3 gets 11

kw: vacations, career

You know your vacation was long enough when you return to work and can't remember all the daily routines. This year, taking the last "week" off was a no-brainer. With both Christmas and New Year's Day on Tuesdays, and also having Monday off both weeks as company holidays, by taking Dec. 26-28^th as vacation days, I got 11 days in a row of staycation (I did take a short driving trip). Most of my colleagues did the same.

I decided to retire at the end of this month. I and my managers agreed to all that a month ago. I'll be taking off a couple of days also, so today was the first of 20 days I have left to "work". Actually, I completed my work in December, and I am passing on knowledge and information to a couple of colleagues so they can continue certain projects I was involved in. Mostly, I have a lot of sorting and donating to do. I have only a few books I'll be bringing home. Most need to be passed on to colleagues who can make use of them. A lot of notebooks full of things like old viewgraphs (from the days before Framework or PowerPoint) will just be tossed out. I also have a large horizontal file (the equivalent of two filing cabinets) full of stuff:

• Master copies of all my publications (no need to keep, they are in print, and I have those, too)
• A 40-year collection of algorithms and analyses (maybe I'll send them to the programmers in India, where they still write technical software)
• More than 3 years of the Sunday comics pages from a newspaper, that contain the last 3+ years of Calvin and Hobbes (though I have them in book form also)
• Nearly a full drawer of pages photocopied from articles of (former) interest (out they go)
• A full drawer of project files, of completed projects (out... unless someone wants the records)

That is the bulk of it. One accumulates a lot of stuff over a career, and I have had three. Time to lighten the load. The more stuff I get rid of now, the less for my heirs to throw out later.