The Passing of Time

I awoke this morning to the usual, customary, and quite reasonable bits of e-mail... the AFA Daily Report (which I read in its entirety), the daily Townhall missive (which I largely ignore, save for the political cartoons), overnight comments on EIP posts, and the odd communication from friends and relatives (which is odd in the "once in a while" sense and is not a comment on the content).  The latter which inspired a brief communication between YrHmblScrb and a long-time acquaintance, who noted today is the 43rd anniversary of his discharge from Uncle Sam's Air Force, which led to a brief communication wherein we exchanged views on aging and other such mundane things, the both of us bein' fully retired and lovin' it, for the most part.

My friend and I are sorta the same although very different.  He, on the one hand, did one tour with the Air Force and embarked on a career in The Academy, albeit a career less involved with academics and more involved with research in the field of physics, which career we suspect was highly rewarding... in every sense of the word.  I, as you know, Gentle Reader, chose a different path... in that I screwed around with a USAF career that mostly involved a lot o' beer and other mind-altering substances whilst traipsing around the world at a time when we were confronting an existential threat to our very way of life, or so we 're led to believe.  Then I married well, got serious, and made my bones in a brief but exciting 16-year foray into the Info Technology world after that Air Force thang was done.  All that is water under (or over) the dam, as it were.

But here we are, the both of us, reflecting on the past and thinkin' about gettin' old.  But I paused and reflected on one interesting thing.  My friend brought up the 43rd anniversary of his discharge and I, in turn, remarked that the first of this month marked the 26th anniversary of my retirement from the USAF.  Which is middling strange.  We, as a species, tend to mark the passing of time in increments of five...as in our fifth, tenth, or twentieth  wedding anniversary and such.  Rarely do we ever remark upon the passing of time in single-year increments, which I find passing strange.  Why is that, I wonder?

―:☺:―

Today was an interesting blog-day.  It seems like all my Daily Reads got prolific overnight, so much so that we divided our normal blog-reading into two sittings vice the UCR one, there being THAT much to read and comment upon.  Just to cite one example... Blog-Bud Daphne asked a provocative question today, to wit: 

I doubt I’m the only one feeling a low-level of anxiety about our economy, national debt, unbalanced budget, the Fed’s shenanigans, unemployment, rising prices on basic commodities, incompetent politicians, etc.

[...]

I rarely ask personal questions, but I’m intensely curious about this right now. I really want to know what you’re thinking and experiencing. Are you anxious, worried, at the end of your financial tether or feeling that everything is fine and this bit of government trouble will all blow over soon?

What suggestions or advice do you have to share?

To which I replied...

Are you worried? What kind of preparations are you making if the country goes the way of Greece?

Worried? Slightly, the biggest worry being a Weimar-republic or 1970s South America bout of hyperinflation. Total collapse? Not so much. It could happen in an “anything is possible” way but I think the probability is quite low.

Preparations? Zero debt beyond monthly expenses. I AM considering turning a part of my 401k into gold… of the real, tangible, “hold it your hand” Krugerrand sort… as an inflationary hedge. Nothing much beyond that, though, aside from reading the end-o’-days whack jobs, who I find enormously entertaining. ;-)

About those whack jobs... I'm seein' a whole helluva lot of that "end o' days" rhetoric of late, which includes tales predicting an impending Mad-Max sorta fate for us all.  I don't see any of that stuff happening, whether it's because I lived through the Carter presidency with its double-digit inflation, the "we're all gonna die" backyard bomb-shelter building epidemic of the Eisenhower years, and all that other stuff.  Or mebbe I'm just overly optimistic about things in general.  What's your take, Gentle Reader?  Is the apocalypse at hand?  Or is this just more bid'niz as usual?  Enquiring Minds™ wanna know.