I’m retired (just over a year now), so in theory, every day is, in effect, an unpaid vacation day.
In practice, I usually get up just before my telecommuting wife so I can make her coffee. (That’s my job, coffee boy. The pay isn’t good, but the benefits are great.) This isn’t even as onerous as it sounds: most of the folk she works with are on the West Coast (we’re in Denver), so she rarely has any meetings before 9, often after, and gets up accordingly.
(The flip side to this is that meetings that start at 4pm for the folk out there start at 5 here, and sometimes they schedule 5pm “only time we can squeeze it in” meetings that start at 6pm here. It’s still, net-net, a nice arrangement.)
We’re just coming off the holiday season. My wife took vacation from Christmas Eve through last week. Which was great for her, but kind of threw me. Yes, I could sleep to 10 or 11, which is my Natural State (I also tend to go to sleep around 1, so it’s not that overindulgent), and I had no problem if that’s how late she wanted to sleep.
On the other hand, it really felt like, as a Standard Operating Procedure for more than a weekend, it meant I was losing half the day. And, unlike some retired folk who bang around the house, desperately searching for something to fill their time or give their existence meaning, I have a lot of stuff, mostly fun, that keeps me busy for several hours a day.
So, in some ways, it was kind of a relief when the alarm rang.
My wife’s likely to retire either this year or next (the main thing that’s held her back is keeping my son on her excellent health insurance coverage, and he ages out of that this year). How will it look when nothing aside from things we choose require us to get out of bed at any given hour? Will we set an alarm? Will we sleep the morning away, or get up and do things? What sort of hobbies and projects does she plan to occupy her time? What could we do together?
Lots of questions. It will be interesting to see how the answers turn out.