Today is the 29th anniversary of my retirement from the Colorado Air National Guard.  Forced out at age 60.  I retired aa few months short of my birthday because I had a part time job at an electronics parts store in Denver and I wanted to make it full-time until I reached 62 and could start drawing early Social Security.  That's when we moved to Roswell.

Retirment was great!  We travelled a lot.  We took a month and drove to Florida to visit a forum flight simmer.  Then up the east coast and crossed over into Canada somewhere in northern New York.  We stopped at Toronto to meet two more forum buddies and then on to Edmonton to visit another forum buddy who was also a pilot and gave me an aerial tour of Edmonton in C-172.  Then it was on to Lethbridge and another flight simming forum buddy before coming back home through the Rocky Mountains.

During this period I was designing quite a bit of scenery for FS5.1 through FS2004 for both Flightsim.Com and California Classics. My last upload was a bunch of flightsim desktop icons I uploaded to Flightsim.com in 2009.

And I had a flying buddy.  We would go out to the FBO once or twice a month and split the cost of a C152.  We would fly to places like Sierra Blanca or Tatum or Carlsbad.  One of us would fly out and the other would fly back.

All this time during the summer Betty and I were out fly fishing and hiking in the Sacramento mountains.  And we were both volunteers at the wildlife refuge where I became a wildlife photographer.  I spent three or four days a week out there unless we were doing something else.

Our last hike was when I was 82.  My feet and legs just couldn't hold up anymore.  I became sort of housebound.  I took to reading, writing more of my boyhood stories and Marine Corps experiences, watching old movies on TV and, of course, flight simming.

I've lost interest in writing and spend a good part of the day on P3Dv5.

I only fly 2 or three times a week.  The rest of the time I am collecting airplanes and setting up airport parking scenarios for my Kodiak around the world with desktop icons so I can go right to my airplane.  I do have flight plans for an around the world flight circumnavigating the continents and fly one of those once a week

I organize my desktop with Fences and I can get 20 icons in a row and 7 rows on a page.  To date I have two and a half desktop pages or over 250 Kodiak startup scenarios and 120 collection aircraft icons.  There's no end in sight.

I also modify the panels of each aircraft I collect.  I remapped the keyboard and my Saitek some time ago so things like the radio, GPS, upper or lower switch panel, autopilot, PFD and MFD are brought up with the same keyboard keystroke or Saitek button for every aircraft in my collection.

That's 29 years of retirement in a nutshell.  No complaints.  I'll just have to keep trucking until my time comes.  I thought it would have been earlier than this, but wasn't.  I don't have the energy of the energizer bunny, but I still have the endurance however limited.

Noel    

Edited August 12, 20223 yr by birdguy

If you retired 20 years ago today at age 60, that makes you 80 now.  But you said your last hike was at age 82.  Did one of them Roswell aliens capture you and put you in a time warp?  😜

A senior moment Bob.  I retired 29 years ago.  I was going to put down that someone who enlisted in one of the services on same day I retired and stayed in for 20 years has been retired for almost decade now.

I sometimes get confused like that.

I edited the original post to 29 years.

Last week my wife and I celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary.  We went out to dine and I told the waitress it was our 58th wedding anniversary.  Betty had to correct me.

Noel

7 hours ago, birdguy said:

Today is the 29th anniversary of my retirement from the Colorado Air National Guard.  Forced out at age 60.  I retired aa few months short of my birthday because I had a part time job at an electronics parts store in Denver and I wanted to make it full-time until I reached 62 and could start drawing early Social Security.  That's when we moved to Roswell.

Retirment was great!  We travelled a lot.  We took a month and drove to Florida to visit a forum flight simmer.  Then up the east coast and crossed over into Canada somewhere in northern New York.  We stopped at Toronto to meet two more forum buddies and then on to Edmonton to visit another forum buddy who was also a pilot and gave me an aerial tour of Edmonton in C-172.  Then it was on to Lethbridge and another flight simming forum buddy before coming back home through the Rocky Mountains.

During this period I was designing quite a bit of scenery for FS5.1 through FS2004 for both Flightsim.Com and California Classics. My last upload was a bunch of flightsim desktop icons I uploaded to Flightsim.com in 2009.

And I had a flying buddy.  We would go out to the FBO once or twice a month and split the cost of a C152.  We would fly to places like Sierra Blanca or Tatum or Carlsbad.  One of us would fly out and the other would fly back.

All this time during the summer Betty and I were out fly fishing and hiking in the Sacramento mountains.  And we were both volunteers at the wildlife refuge where I became a wildlife photographer.  I spent three or four days a week out there unless we were doing something else.

Our last hike was when I was 82.  My feet and legs just couldn't hold up anymore.  I became sort of housebound.  I took to reading, writing more of my boyhood stories and Marine Corps experiences, watching old movies on TV and, of course, flight simming.

I've lost interest in writing and spend a good part of the day on P3Dv5.

I only fly 2 or three times a week.  The rest of the time I am collecting airplanes and setting up airport parking scenarios for my Kodiak around the world with desktop icons so I can go right to my airplane.  I do have flight plans for an around the world flight circumnavigating the continents and fly one of those once a week

I organize my desktop with Fences and I can get 20 icons in a row and 7 rows on a page.  To date I have two and a half desktop pages or over 250 Kodiak startup scenarios and 120 collection aircraft icons.  There's no end in sight.

I also modify the panels of each aircraft I collect.  I remapped the keyboard and my Saitek some time ago so things like the radio, GPS, upper or lower switch panel, autopilot, PFD and MFD are brought up with the same keyboard keystroke or Saitek button for every aircraft in my collection.

That's 29 years of retirement in a nutshell.  No complaints.  I'll just have to keep trucking until my time comes.  I thought it would have been earlier than this, but wasn't.  I don't have the energy of the energizer bunny, but I still have the endurance however limited.

Noel    

Hey, Noel...Living in Roswell, have you ever seen anything in the sky that was questionable?  What are your thoughts?

Stan

3 hours ago, spilok said:

Hey, Noel...Living in Roswell, have you ever seen anything in the sky that was questionable?  What are your thoughts?

Stan, I've never seen anything flying in the sky that was questionable.  My mind is open on the incident.  It's not impossible that a craft crashed that night.  There were severe thunderstorms that night.  On the other hand if the subjects didn't know what that type of balloon was they could have been mistaken.  I don't know and don't expect to ever know.

Noel

Congrats on a nice retirement.

Keep on truckin Noel, I love your stories.

All the Very Best

Phil

Living your best life my friend. I preferred the scenery designs back in the earlier years of this hobby their is a good chance I used your scenery back in those FS5.1 to 2004 years, the community was more community back then, now it is more commercial.

Maybe MSFS will include Mars airports after Elon Musk colonizes it. And then Around The Mars flights will require many hours of patience to set up?