We closed out the first week of March with our collective first milestone complete. Both Jan and I had our final days of work. Jan was done on Tuesday and I finished today (Friday). Some random thoughts.

1. I went into work this morning, opened my office, ate my breakfast then went to turn in my computer/blackberry. When I got back to the office, there was a bottle of wine on the desk. SWEET! I left to go turn in my office keys and when I got back, the bottle of wine was joined by a bottle of champagne! I immediately left my office, walked around the hallway for a minute and returned but the luck had run out. We promised to save the wine for a special occasion. Which turned out to be 4pm. Cheers!

2. We are now on a fixed budget. Or rather we are on a much smaller fixed budget. Which means we need to cut out all the frivolous spending that we do. We sat down as a family over lunch and beverages at a local restaurant to think about all the ways we could reduce our spending. Probably need to work a little harder at this.

3. Neither of us will miss our commute. But both of us had the great fortune to work with fantastic people and we will miss everyone. Well. Almost everyone…

4. While Jan and I are pumped to be finished with our jobs and the time to focus on packing the house and getting the boat ready, our excitement is not felt across the house. AJ had a bit of a melt down on Tuesday. There is a pack of kids in the neighborhood and he is not excited about leaving them for a year. Our comments about ‘how great this will be’ and ‘it will be an adventure’ fall on deaf ears and Tuesday he had enough. As we were about finished with the episode, Jan walked in from work. She had a bag of gifts from her work and when she saw the tears, she pulled out three mugs that were made for us on the boat. They had the Serenity logo and our names (Admiral Jan, Captain Jim and Chief AJ) on the sides. When AJ saw his mug, it was like turning off a switch. Tears stopped and he marched around the house with his mug talking about how GREAT this trip was going to be. If I knew that was going to be the reaction, I’d have ponied up on the money to get us mugs WAY before now.

 

ginger-beer
Tough job, but someone has to do it…

5. I got a bug out bag from work and among other things in the bag were three recipes for a “Dark and Stormy” along with the requisite rum and ginger beer. While we have a long list of stuff to do between now and the first of May, tonight we concentrate on perfecting the drink recipe. It may take awhile, but we will slog through the process.