How I spent my retirement

* I retired early by academic standards, seeing that my scientific interests were no longer fashionable and hoping to have enough stamina to do something satisfying that ought to be done. What I did was recreational music, recreational inventing, recreational home restoration, recreational inquiry. It might have been more satisfying had one of these been remunerative. I imagined myself filling a societal need for uplifting recreation as technological advances in human productivity would shorten work weeks. I didn't anticipate that smart phones, social media and video games would come to dominate people's leisure time.
* Back in the mid 90s, I was in the "Road to Ruin Ramblers", that played in and was dismissed with cause from several lower-broad venues. Owing to this experience, song ideas came to me. One of them, "Repo Man" seemed to have commercial potential. Two that happened to be video'd were "Road Trip" and "One Christmas Eve".
* Well before the Road-to-ruin days, we had a garage band called "Outbound Freight", that was mostly social picking, though we played for the occasional birthday party or civic gathering. It occurred to me that a book of favorite country parables might be useful for future garage pickers, so I assembled such a book, called "Country Pathos, Country Soul". Getting licenses was too expensive without some kind of institutional collaborator, which did not materialize, so I dropped the project. There was also the "Budget Bluegrass Band", that was constituted in various configurations as needed since the 80s.
* My wife who immigrated from Germany in the 50s asked me to lead some Christmas songs for a gathereing of German Americans in the early 90s. Hoping to share those songs with regular Americans, I composed English lyrics and various arrangements for a bunch of them. I managed to talk the Nashville Parks Recorder Consort into performing several of these arrangements. For example, "Sweetly the bells" and "Holiest Night". They also performed my arrangement of "Silent Night".
* Several times in my life I was in the right place at the right time, eg when I encountered my mentor, Rollo Park, when I met my wife to be, Lieselotte Wilde, and when my church decided to create and present orchestral arrangements of music by members. Our music director, Michael Graham, arranged several of the German Christmas songs that I had worked on, incluiding: Sing and Ring and Quietly Rustles the Snow.
* Back in the late 90s, I began trying to engage people in gospel singing with bluegrass accompaniment. I assembled a group, "Gospelaires", that performed in my church's less formal services about once per quarter. Eventually, we established Wednedsay-evening singalongs during the summers in Woodmont Christian Church. At about the same time, we established the Second-Sunday Singalong in the Bellevue Christian Church. As these two programs progressed, I worked on a two-volume song book of bluegrass-compatible gospel songs and hymns one volume containing regular scores for singers, the other containing lyrics and chords for pickers.
* Also back in the 90s, I tried out several dobro capos and, finding none that suited me, I designed my own. Eventually, I thought others might like my design, so I patented it and set out studying machine-tool technology so as to manufacture it. I produced several in each of five sizes, as resophonic guitars come in several specifications. The capo is essentially a modified scalene-triangular prism with maximal difference between maximal and minimal heights. To easily make one height half way between the maximal and minimal, it was conventient to derive a formula for characteristics of a triangle of known heights.
* Having seen that I could produce and prosecute a patent application on my own (text, drawings, claims) I contemplated an invention whenever I had trouble with a project or when an untoward event occcurred that might be ameliorated by some new product. In revising some electrical wiring in my garage and basement, I decided it would be easier to join several larger wires if the junction box were shallower. It occurred to me that the solid elements of ammunition could be labeled hence traceable to the person who bought it retail.