Well, well, well. what do you know? It’s already been 7 years since I retired early exactly on this day in 2018. There isn’t much to write about since nothing much has changed since what I wrote last year when I completed 6 years in retirement.


I still spend most of my time with my daughter but it is becoming less and less as she is growing up and likes to spend more time with herself or with her friends. Still home schooling her, but now goes to an alternate school for a couple of days a week to have company.


The next big chunk of my time goes in my hobby projects. I have recently started a home lab and tinkering with it, which is taking up a lot of my time. Running and maintaining containers. Build a dashboard to monitor health of containers and upgrading them etc.


You may or may not know but I have installed several sensors (temperature, light, motion etc) in my house way back in 2012. I wrote my own home automation code in arduino or android devices to control several relays in the house to automatically turn on/off the lights and fans based on motion sensors and ambient light and temperature. This was my passion and I used to work on it after coming back from work.


But after having a kid and work taking up too much of my free time, I decided to retire early and spend more time with my daughter and give any left over time to this passion of mine. So I continued to upgrade my home automations.


Most recently I moved all my code into Home Assistant. It is better in some ways and inferior in some other ways compared to my own home automation code. So now I am trying some sort of hybrid approach where most of the home automation is done by Home Assistant and some is handled by my own code.


I installed several new sensors including mmWave sensors instead of PIR sensors, pressure and humidity sensors all wired up to several ESP32 devices which communicate with my Home Assistant running in a container in my Home Lab. I also moved part of my solar panel project to Home Assistant. Welcome to my messy world :).


Lately I am experimenting with moving all my expense tracking from spreadsheets to self-hosted Firefly III and Actual Budget. Again, I feel these tools are great but not as flexible as just using plain old spreadsheet. But updating and maintaining spreadsheets is very cumbersome and time consuming. These tools make things easier after the initial hurdle, but don’t have all the features I want. I am currently figuring out which is better and go with one of them.


Next, I am rewriting some of my old investment planning tools in Flutter so it will easier to maintain. My older NodeJS apps are harder to maintain and keep updating.


Meanwhile, our farm project had come to a screeching halt, due to some snafu. That puts the project on hold for a few years before we can continue working on it further.


All these projects are keeping me so busy that I am not getting enough time to write blog posts. I will probably write more details about them in future posts at some point when I have more time.


Then most of my time goes in spending time with family. Watching movies or cricket or long walks or visiting places or friends.


Finally, my workouts take up any left over time. I continue to go to Karate classes and have started teaching some students (for free) in my Karate class. Since I am black belt now, I am allowed to teach :). I don’t think I am good teacher at all and I don’t teach anyone except my daughter in general, but this is an exception. I also workout at home to keep myself fit.


Our financial health is also ok. I won’t say great, but we are surviving. Still, 7 years is a very short time. So I will have to see if I can maintain the finances far into the future.


Those were all the updates I wanted to give after my 7 years in retirement. Hoping for more exciting years in my retirement.