Working Odd Jobs and Traveling to Quiet Places

November 24, 2025

This is a quiet place, but it takes me a couple hours to get to it.

In my final year of teaching, I promised other teachers that I wasn’t going to go full-hermit during retirement. I said that I might go hermit-adjacent, but I’d still keep somewhat socially active. Well, I think I’ve gone full-hermit. I don’t keep up with anybody on social media. Since most of my friends/family from the 1990s and 2000s have moved or have died, I’ve had to find a new circle of friends/acquaintances, and it’s a much smaller circle of friends/acquaintances. In other words, I have a very quiet life.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the quiet life, and I’m coming back to that in a couple paragraphs.

One of my post-retirement goals was to write/publish a novel, a goal that I’d had since I was in college. I finished the entire process at the beginning of 2024 when I officially self-published The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. When I was putting the final touches on my book, I knew that I’d have to come up with a new goal. I don’t like the idea of marketing my book, so I needed new goals that had nothing to do with writing:

This is from the back cover of my book, The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy.

I like my goals: working odd jobs and traveling to quiet places.

My post-teaching jobs haven’t been that odd. I’m not sticking my face into sewage or anything like that. I have worked part-time at several retail type jobs (not at the same time). I have used my education background for a few part-time jobs. I’ve also monetized a couple of my non-writing hobbies (but not to the point where my hobbies are stressful). None of those jobs by themselves are odd, but people seem to think the combination is odd, especially if you consider my writing; I’m not really making money off of it, but it’s part of what I do.

I’ve been doing the odd jobs consistently for the last few years. Now I’ve started focussing more on the quiet places. I’ve lived in a pretty big city for over 35 years, and it’s not very quiet. Even when you can find a spot surrounded by trees and chirping birds, you can still hear cars in the background (and usually voices too, often women yelling at their boyfriends/husbands over the phone. Why go to a quiet place just to yell at somebody on the phone? Haha!). I had to drive about 90 minutes to find a good spot where I didn’t hear cars in the background. Even then, I occasionally saw helicopters flying overhead. Don’t worry; they weren’t black, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t following me.

After 36 years, I’ve finally moved out of the city. Now I’ve found a town that’s not necessarily quiet (it’s quieter than the city), but it has easy access to lots of quiet places. The town is a decent size, so I can do the odd combination of jobs that I did in the city. Maybe I’ll even add another odd job. There’s always sewage.

I couldn’t find a spot like this in the city. Now, I could come here every day if I wanted to (but I won’t because I don’t want to get bored of it).

Even though I’m keeping up with my blog, my current friends, co-workers, and employers don’t have to worry about me spilling secrets. I’m not the type who sits in my car and complains. I wait about twenty years after something happens to write about it. The exceptions are after a death because the person involved won’t care. If I do write about something, I change names and settings so that nobody (except me) gets associated with anything negative. The only real employment I’ve written about was my first school job in 1989, and I didn’t write about that until 2021. That’s 32 years. In that time, the school was torn down, rebuilt, and then renamed. It’s no longer called Hellhole Middle School. It still might be a hellhole, but I don’t know. A new building can only do so much.

Anyway, the tone on this blog might be changing because the structure of my life has changed. I’m not in a constant state of anxiety while stuck in one of the largest cities in the country. Now I’m in a smaller place and have found quiet places that are only a few minutes away. Even at the quiet places here, women yell at their boyfriends/husbands on the phone. I guess that’s universal.