Well it's been a crazy 4 weeks!
After getting back from Arizona we did a turn around and I headed to Dayton and my "roomie" headed back to PA.
The final week of work was fairly uneventful with the biggest activities being a good turn over to my replacement. I was pretty pleased with their choice. A great engineer that was in our department a couple years ago. During that time I was his mentor and basically trained him in the Jedi way... My customer knew him from that time so the account is in good hands.
Huge kerfuffle with porting my phone number out of the company. Verizon did a really poor job with this and ultimately I spent about 6 hours on the phone with them just to get accounts set up and so on. I understand technical issues but I repeatedly asked for a supervisor and the agent was stubborn. This was Friday night the 28th and not getting it done I had to buy a burner phone at Wally's and then finish on Monday - grrr....
I could rant more about how Apple is the evil empire and my new laptop needed a lot of setup etc. etc...
The biggest issue was that every important website basically said, "We see you've logged in from a new device. We are sending a security code to..." You guessed it, the phone that was out of play. It was quite stressful.
But I retired! With the remaining stuff it didn't seem real as I still had to close out the house and get back "home."
The close out of the house was another challenge. The first part was getting my brother relocated. He decided to buy a TT and stay in a park long term. Here's a video of us settling him in.
The bigger issue was my son who continues to get smacked by covid shut downs and didn't make the income he needed to get first/last and so on to move into an apartment. He was supposed to take all the furniture and we agreed it wasn't worth it to store it. He tried to sell it on marketplace with no luck and I was close to dropping an entire house of furniture in the dump. At the last hour I got hooked up with a group called Planting Seeds. They are a charity and do a lot of work with moms escaping abusive situations. As it turned out they were working with a mom of 3 kids and the only furniture she had was a mattress.
I fell really good that she got a whole house of furniture. I was raised on hand-me-downs, St. Vincent DePaul and Goodwill so this really made me feel good.
However that left a ton of his personal gear and some other stuff (household goods) that I chose to try and add to my trailer load. I had always planned to bring the washer/dryer, BBQ, a couple of outdoor furniture pieces, two desks and two beds. I had a 6X12 and it's amazing how gear expands to fill capacity - LOL... I literally had no inches of space left when I closed the doors and headed out.
I had planned a turn over on Sunday but my brother got his second (moderna) shot and was dropped for 36 hours and couldn't help. Real bad side effects. Here is where I was at around 4PM Sunday. I ultimately finished shampooing carpets at 5am, slept for 2 hours, finished up the kitchen and handed over at around 11am Monday.
With the phone issue I again spent Tuesday morning on the phone with Verizon and got the SIM card around 10am. The phone was not able to send text or make calls but was visible on the network. I got on the horn again with tech support and we did literally "everything" - reboots, resets etc. etc. They finally agreed with my diagnosis of a bad sim card and at 7pm I finally got a second card and the phone finally came to life.
Bad SIM out of the box... Who knew...
I then took my brother to dinner spent another night in the hotel and finally launched at around 2pm on Wednesday, arriving on Thursday at around 9am at the storage unit after a stop south of Atlanta to sleep. Unfortunately I had loaded the trailer a little light on the tongue and it was squirrelly above like 65mph if knocked by wind or an off camber bump.
So finally Friday was a vegging day. I ran a couple of errands and tried to absorb the fact that I am done. I spent a lot of time working on my tech - phone apps, laptop organizing etc. I had a great surprise Friday in that the separation check hit my bank - The government took over 30% (dammit) but it's still a big number and in the expectation range. I then linked up all my bank accounts to Fidelity and started transferring the "nest egg."
Today I am switching the phone to AT&T's 100gb plan as their coverage appears better here and both V and AT&T have better coverage maps than T-Mobil. I am not a happy camper with Verizon - LOL...
Then I am gonna continue the veg for the weekend, make a trip today to Cocoa Beach to see my niece and then get back on the property Monday.