Believe it or not, a day in the life of a couple of retired septuagenarian baby boomers can be invigorating and exciting. Aron and I wake up each morning thankful that we can crawl out of bed without too many aches and pains. Some days we get busy right away, and other days we take our time getting started.

Getting busy means feeding our miniature schnauzers (Cleo 14, and her son Chip, 12) their homemade dog food. Some days we head to the back deck or front porch or sun porch or living room with our coffee (his regular, mine decaf or green tea) to watch as much news as we can stomach, while we scour our phones and talk. Four days a week it means me jumping immediately into the shower to tame my bedhead (while Aron feeds the dogs, drinks coffee, and watches the news) so that we can head for the gym.

One of our favorite topics of conversation over coffee is how full our life is, and how fortunate we are to be healthy enough to enjoy a lot of different activities. We hear about people getting stuck in a sedentary lifestyle, and we wonder if it’s because they don’t imagine it being any different. If that’s the case for you, this blog is meant to share what works for us.

When we started to list everything we do, it became evident to us that it might be overwhelming to just post that list. Instead, we decided to start our first blog by breaking one day down into a few activities we might encounter that day, thus the name of this blog post, “Five Activities Today”.

Rather than bore you with our individual biographies and life stories right off, we plan to let that unfold as part of our blog posts, podcasts, and other areas of our Honeyboomer Website.

Activity #1: The Gym

I retired from teaching in 2018, and Aron retired from his job that had something to do with robots and potato chips in December of 2022. We both had put on some pounds and were getting pretty disgusted with our profiles in the mirror, so we decided to take drastic measures to correct that.

We have six outbuildings in our back yard, one of which was a fully outfitted gym with exercise machines, a sauna, and a jacuzzi. I don’t work out on machines, and hate being sweaty, but do enjoy a dip in the jacuzzi every now and then. Aron loves soothing his aching muscles in the jacuzzi, but hadn’t been spending much time exercising. The last time he used the sauna was when he had Covid a couple of years back.

We recently decided to build a new deck onto the gym building, move the jacuzzi out to it, sell the sauna and gym equipment, and convert the gym building to a woodshop. An activity we will discuss at a later date is building chicken coops, which will happen in that workshop.

As we were converting the little-used gym to a chicken coop-building workshop, we made our first trek to the local gym together 29 weeks ago, promising to go four days a week for the rest of our lives. I was already enrolled in Silver Sneakers, and Aron quickly found the weightlifting and body building machines that worked best for him. Out of 29 weeks so far, we have missed a couple of days here and there, took one week-long vacation, and I missed the week of working in the kitchen at church camp; but otherwise we have stuck to our plan. In a future blog, we will share our ideas on exercise as part of a daily routine.

Activity #2: The Grocery

Aron is a gourmet cook. It’s a hobby he has enjoyed for many years. Even his children will tell you they ate gourmet food growing up. By the way, Aron and I have only been married since October 1, 2021. In a future blog, I’ll describe how he pulled off a surprise wedding at the Atlanta Aquarium. He had seven children and I had two. We have stopped counting grandchildren and great-grandchildren because we have well over 45 between us.

We go to the grocery nearly as often as we go to the gym because Aron loves to cook, and we both love to eat. Our trip today was for two gallons of milk, which cost us $114.83. Yes, we can never stop at just milk.

We try valiantly to cook and eat healthy meals, so we picked up some high-protein-low-carb-low-calorie items today for snacks and meals. In a future blog post (since this one is getting way too long), we will share our ideas on healthy eating.

Activity #3: Lunch with Friends

We have met a lot of people over the years through our various activities, separately and then together. By far the most sociable people we have met have been our fellow dancers. I’ll talk about them more in future posts.

Five of us decided to meet for some Greek food at the Greek Village today. Only Laura had eaten there before, and she was eager for us to try it. We dropped off our groceries, changed out of our gym clothes, and hopped back in the car for the 26-minute drive to the next town.

One of the specials was Sausage, Peppers, and Onions in Marinara Sauce. On the specials board, which none of us could clearly read, we thought it might have said “with quinoa”.  Aron and I thought that would be a great “high-protein-low-carb-low-calorie” meal, and Laura agreed. When we ordered, we forgot to ask about the quinoa. When the plates came, they were heaped with linguine—not quinoa. I dug around in mine for the sausage, peppers, and onions. Aron ate half of his and boxed the other half to take home. So much for a low-carb meal! (It WAS delicious!!)

Activity #4: Blog and Podcast Research

Since this whole blog/podcast thing is new to us, Aron spent some time in his office today listening to blogs and podcasts for dummies, or some such thing. I decided to jot down some ideas, and before I knew it, I was writing this blog entry. My husband is very analytical and methodical (from his engineering background), so I can count on him to find all of the facts and develop the plan. He also has a photographic memory, so he will remember everything he has researched—me, not so much. He has moved on to his garage where he is either rebuilding a Corvette engine, checking the hydraulics on a John Deere tractor, rebuilding a 1999 Chaparral boat, or fixing the bumper on his pickup truck (all future blog or podcast topics)—and I am still writing my first blog entry.

Activity #5: Dance Lessons

My parents taught ballroom dance lessons in the 60’s. They started teaching at the American Legion, and eventually rented a huge room over the Pizza King which they magically transformed into a ballroom. Well, not so magically, because I remember helping my dad carry sheet after sheet of drywall up that narrow set of stairs.

My early dance lessons included Foxtrot, Jitterbug, Rumba, and Waltz at the age of 15 when any stray gentleman came to lessons without a partner. No one could jitterbug like my dad–that’s us in the two pictures above, dancing the jitterbug at a wedding some years ago. I didn’t really learn the steps–I just learned to follow his strong lead.

I worked in the coat check room for the Saturday night dances at my parent’s Starlight Ballroom. After my mother ran off with one of her dance students, and my parents subsequently divorced, dancing dropped out of my life for the next 40-some years.

I joined the Senior Center at around age 50 and took up line dancing with my friend Cindy. After my own divorce, I found out that some line dancers also liked to ballroom dance, so I started taking lessons again. I realized that some of my happiest moments were floating around the dance floor to a romantic waltz.

When I created my online dating profile (oh yes, we will have some future blogs about THAT), I made it clear that I was looking for someone who either already danced or would be willing to learn. Aron said he always wanted to learn to dance, so that put a check mark in the plus column for him.

We go to Latin dance lessons once a week, and we have also started ballroom lessons another night a week. We struggled through four weeks of West Coast Swing lessons, and are now learning to Waltz together. We will be happy to share what we’ve learned about social dancing in later blog posts.

Summary

Wow! I wasn’t sure how long a first blog entry should be, but I didn’t imagine when I started that it would be THIS long. Aron and I will most likely take turns blogging, and he will be the master of ceremonies for the podcasts that will spin off from this. Our plan is to share the five main activities that we do some days in hopes that we can inspire, educate, or entertain an audience that is yet to be determined. We are happy to be living life to the fullest, and hope you decide to join us!