When I start this blogging adventure in January 2021, Beth and I were living in the Pentagon City area of Northern Virginia, waiting for life to get back to normal after this COVID 19 pandemic. At that time I worked for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), having spent most of my professional career in the Navy. We were also arranging for our retirement home to be built down in Tennessee in 2021, and ended up making monthly round trips down there to keep track of the progress. We weren’t sure when I was going to retire. We initially planned on moving into the retirement home in late 2021 with me teleworking from TN in 2022 and retiring at the end of that year. Instead, I ended up retiring from the FAA at the end of 2021 and we moved down to TN in early January 2022. We’ve been here now two years and “the plan” continues to evolve- we both ended up doing part time work starting in mid-2022, then in August 2023 I moved back into a full time position with the State Department, working remotely here in TN, with the occasional trip to DC. Each step is chronicled in the blog posts. We’re getting smarter, still learning the retirement dynamics, still learning about the area (the deer are feeding in our back yard as I type this), occasionally adding things to the new home, and still considering all our options as to how we are going to spend time- there are many possibilities. I still hope to get wiser by hearing from you through this blog. Thanks for your comments!