Everything in italics is a recent addition beginning in April 2014, three years after my cross-country trip west from Virginia.
It's the last day that's always the most difficult. From the packing out of a convention, to moving across the city, to packing up and out of an old life and into a new one, it's never easy. After you've lived a part of your life with the same people, the same scenery, the same places and things, it's a shock to the system. No matter how happy you are, you're still tearing off a piece of yourself and leaving it behind.
When I woke up Monday morning, I was in an empty room.
Not entirely empty. Five bags of clothing, guns, and other travel goods were strewn about. The mattress and boxspring I was sleeping on was covered in a haphazard pile of bedding. A few toiletries remained in the bathroom, ready for a shower. But the white walls were empty, dusty and scraped. The frames of the old bed were leaning against the wall like brown-painted, rickety skeletons, and the carpet was vacuumed and shampooed clean of everything but a few stray hairs and dust clumps. To all intents and purposes, I was already gone.
On Sunday, the day before, everything but these last few artifacts were stripped out by wombat-socho and myself. The remnants of this previous life are in cardboard boxes, now some two hundred miles away from where I woke up this morning. Books, stuffed animals, trinkets, tools, all are hidden away. Some of them will be sold off, never to be seen again. Others will be shipped to Washington to wait for my arrival in Kennewick.
Half of these things never made it to Kennewick. Many of my things, I sold off or gave away, or simply delayed until my move to Southeast Portland in 2013. A year or two after I moved out, my uncle found a house south of Leesburg, married his girlfriend, and moved onto a good half acre or so. The shitty white walled apartment in Ashburn has proven to be the home I've lived in longest in the last ten years.
I will not be arriving in Kennewick for another three to four weeks. I'm on errantry, of a sort, you could say. I've a list of ten places to be before then, of many more people to see before then, of many more people to see before then. My truck is packed to the gills with clothes, with hardware, with blankets and pillows. Yesterday, after loading up my last five bags, I took two last errands.
The first was to Clyde's of Ashburn for a raucous celebration of my escape from our datacenter cluster. Just about everyone was there: the manager who, alongside my current one, took a chance on me some many years ago. The technician who taught me cable-running and hustle. The genius whose understanding of break-fix was beyond parallel. The hotshit networking guy who didn't know where the console port was when he started. The angry sysadmin with a fondness for robots. The two rack install guys, wisecracking at the end of the table. The new guys, already jaded and drinking on the clock alongside the equally jaded new cluster manager.
Time flies, and most of these people have dropped off the face of the planet for me. It's strange - they meant a lot to me at a very stressful and difficult time in my life. That life keeps to itself. Now that I'm no longer a NOC monkey, I'm no longer part of the machine.
The hotshit networking guy and the sysadmin moved west. One became a hotshit network engineer, the other went on to invest in bigger and better robots. All of us got out of there, one way or another.
I never got to know any of the new guys. But then again, I never expected I would.
It was the best team I've had the pleasure of working with, and the most dysfunctional. These men work miracles, and I'm honored to say I've worked with them, beside them, and pulled off the same miracles. From this crazy, broken work environment, I'm not sure I'll ever do anything this impressive or insane again. But who knows?
The second errand was to retrieve the last two bags from the apartment (laptop bag, gun bag), and to sign myself off of the lease with my uncle. It took thirty minutes, a quick coda to four years in a white room filled with cables and hardware.
It was hard. It was very hard. My uncle is a very linear man, a challenging one whose ethos is excellent for network architecture, but sometimes difficult to live with. But he got me out of Minnesota, brought me to Virginia, gave me a place to stay, and made me into the woman I am today. Insomuch as I've succeeded in my job as a sysadmin, in my role as a functional adult, I've him to blame. He's been a friend, an advisor, even a paternal figure over the past few years, and I'm going to miss the hell out of him.
We signed the papers, I turned over the key. And then I hugged my uncle, and I drove away.
...after he came yelling after me with the bag of tea and the box of books I'd forgotten.
I miss my uncle a lot, and in many ways he made me who I am today. I don't miss the shouting, though. For as fractious as our roommate situation was, we still talk fairly regularly.
On leaving, I drove west, taking the now familiar route of Virginia 7 to US 15, and then west. I'd been dreaming of this trip for months. My plan was to push through to Louisville, but between the realization of my move and the stress of departure, I was exhausted. Combine that with leaving mid-afternoon, and I was already worn and tired. Unfortunately, reality intervened.
Blue skies gave way to rain as I made my way through the mountains. The bumper stickers went from NRA advertisements to warnings of The President beginning what was termed an "American Holocaust". The exit ramps became steeper. The truck drivers became surly and prone to tailgating. My plans of making it to Louisville were cancelled in favor of a Comfort Inn, a tepid shower, and uneasy sleep.