Last night hubs and I celebrated my birthday at The Blue Ridge Grille in Buckhead. It’s one of our favorite places to celebrate extra special events. The food and service were superb, as usual. I think the last time we were there was to celebrate hubs retiring from Home Depot. That’s been well over two years ago.

Anyhow, this particular birthday meant I finally achieved the “magic age” for my teacher retirement benefits to kick in. (No more mortgage level health insurance premiums either!) We celebrated what’s ahead as we finally exit the holding pattern we’ve been in the past two years. Retirement officially begins August 1st.

We don’t expect much to change when it comes to our day-to-day activities. We’re just excited to have the funds previously earmarked to pay exorbitant health insurance premiums now available to tackle some minor home improvement projects and put toward a couple more bucket list trips. Sadie is also slated to get a new dogmobile (my SUV) by year end.

We’ve also started thinking seriously about where we’d like to live in retirement. That’s a tough one. We love our location and neighborhood, but are not happy about future plans for our area. I’ll be attending a DOT open house today about the future express lanes coming to the top end of I-285. I’m curious to see how they plan to add toll lanes in each direction with all the multimillion dollar homes along the proposed path between Vinings and Sandy Springs. I’m more interested in how the planned entrance/exit ramp less than 1 mile from our home will impact the surrounding residential neighborhoods.