One of the things they definitely don't tell you about aging is the many little ways in which you become aware that you're not 29 years old anymore!
All the retirement brochures and advice columns are all talking about "ways to maximize your investments," and "the best places to retire", but they don't really talk about the way your body crunches and snaps and pops more than a glow stick, but without the benefit of a nice light show!
Mrs. Denmarkguy and I are preparing to go to a local renaissance fair tomorrow, to set up our vendor booth and sell our creative wares. That means a lot of preparation and packing.
One of the things I really noticed today — as I was packing all our show gear into our truck — is that I wear out a lot faster than I used to! It's not that I can't lift the stuff anymore, but I run out of steam a lot faster than I used to.
Pretty much everything is loaded up and ready to go but halfway through the loading process we kind of looked at each other and decided that we're going to do a slightly more simplified setup than we normally do for these events. We often start with great plans for setting up a spectacular booth but these days we more often than not end up with a pretty simplified setup. At least for outdoor events.
Besides, this particular event doesn't end until 7:00PM, and it gets dark at 7:30... which means we basically will have 30 minutes to break down everything and load the truck back up to go home. At least if we want to see what we're doing. Thankfully our son is visiting from Seattle and he's a big guy and has a good bit of strength so that'll make it somewhat easier. And we're definitely very grateful for his presence at this time.
There was a time when I really looked forward to these things and pretty much would only think about the positives of them. These days I still like to think about the positives but I'm also acutely aware of the fact that my back's gonna hurt and it's probably gonna take me two or three days to get back to 100% once we get home and get everything unpacked.
Given the somewhat dubious economy we're having these days I just hope that it turns out to be worthwhile and we take in some much needed extra cash to help us live for another month or two. In a way, this feels like a bit of a preview of what the holiday show season might bring.
This is definitely not "retired life." Clearly, the dream of sitting on a beach and sipping colorful frozen drinks with little parasols in them seems long gone and obviously is not going to happen.
At least I'm grateful that we still have reasonably good health and are able to go out and do these things which helps supplement our income and allow us to pursue our creative things. But to go so far as to call it retirement would be a gross overstatement!
I just hope we sell some stuff and manage to get home without any major injuries or pulled shoulders or thrown out backs!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Sunday!
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2026.09.27 00:57 PDT
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