When I was working inside the zone controlled HVAC of my office all those years, thoughts of retirement were sort of my happy place.
I’d let my mind drift for a minute to a life that didn’t have so much stress and endless activity.
Now that I am retired, I realize that while I have lowered the stress level in a very big way, I’m still so active. And I’m not complaining, believe me. I so didn’t want to be one of those people who retired to the air conditioning and the recliner. I’d seen this first hand and it was always sort of sad. So when I retired, the first thing that we had to do was to sell our home. That meant upgrading the HVAC equipment among other things. But we also lucked out in a big way. My retirement and our selling the house coincided with the huge real estate market in our area. We got a great price on our family home and we were off to the land of the heat pump. The first thing we did was listen to some friends who’d been living down here a while. The one thing we paid really close attention to was that we had to acclimate to the heat. Just staying inside the air conditioning all summer to avoid the heat was not the best strategy. It just made dealing with the high heat and humidity even worse. So we jumped on that right away. We waited til late in the spring to even turn on the HVAC cooling. This allowed us to enjoy the summer outside.