It has now been six months since retiring. I set the alarm clock once. You read that right: once. And that was for a car appointment to get it serviced.

I’ll admit that, for some reason, I have been waking near my previously usual wake-up time – about 6:30 – without setting it. There may be something in my environment – a neighbor that goes to work with a noisy vehicle, perhaps – that is triggering this, but I don’t know what it is. It isn’t even the heat / AC because that comes on at 7:00. I just wake up, get out of bed, go downstairs and start the day.

So of the more than 180 days since retiring, I’ve set the alarm clock on a single instance. Though as I type this, I realize that I WAS setting the cell phone alarm when we were traveling (the not-visiting-relatives traveling), but even that wasn’t needed every day.

There is no foreseeable instance where I will need it in the near future either.

The wake-to-radio functionality on the clock broke a few years ago, so I was awoken by that harsh penguin-like (think old Batman) noise. That especially makes me not miss it. So my prediction was right. I predicted that I wouldn’t need it as much.