Don't ask me what Kylie Minogue has to do with the following post. I just think she's hot.

In any event, I was talking to one of my co-workers about retirement plans (meaning what we wanted to do when the days of the 8-5 grind was over). I thought I'd share my retirement plan with you guys because A) I think it's interesting and B) having it on record somewhere will remind me in later years what the plan was in case I forget. :-)

The plan is essentially this: When I retire I want to take my money and travel the world. In the course of that travel I want to hear music in its native locales, take photographs of those performances, place them in a written journal. After the traveling is done, I wanted to collect all of these photographs and writings and turn it into a book. So for example, if I were in Japan I'd like to watch Kabuki theatre and listen to a concert that uses native Japanese instruments. You get the idea.

This is actually a goal I had since I started undergraduate college. I always thought it would be fun to travel the world and journal what it's like to hear native music in native locations. Someone in my sophmore year suggested that when I got to grad school I should request funding and make it my graduate project -- of course that would mean not being at school for at least a year, plus I didn't think I was mentally ready for such an undertaking. I think by the time I got into my twilight years I would know exactly what I wanted to do and I'd be able to do it without the restrictions of a job or college or anything like that.

My co-worker had suggested that I create a blog when I start this and then take the blog posts and modify them into a book. It's a great idea except when I retire who knows what the new social mediums will be. Will we even have books, for example? We'll probably be using the latest Kindles for everything.

So one of the things I've been doing to kind of get in the spirit of this goal was to check out the world music category in Zune Marketplace. I spend at least an hour there a week just sampling various tracks from China, Japan, Africa, you name it.

Have you guys tried the World Music category in Zune Marketplace? Have you given any thought to what you want to do when you ultimately retire?