Early Retired Life – 01.23 – A New Focus

We hope 2023 is off to a great start for you! Happy Lunar New Year for those of you who celebrate! Here’s hoping that the year of the rabbit will be “hoppy” and full of success! For us, January was a month of new focus.

Writing contests

Dragon Gal has decided she’s going to spend this year entering writing contests. External deadlines motivate her to work, so contests are perfect. At the end of 2022, she entered two stories and one non-fiction piece. This month, she entered 4 poems and decided to write a one-act play. She has very little experience with poetry, and zero with play writing, but the least that could happen is that she gets better at writing in new genres. 

Besides writing, Dragon Gal spent this month combing through websites and making a spreadsheet of contests she could enter. She’s decided to only enter contests that don’t require an entry fee. She also went to a local Writer’s Circle meeting to see if she can join a community of writers.

Entering writing contests has given her a focus in her monthly activities. It’s also motivated her to have more discipline and spend less time playing card games online. She was pretty much writing every day this month. When she approaches her projects with this amount of intensity, she usually burns out. But she only got tired from all her writing at the end of the month, right before they took their trip to Central America.  

So far, she’s had 2 rejections, but she’s not discouraged. These contests are just a way to build up her writing portfolio. Eventually someone will like her writing enough to publish it!    

Jury Duty

Dragon Gal was called into jury duty and after rescheduling twice, ended up going early in January in the hopes that there wouldn’t be that many cases on the docket, only to find out that there were 600 cases she day she’d gone.

It was nice that the city was still enforcing a mask mandate in the court, and the jury room had clearly labeled spaces for people to sit so that there was social distancing. Fortunately, by some miracle, none of the jurors were called into trial and she got dismissed at around 2:30pm. 

Trip Planning

Dragon Guy was busy with more future trip planning (one of his favorite hobbies!).

We’ve decided to embrace taking solo trips as part of our early retirement this year. Dragon Gal has done a few in the past, but Dragon Guy hasn’t. (He has done business trips and visited friends on separate trips, but not a trip totally by himself.)

In April, Dragon Guy is taking a solo cross country train trip. He will be taking a train from Washington, D.C. to Chicago and then one from Chicago to Portland, OR. He will spend a night in Chicago to break up the trip. In total, it will be three nights on a train. He will be in a roomette, which is a private room that can ultimately sleep two. Since he purchased the roomette, he will not have anyone else sharing it with him. He will have a couple of nights in hotels, which he will use points to pay for. Dragon Gal was not really interested in taking the train, especially for something this long, so this is perfect for his solo trip. Dragon Guy hopes to be able to see some friends in both D.C. and Chicago while spending the night there.

In July, we will be going on an Alaska Cruise out of Seattle with Dragon Guy’s family. We just finalized plans to visit the National Parks in Washington before going on the cruise. We have our National Park annual pass through September, so we are trying to take advantage of it while we can. There are 3 National Parks in Washington — Mount Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades. We plan to visit all 3 of them on our summer travels.

Dragon Guy is also in the preliminary stages of planning a trip for us to California to visit a bunch of National Parks there, just before our annual pass expires. We think we can see 7 additional National Parks on that road trip – Pinnacles, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Yosemite, Lassen Volcanic, and Crater Lake.

And just before the end of the month, we booked airfare using points to go to Cape Town, South Africa.  Thanks to a couple of new credit card bonuses, we had enough American Airlines points to again fly Qatar Airways Business class — this time to Cape Town via Doha (over 24 hours of flying time). For the return trip, we are currently booked on Ethiopian Airlines business class using our United Airlines points.  Based on the availability of the award travel, we will be in South Africa for almost three weeks — our first time in the African continent!

Other News

Voter Registration Recertification – Dragon Guy took training to get recertfied to be a Volunteer Deputy Voter Registrar. The certification expired at the end of last year and he took a one hour online training class to get recertified. With this certification, he can help people register to vote in our county and an adjacent county. He enjoyed particpating in voter registration drives last year and will be eager to start up again soon!

Prolific – Dragon Gal got approved to start earning money by taking surveys on this platform! We learned about it through Fresh Life Advice, who writes about it in his Side Income Reports. Dragon Guy has been on this platform since June 2022, and earned over $1,000. Dragon Gal signed up at the same time as Dragon Guy but was on a waiting list for over 6 months!  

Meeting up with people – This month Dragon Gal met with some high school friends, her cousins, and former work colleagues. She is still trying to be safe about COVID, so she meets people outside or wears a mask indoors.   

Interviewing students – Like last year, Dragon Gal interviewed high school students applying to her alma mater. She enjoys meeting people in the next generation and hearing about what they are up to! 

Editing a friend’s book – Last year Dragon Gal volunteered to read and edit about 80 pages of a friend’s book. This month, she edited part 2 of the book, which was about 35 pages and met with the author to give feedback.  She always loves working with other people on their writing and being part of their creative process.

Volunteering – Dragon Gal volunteered three times this month for her friend’s food service business. She also signed up to be a library volunteer, and after some phone interviews and a background check, she’s been accepted! She will begin volunteering in February after she goes through training. 

Dine Arounds – We decided once a month we would start having lunch dates. We will take turns picking restaurants and surprising the other person. It doesn’t have to be a restaurant we’ve never been to. We started last month and so far we have gone to an Indian fusion and an empanada place. Delicious!  

FINAL THOUGHTS

It’s been an intense month for Dragon Gal. The mother of one of her close friends has been hospitalized for about a month. In the end, the family decided to take the mother off the ventilator and let her go peacefully. It was gut wrenching to witness her friend and the family go through this. Dragon Gal made an effort to connect with her friend every week and listen to her process her pain.

Death happens, and it is real. Increasingly, she’s accepting her mortality with a little less fear. It’s a reminder for Dragon Gal to be as kind as possible to others and to be grateful.    

How has has your 2023 been so far?