I’ve just returned from a week’s hideaway at our cabin in Strawberry, AZ. I deliberately left the computers at home, and this was my longest offline experience in 5 or 6 years.
The first few days were a bit shakey, and the sweats and convulsions were intense.
I kid you all (the 5 people who read this blog); there was no adverse reaction, and I loved being free of the keyboard, web, and email chains. We ate linke royalty, read books, watched movies, sat in the hit tub, took the dog for runs in the snow, and just plain unwound. I cannot even state for sure why we came back home.
This photo is of a fir we planted in our front yard about 2 years ago. We arrived a few days after the storm of the winter, which plopped maybe 35 inches of snow in one weekend (the total accumualtion up til now was Zero).
There was still a large drift as tall as this tree, and I was fascnicated by the line between snow and tree, so distinct yet so organic, and felt all kinds of resonations with my life the last few weeks.
The day before I left, technically the Monday of Spring Break at Maricopa (staff have the last 2 days of the week as a break), was when I let loose by email notification the news that I was leaving Maricopa to join the Mew Media Consortium as of April 10.
My experiment shatters the illusion of all faculty sipping umbrella drinks on tropical islands, as I got rather instaneoous replies (and not vacation notices) from many faculty colleagues.
I am utterly overwhelmed by the generous and warm congratulations I got from my “bomb dropping”. It’s going to be a hard thing to say goodbye to so many colleagues (and I forgot at least 50% of whom I should have included on that first message).
One of many benefits of my new position is going to be a lovely, short email address. I will just hint it out since the email spam harvesters are not as dumb as you think (look at the spelled out display of my blog email contact, top of the sidebar– that is the only place I have used it, and I am getting tons of spam, though Gmail is darned good at cutting it off).
So my new contact email address (and apparently it works, though I am not using it til April) will be my first name (lower case), and that that funny little symbol of the a with a loop around it, followed by the acronyme of my new employers (New Media Comsortium), followed by a dot and than the domaon used for Organizations. So I will have a 12 digit email address (compared to 27 now at Maricopa).
So in facing this “line”, I have 3 weeks of wrapping up projects, documenting the labyrinthian pile of web sites hoisted since 1993, cleaning out the office I have occupied for 14 years, and saying lots of goodbyes.
Yup, going across the line.
Someone should make a movie with thqat title, or at least write a song about it.
Well, there’s “I Walk The Line,” but that’s not quite the same. 🙂