I’m SO. FRIGGING. GLAD. We’re nearly done with the glut of overtime. It’s going to be fiscally painful to give up the extra money but absolute heaven to have entire weekends free. Freedom in this case is relative thing, because now I’m just shifting focus and working from home, albeit with an eye toward really retiring within the next couple of years.
Some of my readers have been with me for a while; some not so much. You have to understand that I’ve been working full time since I was fourteen years old and most of those years I worked substantially more than 40 hours a week. More than I can count I worked 80 hour weeks and I don’t even want to think about how many 60 hour weeks. When my kids were younger I was working 60+ hour weeks and literally didn’t sleep all weekend from when I got home Saturday night until I went to work again on Monday. That’s the only way I could do the laundry and the other things that absolutely had to be done. I was a single mom and had zero help.
Those days are done and gone, thank God. I still put in a buttload of hours from the day I started working all those years ago.
My point is this. I’m so fucking ready to retire that I’m not willing to consider any other options. When you add up all the hours and the grief compounded over the years, I’ve earned retirement and a hell of a lot more.