Recalibrating, Planning New Route.

So, yeah, That Olde House is sold, closed, gone, bye-bye, and I have more money than I had, but do I have enough to just retire and not work anymore and feel safe and secure for the next 20 years? Given the insanity our country is in right now?? Definitely not. So not feeling safe and secure. So, I'm recalibrating. 

I'm very grateful to have sold the house for the price I got. I know how to analyze a market and what I got was definitely fair. No complaints at all. But as the annoying phrase goes, "It is what it is." It was a nice chunk of money, but didn't fill the retirement bucket to the no worries point.

I have my Disney job searches set, am prepared to jump on any part-time opportunity. I'm not kidding about parking cars, it's a running joke at my current job, but I could do it. A few years ago I had to do a state MOT (maintenance of traffic) course for a role I had. I didn't have to actually stand out there in the sun, but I had to be trained in it to deal with the permitting side of the role.

Anyway, I know traffic management, at least on the basic level. This means I could at least get their lane closure cones spaced properly at Epcot, because every time I hit the parking bottleneck where they filter the regular parking rabble from the ADA spots I wanna leap out of my car and ask who's in charge of MOT because you could mark that lane back THERE and then everybody wouldn't have just 100 yards to zipper in to the regular parking. I may have given this some thought. 😂 It's not what I really want to do of course, my dream remains chatting about any animal in Animal Kingdom, but hell, half those people have been there since the park opened and the other half are getting their hands on zoo experience for their PhDs. I'll recalibrate as needed.

It's weird to be 67 and still have no idea what retirement will look like, but as I said I know I'm luckier than a lot of people. I have a good job, I'm appreciated by my boss, though honestly I really do want to be doing something else, but I can do this a while longer if need be. 

My birthday was on Saturday, and my daughter and the guy who needs a blog alias took me, The Kid and The Prince to one of our favorite restaurants: Chef Art Smith's Homecomin'.  I've been there a few times over the years, but my daughter pointed out that it had been 2 years since our last visit and she scored a hard to get reservation, so I needed no persuasion. 

Chef Art Smith is a Florida boy and still lives in Florida, though in an entirely different part of the state. For those who may not be familiar with him, he was chef to a couple of Florida governors in Tallahassee, has restaurants, and was Oprah's personal chef for years. His thing is Florida farm to table food, and Homecomin' serves a lot of his family recipes, including a chocolate pecan pie that I swear I've had ONE bite of in the last 5 visits, because we are always so stuffed from the main courses we share desserts and I'm usually all about the shine cake. 

He does visit the restaurant fairly regularly, though on an irregular schedule.  We've never seen him, though we have heard of sightings: "Chef Art was here yesterday!" etc. My daughter said she was just about to tell the guy who lacks a blog alias that he does visit the restaurant but we've never seen him, when...yes...Chef Art walked up to our table. 

I did not fangirl and make a fool of myself. I was fogged by a moonshine margarita and it took a beat or two for me to process that yes, it actually was him. He did pose for a picture with The Prince, who I think was the reason he stopped at our table. He made friendly conversation and posed for a quick pic, and moved on, but yes, for a Florida foodie this was a foodie Elvis sighting. 

And so I slog onward, into another storm season, with no firm plans for the future, because that's our world now. It'll be okay, eventually, I think, maybe.
 

 

 

 

 

The Deed Is Done.

And I was copied on the instructions to the escrow agent to record the deed and launch the wire transfer tomorrow, which is the official closing date. 

I am no longer The Reluctant Landlady, we have all moved on. My daughter is in a wonderful relationship and in a much nicer house, everybody's happy and thriving, and I am no longer burdened with an "investment property" that never made me any income but was The Money Pit. 

There's a loud thunderstorm launching overhead right now, and I don't have to think about a tree falling on that fucking house. It's NOT MY HOUSE. It will take a month or two to adjust. 

I'd been responsible for it since the early 90s, but I haven't lived there for over 14 years. I walked through it last week without the teeniest bit of nostalgia for anything. Well, except for the remodel job I'd done on the kitchen 20 years ago, because it has two lovely deep pot drawers, and I do miss them. Oh, and the giant master bedroom closet. Oh, and I did pay to remodel the hall bath, after a plumbing incident that required some major fixing, and it's really quite nice. The rest of the floorplan was never that great, and I vastly prefer my condo's layout. It's nearly as large and much nicer, even if I do have to stagger out at 6 am to walk the dogs in my pajamas because no yard.

No yard is not an issue for me. I was walking my two small dogs this morning when our large resident owl flew by at about 8 ft. off the ground. We were unbothered, but would I ever trust my dogs out in the fenced yard unsupervised in this neighborhood? We have critters. I love that owl, it'll hoot from a tree right behind this building in the early morning hours, that's how I know it's a Barred Owl vs. a Great Horned Owl.  We have both in the neighborhood. Yes, I know an owl couldn't get either dog off the ground and carry them off, but in Gidget's case they could kill her trying, she's under 10 lbs and could pass for a small rabbit in the dark. All of these calculations went into "Do I sell this condo and move back into the house, or stay in the condo and sell the house?" It really was a no-brainer in the end.

I do think I'm going to spend the rest of the week in a sort of disbelieving decompression. We have finally, finally moved on, and it's all good. 

 

It's Finally Here!

 Closing Week! And there's no hurricane on the horizon and I should be done with That House on Wednesday. 

In also amazingly fun news, that last box of photographs that have been sitting in the heat of the garage in FLORIDA for 20 years, carelessly stored in ziplock plastic bags and shit?  An amazing number of them are in great shape. I have inherited a thousand or so amazing vintage photos from the WWII era and before, and several antique cameras, and now I am inspired to create a display: the cameras and a digital frame slide show of the photos from the first half of the 20th century. There are photos I've never seen before, and bless my mom for carefully writing the names on many of them. 

This stylish, handsome dude is my maternal grandfather, who died when my mother was around 5 years old.

And this is a true prize: my mother at around 2. She was born in 1926, so this would be from 1928-ish? Anybody else getting a vague Paper Moon feel from her outfit and that bonnet? 

Anyway, I have about eleventy billion photos to go through, pictures of actual people, not trees, as well as funeral notices and wedding notices and basically I need to renew my Ancestry subscription to put it to use. The slides were mostly garbage, but this is the freaking motherlode of family history. 

So, when it's too godawaful hot to be outdoors, I'll grab a random plastic bag of old photos and do a first cut, pitching the unidentified and the faded, etc., then figure out how to organize them for scanning. Then, a nice 8x10 digital frame will be big enough to put a little slide show display with the old cameras.  I'll put it on my mother's hope chest which currently just fills an empty wall in my living room. 

 Yep, that's me. I was tortured into those curls for every occasion as a tot, because DAMN YOU SHIRLEY TEMPLE! (Not really, not her fault, she was a lovely human.) I HATED having my hair curled like that. My hair was wavy but disobedient, as it is to this day, and the process of creating those curls hurt like a mofo. I finally rebelled when I was about 5, and my mother stopped the torture. Here I'm 3. That might have been the last year of the Shirley Temple look. 

It's insanely hot. I've been drafted to Uber the flute player to band camp tomorrow and I don't have any meeting conflicts. God willing, the house will close this week.  

 

And now you know...

 the Rest of the Story. 

Sorry, I had to do it. I was a kid when Paul Harvey was on the air, but he was as ubiquitous as the Kool-Aid man for a long time. 

ANYWAY...I just had to share the funny outcome of the work thing. 

My very first email of the morning was from the guy who got dragged into the Drama, telling me that this person apparently really needs what she's asking for. (Well, she's not fucking getting it, I have other deadlines. She has not explained to me why she needs it in the first place.) 

I did not respond, I did some deep breathing, and saw that my boss was back from her vacation and online. 

I messaged her: Hi, welcome back, do you have a minute for a quick call? She called me immediately. 

I started the conversation with "I'm not calling to tell you I'm quitting." (Although at going on 67, it's retiring, right?) 

She yelled, "OH THANK GOD! I was sure that was it!" And we laughed.

I then filled her in on what transpired on Friday. She agreed with me that this was not normal or okay, and added a third person to the call, who confirmed that I had not hallucinated and had provided exactly what was asked for, and even added details I'd forgotten. So it's all good.  

Skipping to the end: a Call Was Scheduled between me, the guy referenced above, the guy who got dragged in, and the source of the drama. 

God it's hard to do this without getting too descriptive, but, say somebody thought there was a thing in a museum. Your (my) job was normally to catalog things, but in this special situation, you were told not to bother doing the completely detailed catalog. So you gave the people asking what they asked for, and called it done. She was asking me to go back and catalog the entire museum. It's a big museum. The project in question was to start way too soon to make that even possible, hence the abbreviated schedule.

So I asked her if she was aware that the item(s) she needed to know about were definitely in the museum?

She paused and said she'd had a conversation with her boss, waffle waffle, corporate speak, but finally admitted that she had not even looked at the museum yet. She wanted me to do a catalog for her before she began. The guy she dragged in said a different catalog of sorts had been shared with the team, had she looked at it? She had not.

I'm very glad we were not on camera, because at this point I was mouthing many variations of the word fuck.

After a bit more back and forth, I told her that after she reviewed the museum and identified the items she cared about (AKA doing her fucking job), I'd be happy to help her obtain the information she needed about THOSE items, if they exist. I was NOT going to catalog the entire museum, but I'd be happy to help with her specific questions about specific things she cared about.

And we all thanked each other for finding a solution!  Umpty emails and meetings between parties was finally resolved when the self-important drama queen finally fucking told us what she actually needed. 

If she'd said this up front, without dragging God and Everybody into it and making it much more complicated and mysterious than it actually is, we could have worked this out in an exchange of two emails: "Hey, how can you help me with..." "Here's what we can do..." But no, she just repeatedly insisted I do something for her that the project didn't require.  There, I think I told the story vaguely but accurately.   

 God, I really must retire this year, I'm just over this. 

And there's ANOTHER box of photo albums.

 These are in an ancient U-Haul box, and I honestly have no idea what they are. ARRRRGH!!!

So far, my diligent quest to find and preserve important family memories has resulted in...a few random pictures. We earnestly saved about 100 lbs. of mostly shit for DECADES. Out of focus pictures of unidentifiable places and people. I mean, we are talking THOUSANDS of images, and so far there's less than 100 actually worth keeping. SOO many duplicates, so many WTFs. So many duplicate WTFs. Zero OMG amazing treasures. There are some cool pictures of my parents, the great-grandparents, looking all glam in their 50s finery, and a couple of pics I must scan of me and my cousin in our  teens, as proof that yes, we really were once quite hot. But wading through the drek is just tiring.

One of my absolute favorite things about this modern age is the ability to take and share photos with the gadget in your pocket. No need to drop off the film, pay to develop, wait and see what you have, and discover there are two decent photos in a roll. BUT you paid good money for those photos, and dropping them in the trash feels like throwing money in the toilet. So you put them in an album and 40 years later go WTF and peel out six that are actually worth scanning to bring them into the 21st century.

Yeah, it kinda was just throwing money in the toilet, but we did it because that was the only way to "preserve those precious memories." BTW, WTF ever happened to Kodak? They're still around, they evolved and good on them, but damn, their ubiquitous commercials had us all desperately snapping and paying to develop "memories" that in retrospect weren't precious, and all their point and shoot cameras were shit. 

Taking rolls and rolls of family photos was just expected, and we all did it. We bought cameras and film and then paid to have that film developed, so we paid at both ends, all without knowing if we'd captured the moment we wanted. 

At least "wasting money" on avocado toast is actually buying food. 

My Friday began bright and early with a new work WTF, that seriously had me ready to announce my retirement before 10 a.m. 

How to tell this story without identifying details?  

Okay, so I was asked to provide information for a project. It was a very short deadline project, and they didn't need all the information I'd normally put together, so I gave them what they asked for and considered it done. 

Approximately 6 weeks later, someone I don't work with or answer to in any way asked me for the more detailed information that would be standard in a normal duration project. I explained that we didn't do that for this one because tight timeline and the people needing the info told me they didn't need it, so no, I didn't have the information requested. So okay, asked and answered, I moved on to my current projects.

 So TODAY, that person emailed me and God and Everybody associated with the project and asked WHEN I'D PROVIDE THE INFORMATION AS DISCUSSED.  

And seriously, I had to get up from my desk and walk around and load the dishwasher and stare out the window and breathe deeply, because my first reaction was to explode. I had carefully explained to that person that the information wasn't part of the scope for this project. Happily, our prior emails were attached, and it was clear that I'd never agreed to go back and redo my part of this project. I do not answer to this person. This person can use the information I provide to the entire team, I don't care, but she's not part of the two teams that need my work product and I gave them what they wanted. 

Oh, and my boss was on vacation this week and I like her way too much to bitch to her while she's off, but it'll be on the list for our next one on one. 

Apparently the complainant raised the issue with another party, someone I have worked with for years, and he very nicely asked me about it. I explained what had happened and he said thanks and was fine with it. I'm not "in trouble" - not that I have the teeniest mouse turd to give at this point.  

I'm just too old for this shit.