As you will find, once you retire, the carving gets to be a lot more enjoyable. The lack of a less defined schedule is great. I find myself spending more and more hours, engrossed while working on sticks. On occasion, my wife will interrupt me to ask about starting dinner, or on days when that's my job, asking when I might be thinking of coming up w. dinner. Eating sawdust and shavings can even distract from chow.
At 66, I could retire, and you've made me think it wouldn't be so bad. But so long as they'll pay me to sit around and think about rocks, I'll probably keep on working. It helps me fund these evening and weekend projects. Maybe I'll just tire of the daily grind and go full-time whittling away my time. ;-)
I'd been in the same job for 37 yrs. full time, and 5 years part time before that. I was pretty burnt out, but was still kind of freaked-out by the thought of not going to work. Spent many months trying to figure out if I should take the offer. A week after I decided to take the offer, I was diagnosed w. congestive heart failure. Guess leaving the job was in the cards.
The thing is, I had at one painted for a living, mostly portraits. I had been an avid amateur pianist. Did some wood sculpture. Adapted to modern tools, and did 3-d modeling for a number of years, and wrote some code for image processing. All that had stopped. Having 2 - 4 hours a days to just be absorbed by carving has returned at least some of my creativity. And, having to go out once every 7 - 10 days to hunt up stick candidates, wow, what a chore.
