A big nuisance are the eyes: carrying around 2 pairs of glasses is quite troublesome.

Yet the main problem is arthritis: the "oil" between my joints is unfortunately not replaceable, unlike the oil in the engine of my car. Especially my little finger (which I broke ages ago) sounds as if there is sand inside…

Turns out I still have the perfect skills to read instructions and operate machines

The real thing is that drinking coffee and eating cakes (my wife loves making cakes) and waffles (my wife makes the dough, and I love to bake)… I am gaining weight without noticing it.

Well, my trousers were trying to tell me something, and now my scale confirmed: retirement can make me fat

• taking my alarm-clock
• removing the battery
• putting all deep down in the closet…

So these days I wake up when I hear my chicken making "a hell of a noise". Which in chicken language means: I have just laid an egg!

Brilliant I must say! Just have to put on my clothes and get myself the most fresh egg ever.

I love breakfast with egg in the morning. Seems I do have a tight schedule even being retired, as it took me 3 days to write this post… Oh well, I am not at all complaining!

Every August people ask me what strawberries to plant and every March, people ask me what tomatoes to grow…

Well: you grow the tomatoes you prefer of course!

The next best answer is: you grow the seeds you can find in the shops… Some shops have really limited choices, so … that’s why you have no choice…

Myself I just take a day to drive around all the seed and garden shops nearby to see what’s on offer. If there is a new tomato variety, I buy and try.

I also try to harvest seeds from the tomatoes I grow, but when it comes to seeds of Hybrid tomatoes: it mostly doesn’t give good results the next crop.

Because my garden is big, I love to have variety: the Italian tomatoes, yellow tomatoes and the dwarf tomatoes: those that give tomatoes when the plant doesn’t even reach your knee! Ideal for under glass:

Cherry Tomato "greenhouse"

Then there are people that love to pick tomatoes with the stalk… personally I cannot be bothered because I eat the tomato, not the little stalk attached to it!

In my greenhouse I use "indeterminate varieties" that keep on growing until it freezes, which due to very mild winters can go deep until December. The opposite are the determinate tomatoes: they grow more or less as high as a 10 year old child, so you don’t have to invent big constructions to support the plant.

And of course there are tomatoes in between the 2 mentioned above: they grow a bit higher than myself but do stop growing eventually. Read the tomato seed package before buying.

Anyway, back to work, oops… gardening fun

Apart from marrying the world’s most beautiful women, Brad Pitt hobbies include:

• interior design,
   
• architecture
   
• nature
   
• collecting functional metal art pieces
   
• collecting furniture.

Now this post is not entirely about this little brat, but more about retirement and hobbies. Although when it comes to marrying the world’s most beautiful women, it’s a wise choice not to wait until you are retired. Especially not when you made your fortune already being in your 30′s.

Hobbies and retirement

First question my doctor asked me at my yearly check up after I retired was: "do you have a hobby"? According to him, people with a hobby live much longer than people without a hobby.

Now for me that was a needless question, as I love to spend a lot of time in my garden. And I took up blogging as well, although it would be ideal to have a wireless Internet connection so I could go blogging under my cherry-tree in my garden

Dying standing up

I needed to write this post because this Sunday in church, our retired butcher just stood up and died…

For him, his shop was his life.

He only closed his shop earlier this year and like I said: his shop was his life… no more shop and the poor guy passed away…

What are ideal hobbies when you are retired?

Of course that’s entirely up to you. Just try to remember what you loved to do when you were a kid and pick up from there.

My brother in law who retired 2 years ago quit smoking and at the same time enrolled in a photography-computer course. Meaning he learns how to take a nice picture and then plays around with it in Photoshop making slide-shows and all that.

All you need is a simple camera, a simple computer and… lots and lots of time! It’s an ideal hobby, especially when you learn to look from a different angle to the things you see in your every day life.

It’s always fun to get an email from him, as his pictures are original, not the normal forwarded jokes you get from everybody else. It shows what he is doing and how the world looks around him. And it keeps him away from those deadly cigarettes!

He also subscribed on a website where he sells his pictures for a very small fee. That is: if you need a picture, you pay a few cents to put their pictures on your website.

Making pocket-money is always great when you are retired I find, I do miss the monthly paycheck that used to come in but I love the extra pennies I make like selling my chicken eggs

Not to mention my waffles and my wife’s cakes when people are not buying enough eggs. We could start a bakery but hello: we are retired and we just do it for the fun of it!

Now my brother in law is not making a fortune yet selling his pictures. Unfortunately, he is still a far way off to take pictures from celebrities like those 2 latest Brad Pitt hobbies… But again: it’s the hobby part that’s the most important part.