Update on February.

So, yeah, remember months back when I said I'd wanted to retire before the next hurricane season?

So, I'm still planning on retiring this year at some point, I swear, but I had my annual performance review today and it was so lovely I blushed, even on a call. I've known my boss for a decade now, but she hasn't been my official boss until the last year. I started with her as a contractor, not an employee, then I was a contractor in a different group, then finally became an employee in yet another group, with a boss I also loved (we'd worked together when I was a contractor) but I hated the job. 

Lots of reasons, nobody's fault really. I'll just say it's a bad idea to start a new position with a lot of unfamiliar technical moving parts and working with people you don't know in a work from home situation during a pandemic. It was never a good fit. 

Then my original supervisor when I was a contractor wanted me back in an employee role and she's now my boss, and I said HELL YEAH! Basically, she plucked me out of that awkward, ill-fitting position into the bosom of my former world where I know the players and know how to get stuff done, and I have been living mostly happily ever after, except for being old and still wanting to retire. And we laughed about that as part of my review. 

She was like, well, this is the part where we talk about your future career path in the company, and we both just started laughing. I'm there to do what I'm doing, and she wants me there to do it (it is not an easy role to fill). I said I'd give her a long lead time and keep her informed once I figure out how "retirement" is gonna work, and joked about parking cars at Disney, and we talked about her grown sons and she asked about my new grandson, and it was just so lovely. 

So yeah, I may hang around a while longer. They dangled enough money to make another six months worth it, and I'm working almost entirely with people I like. If something great appears at Disney I'll be all over it, but for now, it's all good.

Oh, and while I don't talk about where I work, I will say management just shrugged and said they're not changing their DEI policy, they don't plan their business on who's in the WH, so that was the icing on the cake for me. 

And my annual bonus will almost, but not quite, cover the actual price of the AC replacement, which came on about a 1/3 higher than my guesstimate. New AC for me next month without taking out a loan!! Not a cruise, but also not a fiscal disaster.

Another reminder that my catastrophic thinking wastes a lot of energy and is bullshit. 

This is also why I'm not writing about the insanity going on right now, it's all unsettled and getting swatted down by courts, and it's really too soon to tell how much of the shit being thrown against the walls will stick. I'm in "one foot in front of the other" mode and doing what I can to support the people filing the lawsuits.