Half a year of retirement!

Some thoughts looking back on my first six months as a retiree.
Reflections
Retirement
Author

Sharon Machlis

Published

February 2, 2025

It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been retired for half a year already. In some ways, the time has flown by. In other ways, those work-filled days feel like a l-o-n-g time ago.

One key insight I’ve discovered: The same things that made me happy when I was working still make me happy now.

In a lot of cases, they’re things I used to do off work hours: traveling, walking around a great city, chilling with my husband, seeing family and friends, running, reading a good book, sitting outside in good weather, enjoying nature . . . . And I’ve got more time for all that now.

In other instances, though, things that made me happy were in fact tasks I did at work. Writing. Coding. Figuring out how to answer challenging data questions. Helping to automate colleagues’ drudge work.

But it turns out I can do versions of most of those “work things” now, too -- and they can be just as satisfying. All I need to do is lower my need for external validation.

For example, I’m still writing! I find this blog very satisfying, even if its audience may only be in the dozens and not the tens of thousands or more I used to have. (Although I plan to ease up on the once-a-week posting schedule – I’m having less frequent new revelations about retirement than when I started.) I’m doing a little freelancing, on topics I find engaging and really want to share.

And, I’ve at least partially solved two of my own coding challenges.

One: While I was working, I created a Web page that automatically generated a searchable calendar of some local events from a few sources I could easily Web scrape. You can see the result at framinghamevents.com. I made the site for the general public, which that means there are a lot of things in there that don’t necessarily interest me, including library events for kids and teens.

Now that I’m retired, I decided I’d like a version just for myself, filtering out those kids and teens events as well as some others and adding in new sources. And yes, I included the Callahan Center now for us 55+ residents, although removing a lot (but not all) of events like card games and sewing groups that don’t interest me.

I also thought it would be fun to include a generative AI chatbot in my personalized calendar that could answer questions like “Tell me about dance classes this week” and “Are there any crafting events on Wednesday?” For now, the chatbot just looks ahead to the upcoming seven days and excludes the Y (I’m thinking of joining but not a member yet).

If you want to see my calendar, I put it online at https://smach.shinyapps.io/mycal/. Note: If you’re local and might actually want to use the information, make sure to click through to the original source! I’ve also included a couple of sites that are difficult to automatically scrape and so may be prone to error.

The other: I’ve got another prototype working based on an app I created several years ago that automatically downloads local government meeting agendas and minutes and makes them searchable, too. However, the search requires an exact match. For example, if you search for “hiking trails” but a document says “recreational trails”, it won’t match. In this era of generative AI, I wanted to see if I could use technology similar to what powers ChatGPT to answer questions about Framingham meeting minutes.

That turned out to be a more complicated problem than I’d hoped. But I finally got a working prototype up, which was very satisfying. It’s at https://search-framingham-meeting-minutes.streamlit.app/ if you want to take a peek. Caution: If you’re using this to find info you actually want to use, make sure to double-check the source documents. And read the FAQ.

Some other thoughts at my retirement half-year mark:


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