This week, a note from each of us…
Sondra’s Thoughts
Friday the thirteenth was the last day of work for Jimmy and me. With that, I suppose we have retired. Well sort of. I will be working about a half a day a week for eight weeks to help my colleague manage projects. Hopefully my replacement will be found before the eight weeks run out.
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity culminating in an empty apartment and a packed Jeep, ready for the trek to St. Petersburg tomorrow morning. At the office, I worked a pretty heavy load up until Thursday. When not working and not packing up the apartment, a lot of our free time was spent saying goodbye to family, friends and colleagues over lunches, dinners, and happy hours. I managed to squash most of my emotions when saying goodbye, with a few leaky eye moments. On my last day of work, I made some rounds at the treatment facility to say goodbye to the great crews out there. I had mixed emotions when I found some people off of work. I was so sad they were not there, then glad that I would not cry in front of them. When I got back to my office, it felt like my chest was twisted into a knot, but I managed to hold it together.
However, last night when I removed a magnet given to me by a special colleague, I lost control of my emotions and cried uncontrollably. Then I nearly cried again when I put the magnet onto my sister’s refrigerator. I sure am going to miss talking to her every day. I imagine that after I stop by and see my niece, nephew, and sister on the way out of town tomorrow, Jimmy will need to drive, because I will most likely be bawling.
Yes, I am super excited to make this move, but it is tough saying so many goodbyes to so many people that I care about.
As for practical thoughts…
Taking more time off between the last day of work and the day to turn in the keys to the apartment would have been nice. However, with some long days, we have pulled this off.
We managed to get some mementos and miscellaneous items crammed into several plastic tubs and dispersed them between two houses. I had offers to place stuff in others houses, and really appreciate all of the offers to help us out. I must add that my sister has been a godsend to us this past weekend.
I am pretty sure we packed too much. At least we think we will be able to fit the final items, and the cat into the Jeep in the morning. We are very curious to see how far the boot stripe will sink after loading this stuff onto Utopia tomorrow.
We’ll update our website eventually. It has just been too busy to get to it. Once we have our Garmin tracker back on, you can click on a button from the website to see where we are. Also, be sure to hit refresh when on a non-blog page, because sometimes it doesn't automatically show updates (it is a free website, for the time being).
Okay, that is a very brief review from me (I could say so much more… but will spare you).
Now it’s Jimmy’s turn…
Jimmy’s Thoughts
Pretty surreal since I have been working full time in one way or another over the past 32 years.
The past few weeks for me from a work perspective have not been as much a whirlwind like Sondra. My duties are pretty much being picked up by my previous direct reports, so I do not need to work remotely like Sondra. It was more emotional than I thought it would be and I am truly going to miss everyone I worked with at the City. They had a nice party for us at work last week and then a happy hour this past Thursday. We then had drinks with some good friends on Friday before we take off. Then seeing Sondra’s sister and our niece and nephews today, I got a little choked up.
It really hasn’t sunk in yet since right after work on Friday we immediately went to work on cleaning out our apartment and I am not sitting here in an empty apartment waiting to turn in our keys first thing in the morning. Tuesday, we plan on taking the boat up to downtown Tampa to anchor up a couple of days as part one of our shakedown. I think when we drop the anchor and actually have some downtime it will begin to set in. It is truly odd not having work to go to tomorrow. Having said this, us leaving this early in our life was absolutely the right decision. I am so excited to turn the page to the next chapter.
I will reiterate that we probably are taking too much to the boat and we woefully misjudged the capacity of the Jeep. I think we will get it all in the car and probably on the boat, but Utopia might be floating a few inches lower in the water.
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