Today is the First Day of the Rest of Our Lives

You know how that cliché goes?  I think I first heard that cliché over 40 years ago and quickly grew tired of hearing it.  Please, not THAT cliché again!!  So, I apologize for dusting off such an "oldie" but it really fits today like that glass slipper on Cinderella.  (Did you know Cinderella got her name because she was forced to sit in cinders?  Click here for the Wiki on her story.)

So, yes, it's cliché time once again.  It all started yesterday when we returned from the yurt.  (We had a great time at the yurt but that's another story best told in a separate blog post.)  I checked my office email account and it was official--that guy got the job. Well, that sealed the deal and it didn't even take a few minutes before we activated a Brand New Life Plan (BNLP for you acronym lovers).  So, yesterday was the Milestone Day that we discussed on the day this blog was born January 1.  No doubt about it.  It felt absolutely great and liberating and wonderful and all those other hackneyed, cliché words.

I will give my two-week notice on February 12 and my last day at the office will be February 26.  We will be heading out for Arizona sometime the following week so as to arrive before The Great Hogan Adventure.  (Yet another, soon-to-appear blog post.)

We have huge gobs of stuff we need to do in a very short period of time to make this happen but the die has been cast and the decisions have been made.  It's time for a new chapter in our lives.  Almost immediately, we began to see and experience all sorts of little things that showed us we were making the right decision.  I'd like to share one of those things with you.

Back on my first day on the job in August 2007, they finally gave me a copy of the federal grant narrative that supposedly guided the program.  We took it back to our travel trailer and I flipped out.  I decided to quit the job the following day as the narrative was ridiculous in every way.  The following morning, we parked a couple of blocks away from the office building and, while walking toward work, we called our federal state director in Boise.  We told him we were quitting and he gave a world calss sales pitch over the cell phone and successfully talked me into staying on.

OK, let's fast forward from August 2007 to yesterday.  One of our friends turned 50 yesterday.  We went to her office in the Courthouse to sing Happy Birthday to her.  As we were leaving to go to our truck, I decided to call the federal state director in Boise to tell him we had decided to retire from the job.  We were sitting in the cab of the truck in our parking spot talking with Kent when, almost at the same instant, Susun and I both realized that we were parked at the precise location where we had talked with Kent on August 23, 2007!!!  Talk about uncanny and strange--all three of us were shocked and awed.  Even Kent said, "Well, what goes around really does come around, eh?"

Yea, verily.