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).