Now We Are Sixty

Sometimes I still dream of the beautiful morning commute on San Juan Island. Over the winter of 2017, after I worked at Island Bicycles, the owner thought he had found a buyer for the business and property. He closed down, moved everything out of the Argyle Street location and started up a smaller, more part-time at-home by-appointment shop. Then the sale fell through. He must have received earnest money from the buyer, but it seems like a raw deal that they could shut him down and then walk away.

During that summer I found that my eyesight was bothering me - it was hard to line up the chain and derailleurs when tuning bikes, though I could still see tiny bearings or screws if I dropped them at my feet. For several years I'd been noticing that my vision seemed to get bad in late summer or early fall, so when I returned to Bellingham in October I went for my annual eye exam. Huge shock when I looked at the eye-test chart at the optometrist's office: looking with my right eye, even the big E at the top was just a big, blurry gray rectangle. Cataracts that had been developing slowly were suddenly bad enough to warrant surgery. After some follow-up exams and waiting time (partly waiting to see if I might have better insurance coverage in 2018), I finally had surgery on my right eye in January 2019. There is still slight blurring in my right eye, and I will probably need new prescription glasses soon, but it has been a huge improvement, much less squinting and scrunching up my face trying to see people's faces and computer screens, and etc.

Never Give Up

This month I passed a milestone birthday (guess which one). I am actually feeling fine about it, lucky to be healthy, active and financially secure in a modest way. I wish now that I had been a bit more adventurous in the past few years while I had life insurance cash in the bank, but I still have savings, and time for travel and eccentric hobbies and so on. And with investments in a retirement account, I'm no longer burdened with the worry of working low-paid retail or pink-collar jobs, then retiring at 67 or 72 with nothing but social security money to live on.

I'm still working 4-5 days a week, 5-7 hours a day, and commuting by bike 17 miles round-trip since the managers asked me to start coming in at 7am. I have had a couple of wage increases in the past year. Not so long ago I was working minimum wage jobs, back when it was $9.76/hour and you had to sell yourself body and soul to get up to $10/hour, so Washington state's new $11/hour minimum wage seems like nothing to complain about, even though it still works out to a barely livable monthly income for most people.

Today I went for a quick morning ride in the rain, out past the Silver Reef Casino on the Lummi Reservation. I'm even glad of the rain. The past few summers the haze and smell of smoke from forest fires in northwest Washington and lower British Columbia was so oppressive and ominous. Rain is good. I love the rain.