A day spent thinking about life

I've had a pleasant day tody. I was going to take the youngest son to Barry but he'd already been so I just went to visit him instead. My daughter was there, three grandchildren and one great grandchild and it was nice to see them all. From them I went to visit Sheryl and spent some time tlking and chatting.

I do enjoy these days when anything might turn up. It is the one aspect of retirement I still haven't got over. In some other repects I still feel I haven;t really adjusted to it. I was so sure of myself when I was planning to retire. I had always said I didn't want to be working for the county when I was 65. I knew just what I would do with my time, I would volunteer somewher. and that's what I did try to do at first. I wanted to go back to advice work which I'd always loved, so I went to the CAB, and I went through the induction and sat in on some interviews. In fact if some of the volunteers I watched had been my social work students I would have had to speak to them about their attitude to people. But you couldn't give advise until you'd been through their training (which is faie enough) and the wait for the training was months and months. that gave me time to remember how much the organisation got up my nose from when In worked for them so I gave it up. I went to Riverside Advice then and as luck would have it the manager was someone who'd been a volunteer with me when I was manager there. So I started straiht away and then one day I saw 12 people in 2hrs and thought 'this is too much like work' and left. Mind you that was when I had to go in for the first hip replacement anyway.

I did try one other volunteer job, helping with  fundraising for a street drug organisation, but to be honest I never really got into it. Most of that was 2010 and then 2011 I was diagnosed with the cancer so that was a year gone and now my other hip is much more painful and disabling than the first one, so I'm not bothering. But it does still feel strange feeling I've got no real purpose, although perhaps just living a life and doing as much that I enjoy as I can, is enough.