No Job. New Plan?

It's been a couple months since my sudden retirement, readers, and the days have been calm. Rewarding, even. This is the type of balance I need, at least while the pandemic drags on, Mrs. Done by Forty continues to work, while nearly nine months pregnant, and Toddler AF seeks our attention every moment. It's a lot, but it's a balance we can live with. For me, taking the corporate job out of the routine has added by subtracting. I'm happier. Calmer. More at peace.

What am I doing with my days? The short answer is spending a lot of time with Toddler AF, which means coloring (and buying packs of coloring books when I can find them on sale), reading children's books (and flying through the library's recommended reading lists), teaching him how to type out words on the laptop, squishing playdough into shapes, finding science experiments to do online, and getting all the time in the backyard we can before Arizona's sadistic summer drives us back inside or into the pool.

When he finally, thankfully naps around one, I catch up on reading, ride my bike (though that is not working the past few weeks as it's already too hot by the afternoon), work on the cars a bit (oh yeah, we bought, um, two used cars since I wrote that post about making one car work), taking my new-to-me Saab station wagon out in search of highway onramps, and catching up with friends on the telephone. Or nap. Sometimes I just nap.

Your Purchases Can't Buy You Class

Another Monday, another post chock-full of middle class goodness.

The notion that our economic class is defined, not by our income or our wealth, but by our purchases, is fairly prevalent. If you own a house, or a second car, and take the family on a vacation now and again, maybe that means you're middle class. If you rent and take the bus and don't get time away from work, maybe you're not. Middle class people wear certain types of clothes. They eat certain types of food.

This purchase-defined class structure has a historical basis, and it's been portrayed predictably, and inaccurately, throughout the years in television and in movies.