A Request

It's a lovely day outside, the snow is falling like it does in the movies, straight down with big fluffy flakes. This winterlude will probably not last, but when winter is pretty it's really amazing to look at. I don't have the camera power to take a good photo, unfortunately.

Yesterday I was chatting with Fab Former Student, and since he was bored at work, waiting for some results before he could go on to the next reaction, I directed him to this site. He had said several times, "You need to keep a blog," and so I figured that since I'd started I'd let him in on it. When I sent him the link, he just said, "Oh, okay, I'll go read that. But I thought it would be something funny..." not realizing the author until I pointed it out. I don't know how much he's actually read, although he was surprised that I'd gone ahead and done this. I suppose that more people would be surprised if I actually told them about it, but for now I'm not going to go out of my way to tell a lot more people.

Thing is, I don't really like the division between "real life" and "blog life"....for me, there isn't a division. My real life and the blog life coincide, and neither of them ever gets the full story, because neither of them is, well, me. Real life people that I know see a lot of my life, but of course not everything. Blogging is another way of providing information, but it doesn't provide all of the information. I do keep secrets. Everyone should.

Okay, so the request is from Fab Former Student, who wants me to write about last summer and how well we worked together: him, other student who I'll call The Redhead. (I am currently also a redhead but I'm actually a blond so, well, whatever.) The Redhead is actually a biologist/forensic science major, but the research is boring. He's worked for the biologists and always gets the bad jobs (here, you mortalize the mice! we're going for coffee!) whereas in my lab? No living things, except for the mice that are actually inhabitants of the building, and we don't kill them and harvest their organs to put into a blender to find the concentrations of whatever goes there. Yuck, I know. which is why The Redhead is much more suited to chemistry than biology.

The Redhead is also native by adoption, although quite frankly it doesn't matter how one gets to be native, but the advantage for him is that he comes with a summer scholarship...and yet still has a hard time getting hired. Why? Because people don't think to look past the fact that he's sort of ADD and he gets distracted easily and bored more easily than that, and he can be disruptive and he's sort of goofy...yeah, all those things, but he's also really smart and if he's got a project he believes in then he'll become completely obsessed with it until it's done right or until he at least gets some kind of results. You don't need to explain things to him more than once, but you do need to make sure that he takes his Ritalin, because when he doesn't, he can't work well. Whether he should ever have been prescribed Ritalin or not is another question for another day, but he was an now he's dependent on it and we nagged him a lot if he hadn't taken the pill. Sad, but quite frankly, when you need the work done and you need it done right, you need people to be focussed on what they're supposed to be doing. We can't have bouncy 20-somethings acting crazy in the lab, period. Even though much of the stuff we did wasn't particularly dangerous, there were enough chemicals in our lab to cause a lot of damage, and we're all about the safety in my lab.

So here we are: I'm getting ready to move in the middle of the summer, and I hire "my boys" and tell them, "Okay, here's the deal. The project is this....(blah blah blah) and here's exactly what I need you to do by the beginning of August. After that, we're packing and getting rid of stuff, because I'm moving."

And they were stellar. They got some gorgeous things done, things that no one else had been able to do after years in my lab. They were motivated, they were funny, we had a lot of fun. Everyone wanted to stop by our lab to chat. The music was going pretty much constantly. They composed this "Hulked-out" picture for me...we visited many a strange and wonderful website when we needed a break from doing fantastic chemistry, including Gunther and several others, although Gunther was certainly the hit of the summer (sorry, I haven't figured out how to put the umlau over the "u"). We ate lunch at the pub when the world cup was on and, as any good ADD student would do, The Redhead got totally into it, and then some.

There are a bunch of stories, and I'll write some of the best ones at some point. This is just an intro to a couple of guys who made last summer so memorable and so much fun, even in the face of building renovations, dust storms inside the lab, crazy work hours (please, please can't one of you come in at midnight to top up the liquid nitrogen? it's always me who has to do it...) and insane colleagues who actually think they are constellations...and more. I couldn't have done it without either of them and I tried to make that clear, I hope they understood.

One story: when I went back to do the last of the packing in the middle of August (I left for Southern Ontario in early July, went to a conference in Hawaii .... ahhhhh....) I took them out for dinner to a lovely Italian restaurant that serves traditionally, which means take your appetite and be prepared to sit for 3.5h. And we did that, we ate and ate and ate (antipasti, pasta, meat, salads, desserts, two bottles of wine and coffees) and drank, and had a great time as always. Two things happened during dinner: one was I received the B-B* Award for Exemplary Leadership and Teaching......it's a glass plaque that holds a small clock and the engraved silver plate that indicates the award. They each gave me a card, and both of them wrote beautiful notes about how I'd changed their lives. The award was slightly bittersweet, since I'd been overlooked for the University Teaching Award this year, and Fab had nominated me for it (after some prodding).

The other thing that happened was we decided to form a band. The only one who can sing at all or play anything resembling a musical instrument is the Fab one, but we dreamed it all up anyway. Keep in mind that I'm twice as old as these guys, and then imagine it anyway. Good times had by all, and then a very sad parting that evening.

The Summer of My Amazing Luck, truly.

(*Both their last names start with B, and they put their names on the award but I'm not putting them here.)

A little knitting content

My links apparently have a use, since StaceyJoy has found me and announced my presence on her blog. If she hadn't, I suppose that I would just merrily keep on writing and not telling anyone that this rag exists, except that I thought if she knows (it's not rocket science if I've linked to you) then I should probably tell the other players in this game, so now Hub, BF1 and BF2 have been informed.

The knitting: yesterday I bought yarn, which is of course a shock to anyone who knows me. I can point and click at Elann with the best of them, and had resisted for quite a while but there was some grey Debbie Bliss stuff that I can't even remember now but which at the time (earlier this week) that got the covet juices flowing. Yesterday, I went to the LYS which is a nice little place, and bought a few balls of things, some gagging pink because Big One wants to learn to knit and she needs a scarf, some army green alpaca/cashmere blend .... wait, sorry, I'm drooling, just let me wipe my face.... okay, some of that for another scarf/small shawl, for A Time for Wine at my former employer, and two balls of bamboo sock yarn that cost one million dollars but which I could not walk past. Also, I have a problem with knitting two of exactly the same thing, it is paralyzingly boring for me...I have thus far, ever, in the last 20+ years, knit one sock. Sleeves are a pain in the ass too, but I seem to be able to get through them. I made The Sock about two years ago, and it is still mateless. See the sidebar for the Stash Enhancement eXperience. (including a wip, the back half of an AS design from The Celtic Collection...woohoo)

One day I will try to photograph the entire stash. Oh, I hear something. Yes, it's the sound of BF1's snort. The stash is huge people, I am a yarn packrat, and I even pared the thing down recently, to about 2/3 of its former glory (I typed "gory" first, that might be more appropriate.). I'm addicted to yarn. I can admit it, and I have no urge to overcome the addiction, since it doesn't seem to hurt anyone except for our need for space in the basement. I love the colours, I love the textures, and in fact once in a while I even love to knit the stuff up.

I like to give knitted things away rather than keep them, even though the wip's are almost all things that I started out for myself....and will more than likely give away anyway, in the end. I think that for most knitters this is the case, that they make and give rather than make and keep. Other people are so enamoured with the hand-knitted garment much of the time that I find it hard to keep it and easier to give away and start something else.

I learned to knit the first time when I was eight years old, and I didn't like it, although I finished a scarf that I wore for about three winters before one of the dogs tore it to shreds. I didn't really knit again until I moved in with my Grandma when I was 20years old and starting my third year of university. I couldn't do the drive in and out of the city every day, with labs and t.a.'ing and studying....oh, wait, no, that would be partying....anyway, my time was full and there wasn't enough time to drive for 45 minutes both ways to school.

My grandma could knit, sew, weave, spin...you name it, she and her sisters knew how to do it (if it involved fiber). She told me that they weren't allowed to just sit at home unless it was Sunday, and then they weren't allowed to do anything except read the bible. Grandma was born in Canada, only her eldest brother Mike was born in Poland; Great-grandma was Polish, Great-Grandpa was German; he had a heart attack right after he and my Grandma danced at his 40th wedding anniversary, so I didn't know him. I knew my Great-Grandma since she lived until I was 16, when she really thought that I should be getting married ... her English wasn't very good but she was pretty clear that I was getting old. Eyiiiii.

Grandma on the other hand didn't particularly care whether I got married or not, just that I was happy and living a relatively good life...good as in I wasn't a "bad" girl...which I sort of was, but not so bad that I couldn't get out of any trouble that I got myself into. Mostly. Grandma herself was employed most of her life as a seamstress of one form or another. She used to work at The Bay in the dressmaking department, for people like my other Grandma, who came from old money. There were good stories about The Bay and the women she used to work for, but that wasn't something she wanted to do forever. She ended up working in a factory downtown that made fur coats, and you know I never found out which one it was, but there are several in our Hometown and they're all excellent. I don't have a fur coat, and I only think they're necessary in colder climates than we have here in Southern Ontario, but if I lived somewhere a lot colder you'd bet I'd wear fur. And I know about the animal cruelty, I know about trap lines (my brother-in-law used to run one) and all that stuff, but in the real cold, nothing beats fur. And that's what she did, and she didn't like it very much and she didn't wear fur herself very often, but she repaired and sewed fur coats for years, for my entire life before she retired.

So when I moved in with Grandma and lived with her for a bit, I asked her to teach me to knit. She was doing a simple sweater, all garter stitch but with one large needle and one small one to sort of give it some interest, and it was a fine thing to start out on. I knit all the pieces and sewed it together a bit more tightly than I should have, but I wore that sweater for quite a while...it was almost weightless, a mohair blend, and it was warm and I quite liked it. Naturally I was hooked. I knit all the time I wasn't "studying" (I really didn't study that much. I really liked to go out a lot and I worked more on the social aspect of my degree than anything else. My grades show it, too.) or at school. And I started collecting yarn, something I keep doing, compulsively. Some day I'll knit it up.........and probably not. Like many knitters, I have more yarn than I could knit up in a lifetime. That's fine. If you don't have yarn, I have no doubt that there's something that you have a lot of that other people don't understand, and if you don't, then you have some other interests that don't involve collecting.

Crafters are bad though. They have lots of ideas and no time. They make plans. They buy, they store, they wait for the time to show up. Usually it doesn't, but that doesn't stop the crafter, they keep on the treadmill of making plans, writing up their ideas, buying, storing. I'm right in there; fight on! perservere! Time will present itself, damnit!

(For those of you who don't knit, I'm sorry for all the acronyms. Also, Big One did not like her knitting experience, and so now Mumma will finish a bright pink garter stitch scarf. Keeping the garter stitch in case Big One wants to put a few stitches in here and there. She declared it "Not Fun!" and stomped off with tears in her eyes. I tried. I was patient, more so than you can imagine. She, unfortunately, was not.)
blogger is toying with me and I can't upload the pic on the sidebar, it's taking an inordinately long time, so it'll have to wait...(add: I did it another way, via Picasa, so there it is...big whoop.)

Return to Normal

BF1's dad died on January 11. My mother was here visiting, and his death was hard for her too; not only did she know BF1's dad, but her own husband passed away almost a year ago. All of this seems very raw. Mum went home on Saturday morning. We took her to the airport and continued on into the big city for some shopping, something we don't do very often but would like to do all the time. It was a great day, warm enough to walk around, the shopping was excellent, the darlings were totally well-behaved.

I went to the hometown on Sunday, January 14. People were covering my classes, since I had arranged that before I left. Turns out that on Monday the university was closed anyway due to ice everywhere, and more expected. We haven't had much snow at all this winter, but this ice was a show-stopper.

Hometown was colder than Antarctica...almost...arrived on Sunday evening to a -26C greeting, colder with the wind chill. Wind chill is for people and animals and other warm-blooded things that wander in the frigid outdoors. It has nothing to do with what your car engine feels, the car doesn't give a damn about whether there's wind or not, the actual temperature is the actual temperature. So usually I don't care too much about "wind chill" because it only sounds like bragging. The wind was blowing and it was fucking cold. Put it together, put your exposed little face into it? and get frostbite really fast. The more the wind blows and the colder the temperature, the faster the freezing of your little cheeks.

And still, the car does not care for the wind chill, its block will freeze when the temperature drops to an appropriately shocking level.

Anyway. I get into hometown, where there is snow, and where people leave their Christmas lights up outside until mid-February, which is something that I am nuts about and if it wasn't so weird and non-prairie-like I would knock on their doors and give them a big hug for making my dark nights sparkle. I am all about things shiny and distracting, after all.

The weather continues to be cold on Monday. Monday during the day is workage, hanging out at Mum's house, making some notes, mostly hanging out. Monday night is sushi with BF1, then back to her place for overnight, staying up until 01:00 drinking martinis and white wine and eating chocolate from here and here. The Paris chocolate came courtesy of BF2, it was fantastic.... Not so fantastic at 06:00 which is when BF1 got up for her darlings, but that wasn't my worry. Much talking, much listening during the course of the evening. You can guess who did what.

I didn't talk about how I felt about BF1's dad's passing. There's not much to say about being sad and confused about it. I will say that when I went to the funeral on Wednesday morning, when Mum and I went into the church, I had a small attack of the shakes. I am not an overly emotional person and I am rarely given over to crying or carrying on. I prefer not to show my emotions in public, since they aren't for others to view. I am the objective observer, I'm not even "the doer" as BF1 is. Often I don't "do" much, unless asked. I find my mind is usually a blank when others would be thinking, or feeling. I feel more like I'm an open vessel, and whatever is available will fill me up. That must sound flaky but I don't know how else to put it. I don't hold back, I suppose that if I wanted to cry or feel terribly sad then that's what I would do. I shook instead, but it passed. I sang the songs, I recited the prayers, I felt superior to those who don't know the Catholic rituals.

Well, after all, I'm not perfect, and I did bloody feel superior.

The funeral was lovely, in the way that funerals can be. The Catholic Church does not encourage eulogies, but two were given anyway, since the priest was benevolent. People who were close to La Pere said wonderful things about him, because for the most part he was a wonderful man. No one escapes the dark though, and he wasn't always fabulous, but many people knew him to be fabulous and there's no point in arguing that when the guy is dead and in an urn. We're supposed to celebrate life at a funeral, and we did that. And there was a wake later, and lots of people came to that (luckily, exhusband did not make an appearance, something for which I am grateful, and I don't believe that gratitude is something that he has ever inspired in me) and then we went to LaMere's house and ate more little things and drank lovely wine, all of it. It's not as though La Pere was going to re-form and drink the stuff, after all, and LaMere is not one for wine. Perfetto!!

Youngest sister of the Tribe of Four picked me up (egad I have to think of better names for people) and we headed into the city (we are rural people) for some food and chats. She's looking to change careers, there's a bakery for sale along one of her routes and she's interested in it. It's seasonal, it's hard work, but we love hard work in my family. We thrive on work, the more there is, the happier we are. Yet, still the dichotomy: we would all quit in a heartbeat to flake out on the couch to watch the soaps.

Although Hub says I would last about 20 minutes at that, and he might be right. I'd go insane.

It was an intense few days, and now I am going to have to scramble tonight to get my notes together for tomorrow morning. Since the U was closed on Monday my classes are offset, and ths is a pain in the ass because I'm not giving the same lectures back to back any more, and because of the timing of my lectures I'm giving the further ahead one first tomorrow, and the further behind one second. Shit de merde, as my Quebecqois friends say, it will blow, but then I'm done and I can come home and collapse for the weekend, henna my hair, call Andrew the hairdresser and get him to trim the tresses....my hair is crazy straight but it is also flat to the head driving me crazy. Hub says there's pad thai for supper, and that makes my ears sing and my belly happy, because I won't have to cook or clean up very much, translating to an extra hour of note-making, which is something I should get to if I'd like to get to bed before midnight. What?? away for four days and not enough work was done to be prepared for tomorrow? No shit Sherlock, not enough notes.

And life, much as we think it shouldn't, because damn it all, everything is different, goes on its little path. We have no choice but to follow along, taking the left and right forks as they present themselves. Sometimes the paths are full of brambles and not so fun things and they leave you shaken and pale, and sometimes the paths are full of bright sunshine and diamonds. Much of the time, they're just a means to an end. Or The End.

Why the Submit Button

When I was writing my grant proposal this past fall, I knew that at some point I would have to submit the thing. As per most forms, even the very formal ones such as grant proposals, this occurs online, and at the end of the form, at the end of the pages and pages of budget items, budget descriptions, grants received and currently held, the personal data, the proposal itself, formatted to within an inch of its life...at the end of the weeks of agony and the almost all-nighters and the full all-nighter and everything else, lies the submit button.

And you have to push it, if you want the proposal to go where it's supposed to go.

This action, of pointing the mouse to a little red rectangle with the word "submit" in the centre of it, and pushing the mouse button, or pressing the finger pad or whatever it is you do to get the computer to do what you want, is terrifying. Once the document is submitted, there's no more editing. There are no more chances to take it back and fix one crucial sentence which, if left as is, will destroy your career. You don't get to pull it back and redraw that one little molecule where you were distracted enough to put boron where you meant nitrogen. (For those of you not chemically literate, this is a big deal. Nitrogen and boron do not do the same things, even if they are next to each other on the keyboard and only three doors down from each other in the periodic table. Those extra couple of electrons that nitrogen has? All the difference in the world.)

So the idea of pushing the submit button, it is scary. It can make your life very complicated, or, if you're shopping instead of writing a grant proposal, it can bring one or two of the seven wonders of the world to your door, for a price. Pushing the submit button can make you spend gobs of money you don't actually have. It's very powerful, but it's easy to control. It's a love/hate relationship. I love to get rid of the grant proposal for example, and I'll hate myself when it's done and I don't get to talk about the agony it caused any more...I just have to wait and wait and wait for months to see if the powers that be like it well enough to give me money to continue my work. If they don't, then they'll be very clear about why, and I can already hear the reasons, or at least, the biggest reason: I don't publish enough.

I don't publish enough because it is more agony to write up the work and submit it (again!!) to referees who will trash it; I defeat myself before I even sit down to work. It's an excellent tactic but it doesn't get the bucks.

Anyway, this is a train ride I didn't want to get on. Suffice to say that I went around saying "I haven't pushed the submit button" and "I'm afraid to push the submit button" so much this past fall that it turned into a good blog title. And you know, it can mean whatever you want.
***
No change in BF1's pere, we still wait for the end.

Thus far...

I would say that, even though some extraordinary things have happened in the last five days, that thus far, 2007 is biting ass.

First off, while I like my part time job teaching at a large university, it didn't have to start on January 3. It could have waited until January 8 so that I could have spent this week harassing my kids and visiting without worry about driving to another city to teach. That's a small thing, only slightly annoying, and besides, no matter if I think I would have liked to spend time with the kids, I know full well that I would have made them go play in the traffic at some point, just to save everyone's sanity.

Small potatoes, compared to BF1's dad lying in the hospital, likely dying. On Wednesday, coincidentally the day I had to go back and teach, he dropped like a stone with what the docs are referring to as a cardiac incident, on the morning walk with his wife and their dog...."luckily" outside the home of an ER nurse, who started CPR on him until the ambulance guys came, and for 20 minutes his heart was not going and they pumped on his chest. They got it started again, but even for a fit 65 year-old, 20 minutes is a long time. This morning they did his 72-hour assessment, and at 72 hours? 98% of the time, you are what you're going to be at 72 hours. We all cling to the 2%, but since I haven't heard anything from BF1 yet, I'm assuming the worst. She couldn't call yesterday, too exhausted from everyone else's pain. Sometimes it pays to be an non-emotional automaton like me.

What? Wednesday again? well, actually, yes. Wednesday night BF2 arrived from his various trips through the country (returns to the UK on Monday the 8th), and the man arrived with Paris chocolate and a gorgeous corkscrew that we will have forever... We were sitting in the kitchen drinking some lovely red wine and chatting while I made pizza, when BF1 called about her dad.

So all of that on Wednesday. Thursday was good, BigOne and I walked downtown to meet BF2 at a bookstore, where he read to her all kinds of kids' books, and this is quite amazing because I don't think that BF2 has cracked the spine of a children's tale since he was a tot himself. He even had some inflection in his voice, not an easy thing when you aren't practiced. I know that prior to having to read to children, I was the lamest oral reader, ever. Now I can breeze through Cat in the Hat in my sleep, and sometimes do.

But Thursday we were still hoping that BF1's dad would leap out of his hospital bed and yell, "WTF???", however, we had to settle for he breathed against the ventilator a couple of times and gagged once. Friday came with the news of midnight arrythmia and a rush to the hospital, but all stayed stable after that. Friday I taught two classes back to back, and I had done this on Wednesday also, and after both sets of lectures my throat was raw and the cold I woke up with on Christmas eve threatened a return. Thus far, I have kept it at bay, but I don't know how long the martini remedy will work before my body figures out that there isn't any vitamin C in gin.

Friday I also applied for a job at the university here in town. The job description basically comes down to, "Hilary, here's a job. Please apply for it," but I don't kid myself into feeling confident. I did submit a 20-page application, just to drive the point home. Won't know for another month whether I'm on the short list or not. I suspect I'll at least get an interview.

Friday night I heard from BF1 that there was no change. It's Saturday now, and I wait to hear whether or not I have to get on a plane. I don't know how I'll handle the logistics of this, because I teach 700 people in two large classes and there are deadlines to meet, but something will work out. For now I'll keep doing what I do every Saturday afternoon, making notes for Monday's class and drinking beer. And actually, en famille we walked downtown to meet up with Fab Former Student and his girlfriend and her identical twin sister, who were in town because their friend lives here...had lunch, Little One was a pain in the ass, and walked home again. Lunch was excellent, don't get me wrong, and we always have a good time. Little One has become a boy and as such, he doesn't listen to much we say to him without trying everything he can to do what he wants as opposed to what we want. What sucks is that he's cute as anything, so it's hard to get angry at him. I suspect that'll get easier with time.

In all, 2007 is providing some seriously sucky moments and some pretty good ones. BF2 will be back here from a quick sidetrip visiting elsewhere on Sunday, but won't be staying. Monday I teach at 08:30, have a meeting, have an office hour, come home. The kids go back to school on Monday. Life, as it has manifested itself, goes on.

New Year

Oooh boy, a new year to look at. It started yesterday and began with my resignation from my job. Until last night, I was an associate professor of chemistry at a small undergraduate university ("college" to Americans, but college is something different here) and this morning, I'm a part-time teacher at a larger university but that's about it. Granted, I'm applying for another job, but having a title and then not having it anymore is a bit ..... well, disconcerting I guess. I suppose that many people would say, "It doesn't matter what your title is, you're still the same person," or, "Titles are overrated. They're just given out to provide people with a sense of self-importance." And sure, that might be true, but I am absolutely positive that I don't care what other people think about what the title meant to me. It didn't define me, it was just a nice thing to have. It's always a bit sad to lose things that you like, even if you give them up voluntarily.

Perhaps you are saying, "Wait a minute! Associate professor?? You had tenure? You gave that up?" and uh, yeah. Small schools are a lot of hard work. I hated the city we lived in for eight years, even though we had the perfect house with the exact giant kitchen I always wanted and some good friends and yes, I had tenure which means that in order to get fired, ever, I have to fuck up so badly that there's no way to save me. I had that, yes, but when you get off the plane to come home to a place you don't like, even though you have the cutest, sweetest kids ever and I'm not kidding, my kids are quite amazing even to a cynic like me, and you have a great home life and you love your work and all of that, when you get to the doors of the airport it's all you can do to actually go through those doors rather than turn around and get back on another plane...well, then you know you don't like where you live. And after eight years? I'd say I "gave it a chance", so it's not like I didn't try. It wasn't the first place I'd ever moved to, I've moved quite a bit within the country, but this place just didn't work for me.

There were things I liked. The South American guy who buys and roasts his own coffee has some fantastic stuff and it spoiled me (but I've found somewhere here that does a comparable job); the city was small enough that getting from place to place wasn't usually a hassle; it was beautiful to look at, and in fact the entire province is quite lovely, there's tons of history and lots of outdoors stuff to do. On the other hand, while the people are friendly enough, making friends and "getting in" was near to impossible. We're not unfriendly people, but it took forever to meet anyone, and if we invited people over, they'd come but we'd not get a return invite, even out of politeness. I know we're not unpleasant or boring or smelly. Once we did make some friends it was easier, but it took years. What drove me nuts the most was the politics, the gladhanding, the "who you know not what you know" that is so prevalent; while many people would say Oh that happens everywhere (and they'd be right) it's not an actual lifestyle everywhere. It is completely accepted that you're not going to get a job unless you can name-drop, unless you know or are related to someone of importance, or unless you have made some kind of a name for yourself in another way.

There were other things, but the main thing was that hub got a new job here in this province, and since we wanted to move here anyway, both having lived here before, we did that. Of course, we waited because I wasn't just ging to run off and leave my ridiculously high-paying job (oh I jest) and its security without knowing that this would work out.

It's worked out. I couldn't go back if I tried, so last night I resigned. I had to tell the university my plans as of January 1, and so I waited until 11:30p.m. on January 1 and then I told them.

Today is my stepfather's birthday. He passed away one year ago as of the end of this month, close to BestFriend2's birthday. BF2's father passed away on my birthday 1.5years ago.

Last year alone with the kids and the ridiculously demanding job was quite difficult. I generally don't think about it, there's not much point in doing so. I don't recommend it unless you like a lot of relentless stress.

I tend not to look too far into the future. I don't make five year plans, I barely plan for tomorrow never mind my retirement. There are some things that require some planning, but otherwise the rest is "you get what you get". In fact, most of life is this way.