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. 

I won't say any Hail Marys but I'll drink many glasses of sacramental wine

Forgive me readers for I have sinned. It's been 20 days since my last confession, er I mean post. I should have done better I know. There is no penance that can make reparation for this. And who are we kidding? I wouldn't perform that attrition any more than you'd expect me to. We both know me too well to expect that. So let me just summarize the salient events since you last saw me breach the surface of the blogsphere. 

Whence I last corresponded I was in the last week of prepping for the movers, but most of the heavy lifting was done and I was mostly enjoying some moments of newly found freedom and mulling over the relative nature of perceptions of time passage. Well, the big move day came and was largely uneventful except for regular rain as the movers were loading up the trucks. The move team was pretty diligent. But their incredible pace left me terrified for the welfare of our belongings. Still we hit the road by early afternoon leaving only a houseful of dust bunnies and some cleaning supplies behind, and arrived in Napa by mid-afternoon, where the moody rain of the south bay gave way to a welcoming view of broken clouds with blue sky and sunshine. 

Since then we've spent our time alternating between setting up a minimalist slice of our life in our 2 bedroom apartment and resolving the bureaucratic minutiae of escrow to complete the sale of our house. As of today, exactly 2 weeks after we first arrived in Napa, both those activities are complete. Those 2 weeks might as well have been 2 months. We measure time from sunrise to sunset and could replace our calendar with hash marks on the wall to count those days. In between the seemingly endless realizations of "Oops, we forgot we need to do X" as far as the mechanics of our relocation, we've tried with some growing success to create a new routine of life. This routine isn't particularly structured, nor the effort behind the creation too heroic. But the attempt feels like progress, and for the moment I'll take that at face value.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5...

We're in the final stretch. By this time next week we'll be in our apartment in Napa and a good chunk of our material life will be in a storage locker. We sign escrow papers this Friday. Movers show up Monday to pack what Dona hasn't already eagerly boxed up. And when that is done we caravan north to the promised land Monday afternoon. It's a marvelous outcome of how much work Dona put into getting us set up for this move months ago that at this point I have very little to do. Yesterday my day consisted of going out to breakfast, sending some emails and making some phone calls, taking a nice long bike ride, then playing guitar until it was time for us to go out to dinner with my sister and her husband. Having plenty of time I've spent a lot of it cruising the area looking at various places that I won't be seeing anytime soon and recalling memories associated with them. It's tempting to think of this as bittersweet but it's more aptly described as a sensible closure to my life in the south bay. It was a great run here but it's time for something new. And I'm ready.

The being of nothingness

I had a moment of selfish zen this week. I was having breakfast at one of my favorite cafes in downtown Sunnyvale. Enjoying a breakfast burrito sitting at a table on the sidewalk at 8:30am with the temperature hovering near 70 degrees in February felt like meditating. I’ve enjoyed many breakfasts at this location, but my recently acquired freedom made this occasion especially exquisite. The street at that time of morning was mostly deserted, the exception being commuters scurrying past to get to the train station at the end of the block. I felt like a rock in a stream while the waters of the working day world flowed past me. At one point I saw a woman jogging towards me in the direction of the station in distress, apparently worried she was going to miss her train. I saw her coming at a distance and as she approached I made eye contact and unwittingly held it. Her expression was an odd mixture of facial entreaty regarding her predicament and frustrated hostility at this laggard staring at her from his relaxing sidewalk perch while her world was in chaos. For a moment I truly felt sad for her and wanted to call out “Stop! It doesn’t have to be like this. There’s another way.” But as she buzzed past I felt sure my suggestion wouldn’t make sense or be believed. Besides, my breakfast burrito was waiting and starting to get cold.

Time, it is a changin'

Sorry for the lack of entries here. You have no idea how sense of time is distorted for me these days. I had started a new post last weekend and it only seemed like a day or so since then that it was aging and waiting for final review to post. Now I realize that day for the rest of you was a week. Time dilation is an ongoing problem I can see. It's a very regular occurrence for me to make off-by-one calendar mistakes or to completely forget what day of the week it is. My accuracy as far as time granularity is fast approaching the level of I still know what month it is. I expect that soon to morph into I know what season it is. 

The retirement week in review

It's been 9 days since I left work and it feels like a month. Tonight I turned on the TV to look for a weeknight show I thought was on and only then realized it was Sunday. A part of the time uncertainty comes from being in the altered reality that is the real estate market in Silicon Valley. We listed our house officially on the Monday of my last week at Google. By this past Tuesday after 8 days we had accepted an offer and were in escrow. It took me longer to sell some of my old furniture on the internal MTV for-sale group at work. Despite the fast pace of the execution, psychologically it felt like the whole thing was happening in slow motion. Also the loss of awareness of the passage of time is in part because I have allowed myself the luxury of leaving large swaths of my day unscheduled and picking up activities as I feel the urge. This is quite a bit different from other time off I've taken, including extended leaves of absence from work that I typically had intentionally well structured. My comfort level with this apparently lackadaisical state of affairs is something of interest to me, but neither because of regret about lowered productivity nor concerns about laziness. It just feels quite natural to me now to react to a given moment organically. So I might go from doing some packing for our move to reading the newspaper to taking a walk with the dogs to working on our new financial plan to...taking a nap. I expect this to change some as we reinvent our lives and get plugged into a whole new set of pursuits. But right now we can't really pursue all the things we have slated for investigation to fill our time. So this is how I'm reacting to the welcome problem of having spare time.

The first 4 days are the hardest

It took 4 days of retirement before I came back to Google as a guest for lunch, but it's not as bad as it sounds (unless you don't think that sounds bad in which case please skip to the next blog entry). My old team was hosting a conference and there were staff from the team from New York that I had not seen in person to say farewell since my announcement. So it was a chance to connect face to face as it may be the last time I see some of them. And well, there was also a team dinner that I got invited to after the conference, and that was special social event so I felt an obligation to participate. And I have additional Google lunches scheduled this week and next with people I haven't seen in awhile. Ok, after 10+ years at Google I might be a free food junkie. You just don't quit cold turkey. Mmmmmmm, turrrrrkeeeeey.

While I was back in the office I did take time to walk around as much as possible which led me to run into folks I hadn't had the opportunity to talk to directly in the last few weeks at work. So I had numerous serendipitous last chance farewells that extended the astounding amount of good will I'd been experiencing in my final days. Plus I got to cruise the pods on my floor dropping in on well established appreciative audiences for one last shot of ego juice as I entertained the troops. Nothing makes leaving more palatable than leaving 'em with a smile on their faces. It's probably at the top of my list of things I will miss most. 

Today is the first day of the best of my wife

I couldn't start the first blog entry of my retirement with something as trite as "Today is the first day of the rest of my life". So I started munging the words initially as quirky joke until I hit on this one, which isn't a title that is completely without relevance. My day started with a rustling near me as I lay in bed enjoying the warmth and lack of a schedule to drive me to get up. When I opened my eyes, through the blur I saw Dona standing there with a tray on which was a smoothie, coffee, and the paper. She has been positively giddy about me retiring and decided to demonstrate that enthusiasm. So she started out my day 1 quite special.

This blog has been long dormant since I started it in 2006 as an experiment. I soon realized I wasn't so good at talking about myself unless it was in person. But I'm resurrecting it as the channel for my thoughts for the time being until Dona and I can set up something new that's more of a collaborative effort to document what happens with us in the next phase. I'll do my best to keep it meaningful and not just a diary of activity. But as a disclaimer please note the tag line that accompanies the name of this blog. It's likely at times to degenerate into bleatings and musings of questionable value beyond entertainment. You may experience dizziness, nausea, hair loss, reduced sexual desire, or explosive diarrhea. It's possible you may experience some of these things simultaneously.

That being said I hope we all have fun.