I have seen the Elephant (and here is the report)

Yes, my day has come, I have seen the Elephant!  I worked my last day and watched the sun set on my career of more than thirty years.

 In any case, as a parting shot on my last day, my dispatch supervisor called and displayed quite the attitude with me on the phone.  It was as if to say how unimportant I am to the new crowd at the company.  I have seen the Elephant and it is a juggernaut of new corporate ideology.  I think I slipped away from it just in time...

Our current home is somewhere roughly fifteen hundred miles east from here.

Our new home should be sixty to eighty miles south from here.

Somewhere way out in the distance.

Ah well, enough of this nonsense, I am done with this blog, it has served it's purpose.  Time to move on and blog about the little place in the desert that we will be looking for soon.

Cheers!

(5) Five, Cinco, Fünf, V, or however you choose to acknowlege it.

Five, yes five work days remain before I am unemployed!  Wow!!  I am so thrilled to be this close.  As I related my thoughts the other day to someone I've known for a very long time, I said I feel like I did the first time I rode a motorcycle at 150 MPH, I am simultaneously mildly terrified and exhilarated.  I'm sure the terror part is temporary, fortunately it is minor terror, well maybe more like mild apprehension.  Actually I am mostly just exhilarated...

The really good news is I made one phone call to a fellow I know in a related industry and asked about some work while I am in transition.  I am pleased to report that he was genuinely happy I called him and said he could keep me busy with his company's extra work or set me up with another friend of his who does commercial Fiber Optic splicing.  Either way, I get a raise and get to set my own day's schedule.  These two things are some of the few things I do miss about contracting.

Ever hear about God opening doors for someone?  Well it seems he is ripping them from their hinges to open a path for me.  My future is as bright as I have ever seen it.  Yes, I am very thankful, I have given thanks, I will always give thanks for the multitude of blessings I receive.  My time from now forward will be used o it's fullest, whether earning a living or looking at the beautiful sunrises and sunsets I will now have time to see.

I have missed far too many of these beautiful west Texas sunsets.  That is about to change.

Cheers!!

Solstice

Well today is the summer Solstice.  i.e. a long hot day.  My time at work is short, nine work days if I stay on plan.  I am considering working an extra two weeks to make it easier on our savings to pay a few bills coming due in July and August.  We will have to weigh this possibility carefully.  I have had just about enough at the "old salt mine".  For once in a long while however, paying bills is easy, no real concern about making ends meet and now I am about to quit, umm, retire from my job.  Yeah, ummm well, we both plan to work when we get relocated and settled, we will be going into the new venture debt free so it should be much easier.  The bills we expect after the move are fewer than now.  Some bills like the electric power bill should disappear completely.  I for one cannot wait...

It is almost a shame to be doing the repairs and maintenance on our home now just to sell it and go.  The bright spot about doing this work is our daughter is interested in buying it from us.  If that should pan out, it would be great, she could raise her family here, two generations or more here.  Kind of neat to think about.

Anyway, the dream we have been reaching for since our young years is close at hand.  Pray for us in our transition to our new beginning...  We are about to wake up to a new day!

What a time we have had...

In the last month I had two weeks off work, we did some major repairs and minor renovation to our place in SC.  We cut trees and brush, re-decked our front deck, removed an old hot tub from our side deck, installed underpinning around the house, did some garden work...  Preparing to sell is hard work.

I hope I can recover some between leaving here and starting again.  Building a new place to live will be a full time job, albeit a job I dearly look forward to.  I can hope we sell quickly and find a reasonable new place and can close quickly.  We will have a tremendous amount of work to ready our new digs for ourselves, our two big dogs and the rest of the infrastructure that will be needed.

Well yesterday was another milestone in my life.  My anniversary date with my company came and went without notice, sort of anyway.  I asked my loving wife what yesterday meant and after a moment of reflection, she said "the day you quit contracting and became an employee"?  She's always the faithful one.  Comes through for me every time.  In any case, back to the milestone, my company in the early days of my career was very employee oriented.  We got our usual paid holidays and a few extra holidays, like the federal holidays, plus our birthday and company hiring anniversary date off with pay.  What a great company.

Fast forward nineteen years, the company was sold, the new management had a very different vision.  1st, freeze pensions, 2nd, take away "extra" holidays, 3rd take paid sick days and vacation, cut the total number of days and call it PTO.  So I now have worked my birthday four of the last seven years.  No real big deal, but in the old days, they made sure we had off for these special days and were not on call.  The reason I worked these days recently is because I was on call...  My sour grapes I guess.  In any case, I am now very close to the finish line, eighteen scheduled work days lie between today and retirement.  What a huge weight has been lifted.  I can't wait for the morning after.  I will have a great ceremony regarding the throwing away of my alarm clock.

Cheers!!

In the short rows

As the old farmer's saying goes, I am "in the short rows".  Forty two work days remain in my career with my current employer.  I will have made twenty six years at this company near the end of May.  The work is beginning to take a toll on me.

My father offered me some loving fatherly advice once when I was a young lad.  He said his father had passed it on to him, his advice was simply to always work at something you enjoy.  My enjoyment of what I do ended some years ago, with the tough job market, my field changing dynamically and my inability to take time away to go to school for training, I decided to tough it out.  The time of toughing it out is now drawing to a close.

My future is all but in my own hands at this point, soon, if I am hungry, cold or in a jam I can rely on my own wits to resolve my situation.  It is where I want to be.  Working toward self sufficiency with food, shelter and entertainment.  In my not so humble opinion, entertainment can be watching the sunrise while listening to Coyote pups yipping in the distance or watching the clouds move across the sky.  I am a simple man and ask little from life.  My life now is far too complicated, I look forward to the shifting of gears.

As I like to say when I am happy,
Cheers!!

The pieces of the puzzle fall into place

I almost don't even care to update here now, so many things are falling into place here at the South Carolina homestead.  No, this does not mean we won't be coming to Texas, for that represents something, well something almost abstract.  Where my wife and I were raised in Florida, were two different towns, both tiny, both miss them if you blink your eye places.  Like miniature representations of the fictional Mayberry.

The area we are in now is about fifty times the population of the town I am from, however it is much smaller than Alpine's population by far.  We have had a great spike in violent crime here in the last 6 to 10 years, many murders, half of those unsolved.  This is a sad reflection of where this area is going.

When we were in Alpine we felt like it was home, so much like our places of youth.  People were friendly and polite, the only rude treatment we got came from tourists, out-of-towners.  Here rude treatment is a normal thing.  Southern charm and friendliness is all but forgotten here.  Old memories of old timers.

I for one will not miss the place.  I will carry my memories with me, I will leave friends behind, the love for this area as a place is not in my heart.  Our home where my wife and I have spent most of our marriage, raised two children, helped with our first grand child, well it is after all just a house.  It is filled with it's own memories, furniture and things.  All that is important here will come with us, or will be available to visit after a not too difficult trip.  Our new beginning will also give our friends here reason to come visit us.

While this blog was started mostly as a venue for me to pour out and arrange my own thoughts, let them sit undisturbed and then reread them as a test for the soul to see if I am leading in the right direction.  My loving spouse is always there to qualify my thoughts as capable or needing refinement.  This plan it turns out is good.  Our little pieces of Texas will be coming home, to be placed by the door of our new beginning home, all in good time....  Maybe some day they will mark the location where our ashes will be scattered together in the west Texas mountains.  Our final home!

Little pieces of Texas

Well, after a visit out west and nearly two weeks spent wandering the cold, dusty roads of the west Texas mountains we came away with the renewal that the area brings to our souls.  We were able to get more of a feel for the area we never had before, actively looking at real estate as first priority and being tourists as secondary.  We met several of our potential future neighbors, visited with some old friends, met some friends we had made over the internet and drove 950+ miles in 10 days in Jeff Davis and Brewster counties.  Our whole round trip was 4065 miles, 79 hours behind the windshield of the truck.

While out this trip, we learned that one of our favorite places to rock hunt has closed.  The Woodward Ranch and Trey Woodward were unique in their own way.  When I heard Trey had passed away a year or so back, I knew how things would likely go.  I had last visited in 2010 and had as always enjoyed a casual conversation with Trey.  We will miss both.  As the ranch is now closed, my wife and I decided to go roadside rock hunting instead.  We found some varied rocks, agates and other evidence of the long extinct west Texas volcano.  I came home with two medium sized pieces of rock from this trip that neatly stack one atop the other.  They now reside by the coat rack at our South Carolina front door, I nudge them with my foot on the way by each day.  I look forward to the day they reside at our front door in West Texas.

We have had so many unexpected things fall into place in the last couple of months regarding this move.  We have had doors open that we did not expect, many prayers answered.  This new beginning for us has been in planning for 30 years, and we can finally see the goal we have worked so very hard to reach.

Cheers, the finish line is in sight!  Soon, we will be savoring the beauty of west Texas sunrises and sunsets on a daily basis.  As the days to retirement are now two digits, the excitement is building.  I look forward to closing this door behind me...