My Last Week at MBI

Well, I’m done with my office job. My computer system is now my own. No PC!!! I’ll be working on my Macintosh! I hate PCs! I love my Mac. 'Nuff said.
It would have been much easier to leave if I had a lousy job filling out TPS reports or some such nonsense, but I’ve spent 12 years being involved with something I enjoy--making books. Yes, there is corporate B.S., but that’s to be found at every company. So I'll miss the buzz of puttiing together a good book, the strategizing over look and feel, but I've done enough of that for one lifetime and I'll be doing my favorite part of that--making the words and the photos--so that I can let go of easily enough. Mostly I'll miss the interaction--the tired old jokes with Dennis and Josh, hearing Darwin rant, Jim's addled babble, and so on. So leaving was not necessarily easy, and it took me a while to (as a friend of mine said) “Go over the wall.”
I had a great last week, being treated to lunches, flying a blimp in the building, saying goodbye to everyone, and drinking beer in the office. As I told the CEO, if the job was all beer drinking and blimp flying, I’d never quit.
Good fun, but now it's time to live my dream of becoming an independent contractor. At the moment, I have two Macs up and running (my desktop and my laptop), Science Friday on MPR on the radio, a warm cup of coffee to drink, some home-baked cookies to snack on, shoots of tractors and garages to schedule, and a proposal to send off. Nothin' wrong with that.