My name is Ed Atterberry, and I am a (soon to be) retired school administrator for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools in Germany. My retirement will be fully effective on July 3, 2009. My final job was as assistant superintendent of the Bavaria District. My purpose of beginning this blog is to write about items that might interest some of the following groups: Americans living in Germany, retirees (especially those living overseas), DoDDS employees and former employees, people who like to travel in Europe, and perhaps some people who share my hobbies and thoughts on various issues. I will remain in Germany because my wife will remain as a teacher and I will be her dependent. This lady is the Queen of the House, the Queen Bee, and I’ll just refer to her as The Queen or simply Q. Because she doesn’t have a presence on the web, it would not be fair to subject her to the slings and arrows of web existence. We have been blessed with two wonderful daughters. Our elder daughter does have a web presence. She is a writer of some note on the web and you can read her blog at www.citywendy.com. Wendy lives in New York City and will soon be married. Our younger daughter says that I can refer to her as “Child A”, rather than “Number Two”. She is a registered nurse living and working in Texas and specializes in sexual health issues. What’s on my mind at present, as a newbie to retired life, is how to make ends meet on a much-reduced income. I had several ideas on how to supplement my income. One was to be an eBay merchant or a web merchant. Sounds promising, but shipping products from Germany to the States via German Post (using the APO for business is a big no-no) is very expensive. Is my German good enough to try to sell to the German population? I don’t know about that. Another idea was to start a worm farm and sell worms as bait and sell their (ahem) “castings” as fertilizer. Going from being a school administrator to peddling worm crap seems like a natural progression. But some colleagues suggested that I become a writer. This blog will be my first attempt at that, and we’ll see how it goes. I would be very interested in developing discussions about various topics. For example, I have mentioned that I am looking for ideas of how to supplement an income while retired overseas. Any ideas? I’d welcome comments. Future posts will be about travel opportunities, discounts for senior citizens, hobbies, activities, and, oh yes, I’ll write some things about DoDDS after I am off the rolls. I look forward to having you come back and visit. And certainly this site needs an upgrade in its look. Are there any website gurus out there who can offer suggestions for improvement on the header and the look of this site? Retired-Ed (but not quite)
