One solution to a social media dilemna

I have a problem with LinkedIn. For those whose use of social media is limited to purely 'personal use' tools such as Facebook, Plurk, or Google+, LinkedIn is a social media site for professionals, used mostly for keeping track of former coworkers/managers/employees, and for posting your own professional status updates.  I made fairly frequent use of it up to a year or so ago, and have a pretty good number of contacts.

It's pretty cool to be able to find people I worked with 20 years ago and see how their careers progressed, or to see where people who've left one employer turn up.  And of course it is a vital tool for someone thinking of moving on from wherever they are currently employed.

A lot of the people I worked with are connecting to each other, and I still get the occasional request to write a recommendation for a former employee or colleague.  Which leads to my problem.  In the past year I have truly moved on and away from the field I worked in for 20 years.  Most of the people who made up what I considered my 'social circle' actually fall into that grey area of work-friends: really neat people who are a pleasure to talk with but who have nothing in common outside of the professional sphere.

Now that I've left that profession, I find the majority of my contacts are just that: professional contacts who, it happens, are also pretty cool people and who I really enjoyed working with and knowing all these years.  But I chose to leave, and without a common profession we really have nothing in common strong enough to overcome that.

What I'm doing now is so different I can't really add it to my LinkedIn profile.  It just doesn't fit with the rest of my resume, you might say. I don't want to leave my profile with just an end-date, a point of departure without a follow-up arrival. At the same time I don't want to just delete my profile, because I still enjoy looking people up to see who's doing what now.  What to do?

I finally found the right solution for me.  I added a new "current position."  I am now officially:  Retired.

One year ago we were in Michigan

with family, in Northern Michigan: my dad, brother and his family, uncle, aunt, their families.  We had a wonderful time.  My uncle had a birthday, I think his 80th or more.  We went out on Lake Michigan, had barbecues, walked around the resort town watching tourists watch us.

At Christmas my uncle was skiing, running around strong.

In March he was feeling a little tired, a medical check found pancreatic cancer.  He died within a month.

In hindsight the visit last year was a God-send.  My kids had time to hang out with my uncle, who they've never met.  My husband talked teaching and chemistry with him - Uncle George had been a chemistry teacher then Principal at the local high school. 

In the fall, Rob was talking about our trip with a colleague, and it turned out the colleague had not only attended the high school but had Uncle George for chemistry.  And Rob was able to send that information to Uncle George before he died.

I had a simple list of things I wanted us to see or learn or do on the trip.  One of the things was to experience the vastness of our country, and we certainly did that.  I didn't realize at the time we also were seeing that the world is truly a small place.