Tag: Transition

In absentia, Refactor

At 5-ish o’clock on Friday, I shut down my work laptops for the last time and packed them up to take back on Monday. Having to drive in to return them instead of shipping them back is inconvenient but unsurprising: I saw enough signs during my tenure to understand that a month’s notice might not be enough time to tie up all loose ends, especially with a holiday falling within that time frame. That my actual separation will only be one business day past my official departure date (and still within the “I can make myself available during the last few days of December” buffer I tacked on to my notice) is great, and that it’s only for two here-you-go-check-here-sign-there tasks1 seems like a win.

Of course, that’s only solving one side of the equation. The other side involves refactoring the absence of work work and fully integrating myself with everything otherwise. Past sabbaticals on this side suggest I’ll have the daily domesticity under control within a month and at least a good start on getting the overdue maintenance taken care of within the next quarter. I have no idea yet how long the other familial wrangling will take and what it will look like while we go through it.

Then there’s the remaining business, the for me business. My hobbies did creep back into my life after I shoved all of them aside and finished the degree, but except for the occasional day lost to installing and playing a video game2, I haven’t given any of them much elbow room. I read fifteen minutes a day during the week and thirty on weekends. I poke at learning German for ten minutes a day. I try to solve a mini-crossword puzzle on my phone in under a minute every day. I stab canvases with a needle when I get the chance (admittedly more frequently when my hands remind me that I’m using a keyboard too much and should do something else with them). I play in the dirt far less than I have been, but I think that … should … automatically … get better?3

I have a new former co-worker who insists I start writing again. She Has A Plan, namely that I come up with one and use her as an accountability partner.

I don’t know what to think about that right now, or even if I want to pencil in when I want to think about that.

  1. Hey, I know this process isn’t always easy. Ask me about the time I spent on a project to automate offboarding tasks for a government agency … or better yet, don’t. ↩︎
  2. …followed by my getting disgusted with myself and uninstalling everything again. I just went through this dance with Sims4, which I hadn’t played since 2023 (another day lost, another round of disgusted uninstalling). I will not do this with Skyrim ever again. I’m as done with it as I am done with multiplayer: I haven’t logged into one of those games in over ten years. ↩︎
  3. I cleaned the extra computer peripherals I was using for work — all mine — off my home office desk today and noticed how sad my collection of succulents on the plant stand in the corner has gotten in the past … uhmNotSure. I’ve been in this room with them for hours on end several days a week, but I can’t honestly say when I last invested more than the muscle memory required to dump some water on them. ↩︎

Unscented Rebalancing

I didn’t hate at the universe until it realigned itself; I just accepted that it was askew and needed a little constructive nudging.
-“Askew Tornadoes“, 11/10/2024

I have two bottles of fragrance, one for home and one for work.

(I used to own three, back when I was accepting the premise that I was a writer who sometimes wore MomAndSpouse-skin and at other times WhateverIWasDoingAtWork-skin. I let that argument go and carried on shuffling the two remaining skins, so to speak, but that’s a tangent for another time.)

Every time we move, whether it’s across town or across the country, I change my home scent. It’s become a way to usher in a new chapter of life as we settle into a new place. I buy a new broom for the house and a new perfume or eau de toilette for me. For years now, home has been the Aerin Mediterranean Honeysuckle I picked out when my son started his freshman year of high school.

I change my work fragrance every time I move between employers or take on a multi-month freelance project for a new client when I’m working for myself. I kept the same scent (Philosophy’s Amazing Grace Bergamot) when shifting from my last job to the current one, since my old company was acquired by the new one.

In a week’s time, I will dump what’s left of the work scent without any immediate plans to replace it.

For the past fifteen years, my husband’s and my in-office requirements have balanced each other out, even during periods when I have been an employee instead of a freelancer. Starting in January, they won’t anymore. There are reasons why this balance between what work wants from us and what home needs from us is still necessary: reasons that sometimes make me want to rage clean … though I know that hating them won’t make them more reasonable, even if my house might stay cleaner.

We’ll adjust. We do. This is just another move. I just haven’t figured out what it smells like yet.

Minimum Viable Trespass

Now and then, a flock of wild turkeys visit our backyard.

Now and then, so do a couple of turkey vultures.

In five years, I’ve never seen both of them in the yard at the same time, until Monday morning, when I popped my head out of the back door to see why the dog sounded so happy; he makes a distinctive “FRIEN! FRIEN!” wurfle-chirp noise when he sees a little kid or another animal.

He was excited about our vulture couple, who were perched on the back fence looking like they were chatting with the neighborhood wild turkey flock who were turkeying around in the grass behind it. The vultures ignored him but hopped off the fence to join the turkeys when I wandered over. The turkeys didn’t seem bothered by their presence at all and continued to strut around in the weeds as if it was just another day.

None of the unexpected visitors seemed ruffled about having been caught trespassing, though I suppose it could be argued that we were the ones trespassing, and at least some of us had been doing so for five years.

My contract ended yesterday, which was half-expected. Initially, the customer had given written notice expressing their intent to exercise the next option year, but they changed their minds two weeks later, then thought about changing their minds in full or in part for the remainder of our time there.

As a team, we assumed that the initial ‘no’ meant ‘no’. Most of us then spent a month tying off features in progress and tidying documentation.

I had to go the opposite direction, move out of an application suite’s requirements and design phase, and build a minimum viable product (MVP) of one of its key components before I transitioned off the contract. The intent was to give the client stakeholders something they could play with a model they could reference while working with my team’s replacements.

Surprisingly, the lead stakeholder enjoyed the MVP so much that he requested that I put it into production before I left. This was a serious well, okay … are you sure? for me, but he was certain, so I got it done, and all of the new live environment assets handed over with the rest of the project materials.

So, now … what? I’m another corporation’s employee for a change instead of working for my tiny little company, and they’ve given me a spot on a bench for two weeks while they figure out what I can do for them next. Fortunately, they have quite a few open roles, so I’ve been sitting here interviewing instead of constantly checking my phone to see if I can feed some of my popcorn to the local wildlife or, more importantly (in his opinion), the dog.