writing and that feels good. I cannot think the deep thoughts of yesteryear anymore and at this point I’m ok with that. So I continue to settle into retirement and I am even enjoying the process these days. I am past the dark days of depression and I find myself rolling with life as it comes. That is a comfort to me these days. Every few weeks I find myself adding to my day. I now do some housework throughout the week, make a few meals here and there and I am reading my Bible, doing a devotion or two and writing in a Bible journal I’ve started, writing in a personal journal or writing a blog. I love all the writing to be honest. As I put my thoughts down on paper so to speak I find myself enjoying using my brain more so. I would like to read more and hope that will be forthcoming soon. I’d also like to do some crafts so then my day would fill out and maybe I won’t watch TV as much as I have been. For the first 10 years of our marriage Junior and I did not watch TV. We would rent a movie most weekends and watch a couple of movies but no TV. Since retirement I am watching TV programs more. I don’t turn the TV on till late afternoon early evening so I may find that TV watching may slow down for me. I am also getting comfortable with the slower paced “Janet”. I in no way can move like I did in my younger years. It has been hard to learn how to be still and quiet when I’d rather be out doing and being with people. I often tell Junior that I love our “boring” life. I mean it as well. Junior is not a dramatic kind of guy. He does life in his own slow manner. The years of drama for drama sake are gone for me these days. I find that drama is not all that exciting and actually wears a person out. I love our life a ton. We travel, we laugh at each other’s antics and we enjoy our life. I like being home with Junior and we don’t have to have a lot of planned activities. I like staying in my pajamas all day many days a week. I like the day or two a week we run and do errands. Life if sweet to me and I am grateful to learn that drama all the time truly is not what it is cracked up to be. So life settles in retirement and I am comfortable to move at a much slower pace. May God bless you and keep you, make His face to shine upon you. Love Janet