By a big margin the question I have been asked the most since March 27 has been: “How are you enjoying your retirement?”

Depending on my mood as well as who is doing the asking, my answers have ranged from “it sucks” to “bored out of the remnants of my mind” to “disappointing given the 63-year wait.”

But things have changed, and my stock answer has become: “Now that I am working again, I am enjoying retirement.”

The COVID-19 lockdown has been to blame for my inability to embrace the fruits of 46 years of uninterrupted labor, but sitting around all day trying to find something to do is not my idea of a party. Going into retirement, I was convinced that I would excel at inertia. Work has got me moving again.

I was sure I was pretty much a finished product, but retirement has changed me in subtle ways.

Being on Social Security and having limited income potential has inspired me to look at expenses to trim where I can. I have never had a lot of money, but I acted as if I did. Now that Business degree is finally coming into play as on one side there is short list under “Revenue,” and the other a longer list under “Expenses.”

I don’t think anyone who has known me would have considered me to be frugal, although I have been called “cheap” often, typically after I ordered one Bud Lite when there were two of us in the booth. It was more insult than observation.

It occurred to me a couple of weeks back that I might be drifting toward frugality when getting to work on time denied me a second morning cup of coffee, and instead of tossing the Keurig cup into the garbage, I decided to give it another chance the next day to see if it were tolerable. Not too bad. I have calculated the annual savings at about $120.

I also find myself hoarding twist ties and rubber bands, eating more chicken and less beef, having developed a sudden taste for $6.99 red wine, and searching longer for my wayward golf ball while also keeping an eye out for any strays.

Speaking of strays, retirement has made me the old man with a cat. Actually, cats. I am convinced they have an innate ability to sniff out retirees, probably concluding we might enjoy the company and have a nice nest egg. So in my case, they are half right.

Boots, a tuxedo cat, arrived two years ago, in advance of my retirement, but I believe he sensed that the end was near. He is a rather famous feline on Facebook. Perhaps you have read about Boots.

A couple of weeks back, Juice, an orange tabby, started hanging out in my yard. He is a feral, and has yet to enjoy the comforts of the inside of my home, but he is rather dependable when it comes to feeding time.

Then a third feral showed up, obviously having heard about the retiree on Cy Williams Boulevard who was an easy mark. He or she is much less dependable, so I have not yet deemed it worthy of a name.

Another change, a welcome one, has been that not much bothers me anymore. When I awakened each day with a blank canvas to populate with need-to-know news and a deadline to get that done, I got aggravated if that pursuit were detoured. Except for the COVID-induced absence of sports to watch, which — fingers crossed — appears to be working itself out, there isn’t much that forces a rise in my blood pressure.

An exception is weeds. I used to walk by them in my yard oblivious to their presence; now, I stop and angrily wrestle them from the ground.

A retiree trap I have yet to trigger has been the reading each day of obituaries, although I am sure that day is coming. As part of my job, I tried to read the obituaries every day. I wanted them to be correct, and I also found some of them to be interesting, especially the concept of distilling someone’s entire life into a few hundred words.

In more recent years, I played a ghoulish game, keeping count of how many obits were for people who were younger than me. If you were to plot my findings on a graph, you would have seen the line trending uphill.

With a birthday in 11 days, I don’t need to watch to know that line is about to steepen.