Let's meet at the hacienda...

Well the time has come for me to unveil my wife's top 10 things she wants to do when she retires. I did not tell her what my top 10 things were until she had plenty of time to answer the question on her own. She does not read my blog, so her answers were not influenced by my answers. She did not make this experiment easy. She listed 5 things very quickly, but it took a lot of time to get her list up to 7. Trying to get her to list more than 7 items was like pulling teeth and for fear of me risking the loss of life and limb, I finally let her off the hook. Without further ado, here are her "7" top things to do when she retires in no particular order:

1. Travel to Europe
2. Vacation in St Thomas
   
3. Golfing
4. Leisure reading
5. Volunteer work
   
6. Part time job
7. Exercise

Okay! So what did we learn from this little experiment? Are we in trouble? Do we have work to do? I don't think we are in horrible shape, but yes we have work to do. There are some things where my wife and I are in alignment. Travel and golf are on both of our lists. She was quite surprised that I wanted to visit Ireland, and excited I might add. We have both always liked to play golf together, so golf on both lists is no surprise. The fact that she has a part time job and volunteer work on her list is indicative of her high level of energy and probably her knowing that she will be miserable if she has too much idle time on her hands when she retires. There is nothing wrong with that. If our lists were exactly alike, then I would say that we were definitely in trouble. I don't think being joined at the hip is necessarily healthy. Having identical lists would not have been the ideal result of this experiment. Communication between my wife and I about the really important things in our lives is an ideal result. No trick plays in the fourth quarter. We may modify our game plan before the end of the game, but we will be playing as a team. Bring on the competition!