Daily writing prompt

What were your parents doing at your age?

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This answer isn’t too exciting, but it explains why I want to be retired so badly. Both my parents retired at 62. My mother was seven years older than my dad, so she retired first from the Census Bureau, where she was a supervisor out of the Chicago area for ongoing surveys. (The Census Bureau does not just do the decennial census, but ongoing and occasional surveys like Current Population Studies and Health surveys). Mom retired to do things like cross-stitch projects until my dad caught up with her.

My dad retired from his job as an equipment installer at age 62. He worked at several different places over his career without ever moving from his job. He started at AT&T Long Lines, then Western Electric, then AT&T Technologies, then Lucent Technologies. “Work isn’t fun anymore,” he said, and then it was time for him to retire. The picture above is where my dad worked for many years when he wasn’t installing electronic switching equipment throughout the state.

My parents retired well together. They spent their time doing projects and traveling, usually taking several-day trips through the US. Occasionally they would visit me. My mother would decorate anything that didn’t run away fast enough at Christmas time. I credit some of their longevity to the fact that my mother was a night person, and my dad a morning person, so they had limited time to get on each other’s nerves.

My life is different. First, I will not get to retire till 67, which is when Social Security and Medicare come up for me. I have five years left to go. I don’t know how long I will live past then, because my mom died at 76 from cancer and I don’t know if I take after her. My dad died at 86, so maybe I take after him. We’ll see.

I just feel like I should be retired by now.

I wake up at 5 in the morning, and the first thing I do is check my phone. It says that I have fifteen more minutes before I need to get up, so I read the phone for a while. The news announces that the President has just signed new climate accords mandating an increase in clean fuels over the next 15 years. Those in the fading coal and oil industries will be retrained in solar and wind.

I get dressed and go downstairs to my car. My car is electric, as most of the cars are. The cost has gone down enough that people can afford them. Clean tech is subsidized through tax incentives.

There hasn’t been an air quality alert in three years. Cities are cleaner and asthmatics can breathe better. The world is healing itself, given a chance.

In my office, the hypoallergenic therapy cat saunters by asking to be petted. I pet her and she jumps in my lap. I guess I needed a hug. My cats at home get jealous sometimes.

My coworkers are friendly, relieved of the stress of the environment.the world is a bit kinder of a place.

When your last name is Leach, “Leachie” is a natural nickname.

I think it started in Kindergarten, which is a natural time for kids to figure out that “Leach” > “Leachie”. It continued through school, and I think people even called me that in high school. Not a terribly complicated story.

However, my favorite user name is “Lleachie”. If someone on the web has the nickname “Lleachie”, it’s a good chance it’s me. It’s pronounced like “llama”, with one L. Except for one person from Poland who pronounced it “ill-e-ATCH-ie”, which I’ll forgive him for.

My nickname isn’t exciting, but it has endured.

This is a hard question to answer, because the one thing I “can’t live without” is my iPhone, and I don’t know whether that is a luxury or necessity these days. I use it for work, I use it for entertainment, I use it to record my carbs every day. I read and compose email, I keep up with people I know — it’s a tool that’s no longer a luxury to me.

At the same time, it’s a luxury. I pay a decent amount of money for my iPhone, although I only replace it after several years. I have lived without a smartphone, but I used to have a Palm Pilot back in the days before the iPhone. (I remember the Palm Pilot for its tendency to regurgitate all its data and become useless until synched on the computer.)

I suppose I could live without my iPhone, but it would have to be a different world, one in which I didn’t get daily emails from my students or have to fill out paperwork for them. One where I don’t need a handy reference for counting carbs. One where my life was a lot slower than it is now.

Daily writing prompt

What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?

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In my undergraduate years, my major was Foods in Business, a major designed to position people into the food industry. This was not what I ultimately did with my life, having discovered Family and Consumption Economics, and my life’s work, my junior year. But as an undergraduate, I wanted to work in a consumer affairs position, or even better, in a test kitchen.

I took a class my senior year called Food Science, where we spent the first half of the semester learning the chemical and physical properties of food, and the second half of the semester testing hypotheses about food. Mine was testing for substitutes for butter in baking poundcakes — margarine, butter flavored shortening, and regular shortening with butter buds flavoring. (Note: people preferred shortening over everything, including butter.) I fell in love with test kitchen work and, if it weren’t for the fact that I loved the thought of graduate school more, I might have gone into test kitchen work.

So, if I had a choice of any job to step into for a day, I would walk into a test kitchen. I think I remember the basics 40 years later — standardized recipes where one weighs all the ingredients on a scale (including a very sensitive one for small amounts like baking soda and seasoning), tasting rooms with good ventilation, white walls, and neutral lighting, testing of texture, crumb, and viscosity using simple and complicated testing. I think I can do it for a day with very little coaching.