My final day at TicketsNow was spent in my remote office, attempting to clean up the Bloomington Branch for the first time in 3 years. The main office is Illinois may have expanded by some 80 or so employees in the last year, but this office is keeping several generations of spiders well-fed with an assortment of creepy crawlies and dust bunnies. Plenty of places to hide, too, between the two dozen boxes of my past stacked in ways a Fire Marshall would condemn.
It was an easy decision to make to clean the office, since my access was cut off a day early. Password expired, and I didn’t think it was worth the effort to get it back. It’s not like I have been on the radar for my final days. Besides, I figure all of the time not spent straightening since 2001 already paid for this day.
It is a wide variety of stuff that showed up. Boxes of childhood memories that had migrated south during my parents’ divorce. Stacks of papers from web projects dating back to 1996. Old bills for credit cards cut up long ago. Sports ticket stubs and programs. Letters and printed emails. Knick knacks I have no use for except to return to a box and spark another memory years from now.
My most bittersweet find was a latchook kit that was to be the pride of my owl collection, once upon a time. Accompanied by little strings of yarn stuffed into a plastic bag, this large grid was about a quarter finished yet preserved for me by successful leaps from box to box. Even now, I cannot bring myself to get rid of it, designating it for some permanent storage in some new box. Were it completed, there is nowhere to display it, and my time is better spent on any number of other unfinished projects. But there persists the hope that one day I’ll get closure with that yarn owl.
There was no closure on the clean-up today, either. I have expectations that I’ll find my way to that point as the days roll into September. Next week, Amy and Archie leave for Germany; Carter and I will be wingin’ it here at home. I look forward to next week with some jitters, but perhaps there will be some opportunity to share this buried treasures with the boy. The larger agenda is to get the two of us untracked after a long and eventful year.
I wake up tomorrow unemployed. Between jobs, I clean.
