When I first thought about retiring, the obvious question was: What am I going to do when I retire? I thought about it for a few minutes, and my first idea was to have the childhood I missed out on because so much messed up stuff was happening. Even though that didn’t become the main thrust of my retirement, every month I try to take a day and do something that I might have done as a child, although perhaps updated a little. This are short little projects that aren’t worth a write up, but I thought I could write them up in batches of five. Here’s the first five, at least since I started my Icosipental Plan.
Category: 25-years
So I decided to reorganize my board games, shifting the storage to mostly vertical. I thought I would post about the experience and what I learned about doing in.
Since moving back to Charlottesville, I have gotten back into board games. I’m probably playing more board games these days than I ever have in my life. I now own over 200 games (or over 2,500 depending on how you define “game” and “own”). I play games two to four nights a week, mostly at a board game night at a local game store that I helped revive. I’m also on my computer a lot, programming and analyzing and reading and so on. You can play board games online these days, including at a place called Board Game Arena (BGA). Sounds like a perfect place for me, right? Except for the crippling anxiety.
In the summer of 2025, we moved my mom into assisted living. It was a complicated and exhausting project that took months to do.
In the past couple of years I have not only been playing a lot of board games, but I have been working on rebuilding my collection of board games after the minimalism purge of the noughties. Being a somewhat obsessive statistician, I had a spreadsheet where I was keeping track of all of these games. But I had some problems with the spreadsheet, and so I wanted to redo it, but that was going to be a lot of work.
I really enjoy computer programming. It’s what I started doing when I first retired, and what I still do because it brings me joy. Over the years I have collected a file of programming project ideas. One of them is based on a quote that I can’t remember the source of. It was something like “to learn how to program games, take six simple, classic games and program them.” I was originally going to do this is Pygame, since I’m mainly a Python programmer, but then I learned about Unity. I decided to do the six games thing in Unity, but Unity doesn’t support Python, so I decided to learn C# (pronounced “cee-sharp”), which it does support.
Back in March I finished a two month project to clean out the excess stuff from my condo. This is the latest episode in a long see saw of my life. I’m hoping it’s the final episode of the see saw, but I doubt it.
Last week I finished the Nand to Tetris online course taught by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken, after seven months of working on it (part time). This is a course where you design and computer from the ground up, starting with the smallest of logic gates. Then you program the computer, creating a simplified version of the Java programming language and writing an entire operating system in that language. I’ve been programming for decades, and still found it to be a fascinating exploration of what is going on behind the scenes.
I recently completed the Science of Well Being course on Coursera, taught by Professor Laurie Santos. This is sometimes called the Yale Happiness course. I did think there were many useful things in the course, but there was also some poor reasoning and misunderstanding of statistics. I think it is a decent course to take, but you should take the claims of the course with a grain of salt.