volunteering | The View from the Porch

If we were having coffee…I would welcome you in and offer you a seat. The weather folks are predicting a lovely day here in southern NJ, in fact it may even warm enough for us to take our coffee out on the porch. Speaking of which, would you like a cup of French roast or perhaps some tea instead? There are some cold beverages as well, if you prefer. No home made baked goods this week, I’m afraid. I will have to get my Hubby working on that.

If we were having coffee… I would ask if you’ve ever had a day where no matter how hard to you tried to get things accomplished, you just seem to end up spinning your wheels? Yesterday was like that for me. All morning I attempted to be productive but ended up with very little to show for it.

I wanted to grid-out a large art project I was working on but I couldn’t find my straight edge (Hubby actually found it later in the very place I thought it was but failed to see it the two times I looked! Duh!) Then I wanted to finish a project that required some tracing paper. Do you think I could find a single sheet?! I had hoped to clean out the downstairs closet but couldn’t get the heavy things out without some help.

Of course it didn’t help that every room I wandered through had odds and ends that needed picking up and putting away. Then, as an added bonus, the cat puked all over so that needed attention as well! By the time twelve o’clock came around I realized that I’d spent the whole morning wandering around the house accomplishing nothing. Sometimes I feel like my brain just spins in circles instead of a straight line. Is this be something else I can blame on middle age?

If we were having coffee...I would tell you that my frustrating morning ended when I had to get ready to go to my volunteer job at two. Since this past July, I’ve spent every Tuesday afternoon and every other Saturday, helping out at a non profit thrift store uptown. It is run by a local hospice organization and all the proceeds help to provide hospice and palliative care for people who have no health insurance or whose insurance doesn’t cover all the services they need. I am just one of 17 volunteers there. Miss Dee helped too before she started her regular job.

I really enjoy my time there. It puts my obsessive organizational skills to good use and the other ladies I work with are very sweet, especially the manager Sherri. The shop isn’t too large but we have a nice selection of ladies and men’s clothes, accessories and some smaller housewares, all donated by people in the area. It is a very different atmosphere than my regular job. I think that’s part of the appeal but the main thing is that even though my own loved ones have never been in need of hospice care, I’ve seen how important it is to so many other families. It feels good to help.

If we were having coffee..I would appologize for cutting our visit a little short today. Miss Dee is leaving on her senior trip to Disney World on Tuesday and there are still quite a few odds and ends left to be done. She has to have her luggage packed and at school by 4:00 Monday afternoon. They weigh it and have the TSA dogs give it a sniff to avoid any problems at the airport on Tuesday morning. Speaking of which, their flight leaves Philadelphia at nine so they need to be on the bus at school by five! THAT’S 5AM PEOPLE!!! You better believe this one falls under Hubby’s list of parental duties. No one wants me driving a car at that hour! 😳

Thanks so much for stopping by. Don’t forget to visit the rest of the Coffee Share Post hosted by the lovely Diana over at Part Time Monster!!

This weekend I spent some time with my one sister and her husband. Discussion turned to the fact that my brother-in-law after 28 years with the U.S Post Office had retired that week. My sister, who is a nurse, had cut her own work days so they were chatting about what they planned to do with all the free time they now had. My other sister and her husband have been retired for over a year as well. This got hubby and I thinking about what we would do with our retirement. Not that it will be happening anytime soon (my sisters are over 10 years older than me), but, except for a few years when my children were little, I’ve worked since I was 16 years old. It’s hard for me to imagine not having a job to go to.

Since both sisters have grandchildren, much of their time will be dedicated to spoiling them. They also intend to do some traveling and spend lots of time at the beach. My one sis is trying to talk her husband into renting or buying an RV and driving cross country to visit their son in California. There is a lot of speculation among the rest of us as to whether or not the marriage could survive such a trip! That’s an awful lot of togetherness for any couple but who knows? I’m sure my husband and I will do the same sort of things when we retire but what else would we do to fill our time?

Obviously, we would still want to spend time being of use to society and the world around us so volunteering would be a given. I would enjoy working with Habitat for Humanity or the ASPCA. My one sister volunteers once a week at a thrift shop that her church runs. She finds the sorting and organizing at the store both therapeutic and fulfilling. My husband would probably lean more toward helping young athletes.

I would like to spend more time drawing and painting and exploring other mediums. Then of course there are books I haven’t gotten a chance to read, and films I’ve been wanting to see. There will be more time to spend with the people I love and more time to make new friends. Hmmm, I’m seeing a pattern here.

Basically, retirement to me is just a shift in balance. It would allow me to spend less time doing the things I have to do and more time doing the things I want to do. For now I want to do as much as my free time allows, then in 10 or 15 years I can just expand! Okay, that’s a plan.