Retirement

I have been very retired lately. This is a fun place to be. I've had dinner with friends and have plans for future dinners with more friends. I've been cooking like crazy; mostly just the regular, but I've tried a couple of new recipes. The new goal is to learn how to shop. You don't have to shop for the week. It's probably better to shop for a couple of days. That's different. I've been trying to do two things: cook everything I buy and use more vegetables. I know that first one sounds funny, but I am horrible at buying out the store.

And I've been working jigsaw puzzles while I listen to my books. When we used to have Thanksgiving at my mother's house, I would cook and my siblings would put together a jigsaw puzzle. It was always one of my family's favorite things to do together. Remember, I was born before TV. We didn't have a lot of money, so we didn't have many puzzles. We worked one so many times that we started to work it upside down. Yep, we be crazy. Now, I get to work the jigsaw puzzle without "the boys" hiding the last piece. Karen and I worked Palmer's Christmas puzzle. It was a mystery and we wanted to help him get the puzzle done so he could solve the mystery. Not. His mother, my niece Julie, made us stop so he could do it. Spoil sport.

My current puzzle is very difficult. I may read a lot of books by the time I finish it. I finished another Swedish detective book, The White Lioness, and I'm still only 1/4 done with the puzzle. The book is about a South African who goes to Sweden to perfect a skill he could have perfected anywhere in the world. That stretched my belief system more than a little. I understand that Mankell likes to include things that are happening elsewhere in the world. He may have stretched a bit for this connection. However, I liked it in the end, which is a good thing because I seem to have bought 2 Mankell books. I think they were on sale. This book was written just before the book I read earlier. This case was the reason he went a little crazy, which is where I found him in the last book. The book was written in the mid-90's. I didn't understand why they are just now showing up in Audbile until I realized that they were written in Swedish and have just recently been translated. Duh. The wits are not becoming any sharper with retirement.