All Good Things...

Today is the last day of sabbatical. It's always crazy to me how fast it goes. That first day it seems like we will have forever. It takes about a week or two to really get into the swing of things, realizing that you can run errands on a Tuesday instead of doing it all on the weekends, for instance. Not worrying about what time you get up in the morning, there is no 7 AM meeting that you have to attend. (He has to attend, not me, I just try to make sure breakfast is done before those early ones so he doesn't go in starving) And then once you get into your new rhythm suddenly it's almost over.

This time was a bummer. Not the sabbatical. The sabbatical was lovely and much needed for Brent. Intel is a stressful place to work on a good day, and lately the good days have not been as plentiful. But it was a bummer because he has to go back. I guess there used to be high rate of people who did retire after they came back from sabbatical. It's easy to see why.

Last week we went to a friend's retirement party and a lot of the people there had taken the package. Another friend had her last day the same week. It was a fresh round of "did we make the right call?" Which we don't really know for sure. We know we made what seems like the best decision for us for where we are in life. But we won't know if it was the right call for awhile. That's the thing with decisions like that, you make the best one you can with the information you have, but you don't know if it was the right one until later.

We made the call we did because we just didn't have enough money to make it work mostly because we are too far out from Medicare kicking in and health insurance costs are insane, and with the new administration coming in who knows what will even happen with that. And he's just on the other side of an age where job hunting would be easier. Nobody wants to hire someone closer to 60 than 50. The prospect of looking and not finding anything was worse than the idea of staying.

Then while he was gone things have changed even more. He's going back to a company that just fired their CEO after doing massive layoffs (excuse me, where their CEO retired voluntarily) so every single department and area is in flux and will be until they make a new hire, and then again while the new guy (assuming it will be a guy, it's almost always a guy) figures out what they are doing with the company. Who knows what he's stepping back into.

So yeah, it's a bummer to see sabbatical end.

Tomorrow morning the alarm will go off and we will settle back into that groove.

It was a lovely break and I am glad he was able to take it.

But I am bummed that it's over.

Time to buy a lottery ticket.