I tried my best, but I can't put this off any longer

Well, it's been over 2 years since this blog displayed any signs of life. Dormancy, or perhaps I should say lifelessness, seems to be a defining characteristic of my abilities at this kind of writing, and that has been the case since I started this in 2006 as an experiment. As I noted back then I realize I'm not very good at talking about myself in writing. But there's no reason this forum has to be little more than a diary, and I'm still curious about the possibility that I might actually have something to say (although this post suggests otherwise). Also I'm morbidly curious whether anyone who was on the recipient list for this blog previously will notice that the corpse is starting to move around again. So please react as you choose to let me know you're also still out there. But before you do I will repeat my original disclaimer about consuming this content. It's likely at times to degenerate into bleating and musings of questionable value. You may experience dizziness, nausea, hair loss, reduced sexual desire, or explosive diarrhea. It's possible you may experience some of these things simultaneously. But, please enjoy. 

Three years later.

Three years later and what should feel like "it's over" feels something more like "hangover", a dull ache that just seems to drag on.

Another voyager signals from the far reaches of space and time to say it's still here

We recently watched an illuminating and at this point in time somewhat poignant documentary on the history of the Voyager missions, which launched in the late 70s. The satellites are now 14 billion miles from earth but still occasionally being heard from. It reminded me that it's been seemingly a millennium since I posted to this blog. Either that or just over 5 years; time is a bit fuzzy these days. But like a spacecraft wandering the less limitless space/time continuum of the California universe I now send out a weak signal to let those who might still be listening know I'm still on the path set way back in early 2016. In December 2016 when I posted last we had yet to find the permanent home in Napa that we were seeking, but were comfortably living in a rental house on a beautiful piece of land with great views and figured we'd just stay there for some time. Never make plans. Three months later a home we'd looked at previously and dismissed became available a second time and we fell in love with it unexpectedly. We've now been in it for almost 5 years, thereby finally putting the trials of our itinerant past (see previous post) to rest. And we certainly feel lucky to have landed where we did as we were well situated to pass through the black hole that has been a shared pandemic existence for the world's population for 2 years. We're now beginning to see the stars again. And I will endeavor to make my signals stronger in the future. 

Close encounters of the retired kind

There has been a lengthy silence in this blog. It feels like I've been away for a long time in a remote area of space and having just returned am confronted by the realization only now of where I was and just how much things have changed in my absence. I won't force you to read through a painfully detailed recounting of my abduction (yet). Rather I'll just cut to the key realization. Despite all my blathering and posturing on what I was sure was a well choreographed exit strategy from the working world to the land of milk and honey, I did it wrong. As with many projects, and those from my former company will empathize mightily with this observation, it was a great notion that wasn't executed as well as it could have been. In proper Xoogler fashion I will let the data speak for itself:

Previously what you knew of our story and plans was this:

1. Retired in early 2016
2. Sold the house in Sunnyvale
3. Relocated to Napa and lived in an apartment
4. Bought a home within 3 months and moved in early June, planning to remodel it to be the last place we live
5. Die happy

Let's turn on monitoring and examine the state of our system now:

• Living in a rental home for at least the next 9 months
• Remodeling plans abandoned after we spent 2 months working with and paying a designer and even got a loan to finance that
• Our purchased house is mostly empty except for the garage which is now our main storage facility
• Not sure where we'll live next other than it should still be in Napa
• Not waiting to die happy but looking to stay happy now and doing surprisingly well on that front despite the current state of affairs

Hmmm, seems like it's time for a postmortem (damn, this is just like I'm still working at Google). Where our world flew out of its orbit was around #4 in the first list, but the cosmic forces that led to this were really set in motion in between #1 and #2. As with many project failures the seeds of the problem were sown early, subsequently overlooked, and then ignored later when they surfaced. So what went wrong? There were a number of textbook examples of poor project management involved, but a big one was allowing an artificial timeline to exert urgency into our decisions where that urgency didn't really exist. This meant that even though we *did* have a well thought out plan and an excellent grasp of the details underpinning that plan, we acted too much with the goal in mind. Also as importantly I now know we suffered from another major project failure hallmark. We felt we had a solution, but we didn't understand fully what the problem was that we were trying to solve. So we worked too doggedly and overconfidently to achieve an end rather than taking a much more iterative approach that would have allowed us to stop and re-assess after each phase. We didn't have to sell our Sunnyvale home as a parallel effort to my exit from Google or at all for the time being. That put too much in play at once and created dependencies where they didn't have to. We also didn't have to choose to live an apartment only on a short term basis in the belief that we knew the Napa housing market well enough to find a home in 3 months and were worried that market was heating up. That was hubris. But when we finally saw the bottom line on the cost of the projected remodel and compared that to what we could buy in our area that was better for less money we couldn't deny what we'd already started to feel at a gut level, which was that we somehow had blown it. We were living a dream on the one hand just by being here, yet seemed to have as much general anxiety as we'd had when I was still working. 

The good news is that we didn't make the most egregious project failure choice by continuing on the poor path we'd set just because we felt we'd gone so far that we couldn't turn back. We went the other direction and declared a complete mulligan on the whole house thing. We're going to sell our current home and stay in the very nice rental we have until the lease is up to give us time to reset. We'll try to make up the investment we have so far on the sale and just start over with a blank slate. In the meantime we still love Napa and know we made the right decision in living here. We've already made many friends and feel like we've lived here for much longer than 10 months. 

So despite the huge pivot we're only slightly off balance and are staying on our feet. Our tragic problems are still of the first world variety. What I wanted to say was, well, retirement is harder than it looks. For one thing at this point in life there are more anal probes (see how I tied that back to the tagline?). More on that subject soon (retirement, not anal probes). 

Honey, we're ho-ome!

Seems like I have organically settled on a heartbeat of about 1 post a month. It's not what I'd hoped for in terms of output. But it turns out retirement is hard. The term "hard" here is certainly relative. It's not quite as hard as having your latte served a bit too hot, but much harder than a breeze that's not quite cool enough on a warm summer day. 

During the last month's cone of silence* a lot has happened. Within a week of my last blog surface breach a great house came on the market that we had seen before but weren't in a position to move on. Luckily (a word that barely captures the repeated good fortune we've had) it never sold previously and reappeared at a point when we were thinking we might be looking for another 3-6 months to find the right place. We put together what we thought was a reasonably generous offer, but we also found out we were competing against 6 other offers. The overall picture our offer presented was just slightly better than the others and we entered into contract and just closed escrow last week. We are now homeowners again. We had to give the previous owners some extra time to move out so are still renting for a week or two. Also during the last month we spent a lot of time closing out the last vestiges of our infrastructure connections in the south Bay Area and migrating them to Napa. So we are now fully plugged into all the financial, medical, social, and recreational channels we need. 

Something that I only just recognized in recent weeks was that the mechanics of moving and rebuilding our lives in Napa completely subsumed all the concerns I had with what it meant to be retired. So where we are now is finally in a place to fully realize what retired life means. Up until now it was bit more like going from my old job at Google to my new job (modulo that relative definition of "hard" I brought up earlier). 

* Reference bait!

The anniversary that I didn't reach

Had I not retired in February, today would have been my 11 year anniversary at Google. It's poignant for me to think about that milestone strictly from the perspective of what it meant to work for such a great company. But from the perspective of what my life is like now, it's also a reminder that I made the right call when I decided it was time to leave. Hitting 10 years in 2015 was a very fulfilling milestone that came right as I began to understand I'd done what I needed to do in my existing role with plenty of positive impact and that it was time to move on to "something else". The freedom that decision gave me triggered a avalanche of thinking that would not have happened with such clarity had I maintained notions of continuing on some career trajectory to my next anniversary. Ultimately it led to the realization that the something else I wanted to do was not work for a living any more, even though opportunities to do so weren't lacking. So I was happy I left when I still had something to offer if I'd wanted to stay, and before I'd reached the point where I might no longer enjoy the work or be as productive as I wanted. Everything that has happened since is just like gravy on a chocolate cake. 

A day in the life

I've had a few friends I communicate with regularly ask me what my days are like now that I'm retired. Now that we've been in the temporary apartment for over a month we have some predictable routines. So here's what happened yesterday:

1. Got up a 6:45. Apartment has no yard so that means dogs have to be walked whenever they have business. This is something I would have hated while working but is a non-event now. It's a nice way to wake up before I've even had coffee.
2. Make coffee and read the paper while Dona sleeps in. Look online to see what houses might be coming up that we can look at to buy. Have a few email exchanges with our agent, which is definitely a daily routine.
3. Dona gets up and I propose we skip our simple oatmeal and toast at home and go into downtown Napa to a great little bistro type place for breakfast. We toss off the PJs and toss on some workout clothes, pack the dogs in the car because we take them everywhere now, and head off on the 5 minute drive to downtown Napa.
4. After breakfast I take the dogs for a 1.5 hr 4.5 mile walk along the river and in a nearby open space preserve. It's in the high 70s and it's a great workout. Hardly anyone is out which makes it seem like I own the whole place.
5. Showered and free of sleeping and workout funk, Dona and I drive to get a light bulb for the living room lamp and to drop off some docs for shredding that we cleaned out of our file cabinets recently since our life, and the need for all this documentation of those life, has gotten simpler. Before we get there we decide mid-morning coffee is in order so we stop at Starbucks and actually take the time to finish our coffee before hitting the stores. 
6. We get our light bulb and shredding done and then pop into Target for a couple of items we notice are on our short term shopping list (dutifully kept up to date in Google Keep). Unlike in Sunnyvale where the crowds are unavoidable the stores here are only mildly populated and all these errands feel more like recreational activities rather than chores.
7. On the way home we decide on the fly that we should stop at our favorite Napa lunch bistro, where we are now so regular all the servers and management have started introducing themselves to us so they can learn our names. We have no reason not to so we have a carafe of nice local red table wine with lunch. Our waitress invites us to a special dinner they are going to have after hours in early May where the chef and a local brewmaster are going to team up for sit down dinner pairing. We're really starting to get plugged into a new network of people here.
8. Back home Dona goes out shopping for clothes while I stay to organize our files now that we've cleaned up (see "shredding" above) and dial in my reduced office space a bit more (an ongoing process that for me is much like a beaver continually working on a dam).
9. I prep dinner by marinating some swordfish we got at Whole Foods. 
10. A very old friend who has been going through some serious tribulations in life and who I have been waiting to hear from calls me and we talk for an hour and half while he catches me up and I try to be helpful. 
11. Dona comes home from a successful clothes shopping trip and comes into the office where I'm still talking on the phone to my old friend and hands me a beer in a cold glass. 
12. We make and eat dinner while we alternate back and forth between the SF Giants game and the SF Warriors game. We drink a couple more beers in the process.
13. I have another 30 minute phone call with another old friend about hooking up this weekend when we head back to the south bay area for a jazz show at a little club, an event we had planned going back before we moved. We'll spend the weekend in Saratoga,  a beautiful little village, and do some local hiking. 
14. I decide to crash out about 10:30, right after Dona and I discuss some new home listings that just popped up in the evening that we are very excited about. So we ping our agent for the umpteenth time that day in the hopes we can tour the homes next day.