For those of you following me from locations in Russia, Europe and Asia, I am not sure how the word 'darned' translates. It is a word often used by people living in the southern parts of the United States as a polite way of saying damned. But I have a darned car that is giving me fits.
About three years ago Cyndee needed to jettison a minivan that simply was not going to make it until our planned departure date. We had to get her something to drive for about the next 36 months. Keeping it as low-cost of an affair as possible she came upon a little red PT Cruiser (Chrysler) (now named Putt-Putt). It was a 2004 model and had 90,000 miles on it. It was in great shape in the looks department and seemed mechanically sound as well. And it was, until the last 14 days.
In the past two weeks I have had to take it to the shop 3 times for safety related issues that could not be put off until selling the car next month. They had to be fixed right now or else the car would not be drivable. So as of today I have sunk about a $1,000 fixing these nuisances with literally only days to go before selling it. I am a little nervous about what might break next and actually considering selling the car right away and just renting a car for the next month. It would not cost any more than I just spent on repairs. I could sell the PT, rent a car and still have money left from the sale after it was all said and done. I am going to have to run that by Cyndee and see what she thinks. She is kind of attached to Putt-Putt, advancing the date of separation from it may be a tough sell.
On another note, it is definitely spring time in the deep south. Tree pollen is raining down like snow. The pollen counts are some of the highest ever recorded, it is literally piling up in parking lots and gutters and any horizontal surface. I am pretty sure that I will have to get on the roof of the camper and sweep all the collected pollen off the slides before bringing them in for travel. It is bad enough tracking in all that yellow-green junk on the bottom of your feet. I can't imagine introducing clouds of it by rolling in the slides with their tops covered in it. But it will give me good practice for traveling in West Texas where, instead of pollen, it will be blowing red dirt and sand. Anybody that live out there knows that the dust bowl days did not end back in the 1930's. There are still plenty of days when giant red clouds of wind-blown red clay obscure the sun.
T -53 days from departing Georgia
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
18 and Counting (down).
I once heard the definition of what "work" is: it is when you are doing something but would rather be doing something else. For most of my 35 years I had a great job, but in the last few it has become work. I would reallly rather be doing something else. So I am doing something about that. It is only 18 days until my last day of work. Now, Cyndee argues that it is only 13 days as she only counts work-days not calendar days. But since my job has always been in support of customers around the world, there has been little distinction between night/day, week-day/week-end or even holidays. It's 18 days.
My pending retirement was announced broadly a couple of weeks ago. Since then there has been a shift in the normal flow of work. Typically I would handle 40 or 50 emails a day (the ones that needed action on my part), a stream of phone calls and meetings of all sorts. In the last five days I have not seen more than 15 emails (total) and I have lifted the phone off the receiver a couple of times to see if there is still a dial-tone. But the meetings have continued, I have several a day scheduled right up to my departure time on the last day. I have clearly become a lame duck, but there are things to do right to the end. I knew it would be different, I just did not know how it would be different. That difference is now revealing itself.
Of the few emails I have received in the past week some of them have been well-wishes from colleagues in Europe and Asia. These are some the nicest notes I have ever received on the job. These mean a great deal to me and will be some of the very few things I will preserve from my career.
There have also been a couple of lunches and dinners with friends and colleagues that were "one last time" affairs after having shared a meal with them countless times while traveling together all over the world. Again, very nice. There are definitely people that I will miss.
Pre-work for the change in domicile continues. Change of address has been trickling out for minor things but we will have to hold off on the linked things. It is amazing how connected everything is to your credit card. You really can not change a lot of things until you are ready to change your credit card. And when you are ready to change your credit card, you better be ready to change everything! This statement may leave a few of you scratching your head, but you have to think about this from the perspective of becoming a fulltimer. It is not like you will just be doing a traditional move and over a period of months, or even more, you get everything switched over. At least for us, we will be trying to time everything so that as little as possible ever has to get forwarded from our GA address to the TX address where it then has to get forwarded to wherever we are. We hope to get all parties notified in advance of leaving GA and catch up to our mail when we go to TX to complete the establshiment of our domicile.
One of the numerous aspects of domiciling in TX is that it is a state that has no state income tax. We will be dissassociating ourselves with GA (our domicile and residence for the past 25 yrs) and ending their claim to their cut of my income. Something I learned in the last few days is that bank account numbers are associated with a particular state. So, instead of just putting in a change of address with my, as Clark Howard calls it; "Giant, Monster, No-service, Mega-bank" and calling it "good", I have to physically close all my GA account numbers and get TX account numbers!!! Mind you, I could just do the change of address, but this leaves me wide open for any number of interpretations by GA state gub'ment about whether they have claim to monies in my account that resides in "their bank". I'm not leaving that to chance. I have a large number of hours set aside for terminating all the existing BillPay programming I have and recreating it anew under the new account numbers. This is not a detail taught in fulltimers school. But they do teach patience and flexibility as central to everything fulltiming so I guess I'll just roll with it.
T -54 days until departing Georgia
My pending retirement was announced broadly a couple of weeks ago. Since then there has been a shift in the normal flow of work. Typically I would handle 40 or 50 emails a day (the ones that needed action on my part), a stream of phone calls and meetings of all sorts. In the last five days I have not seen more than 15 emails (total) and I have lifted the phone off the receiver a couple of times to see if there is still a dial-tone. But the meetings have continued, I have several a day scheduled right up to my departure time on the last day. I have clearly become a lame duck, but there are things to do right to the end. I knew it would be different, I just did not know how it would be different. That difference is now revealing itself.
Of the few emails I have received in the past week some of them have been well-wishes from colleagues in Europe and Asia. These are some the nicest notes I have ever received on the job. These mean a great deal to me and will be some of the very few things I will preserve from my career.
There have also been a couple of lunches and dinners with friends and colleagues that were "one last time" affairs after having shared a meal with them countless times while traveling together all over the world. Again, very nice. There are definitely people that I will miss.
Pre-work for the change in domicile continues. Change of address has been trickling out for minor things but we will have to hold off on the linked things. It is amazing how connected everything is to your credit card. You really can not change a lot of things until you are ready to change your credit card. And when you are ready to change your credit card, you better be ready to change everything! This statement may leave a few of you scratching your head, but you have to think about this from the perspective of becoming a fulltimer. It is not like you will just be doing a traditional move and over a period of months, or even more, you get everything switched over. At least for us, we will be trying to time everything so that as little as possible ever has to get forwarded from our GA address to the TX address where it then has to get forwarded to wherever we are. We hope to get all parties notified in advance of leaving GA and catch up to our mail when we go to TX to complete the establshiment of our domicile.
One of the numerous aspects of domiciling in TX is that it is a state that has no state income tax. We will be dissassociating ourselves with GA (our domicile and residence for the past 25 yrs) and ending their claim to their cut of my income. Something I learned in the last few days is that bank account numbers are associated with a particular state. So, instead of just putting in a change of address with my, as Clark Howard calls it; "Giant, Monster, No-service, Mega-bank" and calling it "good", I have to physically close all my GA account numbers and get TX account numbers!!! Mind you, I could just do the change of address, but this leaves me wide open for any number of interpretations by GA state gub'ment about whether they have claim to monies in my account that resides in "their bank". I'm not leaving that to chance. I have a large number of hours set aside for terminating all the existing BillPay programming I have and recreating it anew under the new account numbers. This is not a detail taught in fulltimers school. But they do teach patience and flexibility as central to everything fulltiming so I guess I'll just roll with it.
T -54 days until departing Georgia
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)