Yippee! It's Tuesday!

I’m writing this at 36,000 feet, on an Air Canada Airbus A320 headed west for Los Angeles. I’m not standing in that spot in the backroom of the hardware store that I no longer own as I had been doing for almost every other Tuesday since the fall of 1988. No more starting the day unloading a tractor trailer by hand, and then sorting and pricing it all. No more slicing open box after box, having done that job so many times that I could tell just by looking at a plain cardboard box what its contents were.

I’m a free man. It feels as if the weight of the world has come off my shoulders in the last few weeks. It seems incredible that the day I somehow never really expected to get here, the day I close the deal on selling the store, is a week behind me. No more big yellow truck every Tuesday, no more customers whining about anything they can, no more wondering if I’ll be able to take my next day off or if I should even try and plan a vacation, no more of having my life run by some “thing” that I often felt was controlling me, not the other way around.

In case you didn’t get the memo, or read in the paper about “The Retirement Riot”, yes, I’m unemployed. Freedom 52. And I have a dozen shredded red Home Hardware shirts to prove it. I staple gunned them to the tree in the front yard so everybody passing by would get the word. To all who attended, thanks for coming by to wish me well, especially the surprise guests who I didn’t think even knew where I lived. My lawyer was in attendance in case the cops showed up, which was fortunate as John brought along a gift of his latest drinking game involving a candelabra and whipped cream flavored Vodka shots. But despite the racket the solicitors services were not required as I had taken the pre-emptive step of inviting all the neighbors. And I came out way ahead on the deal. My former staff all chipped in and bought me a hip flask, which I have every intention of wearing out with over use, and people brought far more booze than they consumed, leaving behind a huge stack of the excess. I also received gifts of so many bottles of booze in general and premium Vodka in particular that I lost count. The Vodka-sicles were a big hit, you just had to eat them quickly as the high alcohol content meant they melted quickly.

Diane and I are on our way to Perris Valley Skydiving where we’ll be doing a 100-way skydiving camp for 4 days, and if I do well, followed by 5 days of high quality Invitation-Only 165-ways. Diane already has a slot on the 165, but mine is to be confirmed based on my performance over the latter part of this week. I seem to keep going out with women who I’m trying to catch up to skydiving-wise, no doubt Freud and my sister Cathy would have something to say about that.

The whole plan could have gone bad early on while we were changing planes in Toronto. We went by the Duty Free and I spied a large display of Grey Goose. A couple of moments later we each had a quart bottle in our knapsacks, and quickly found ourselves in another store with me eying the bottles of lemonade and Gatorade. “We could make this plane ride go by pretty fast!” I thought. But then I flashed back to the Great Oshkosh Air Show drunk stumble and thought better of it. It would put a crimp in the whole thing to wind up getting tossed off the plane halfway there, not to mention they’d probably confiscate the Vodka.

The store is gone, and now the whole world is spread out before me. There are boogies galore in the offing, evening, weekday, and weekend trips lined up with my riding group, a new Mission 100 in Farnham, tandems at Mile High, and even, wonder of wonders, some unstructured free play time. I’ll be dropping by Mike’s place in Norway Bay for coffee or a beer on a regular basis - it’s only a 7 hour round trip if you know which route to take, cottage weekends with friends, and go over to fix whatever needs fixin’ at my mom’s place when it needs fixin’ rather than  sneaking away from work whenever I can for long enough to put a patch on the problem.

The next 4 days should prove to be pretty entertaining, skills camps are a place where the coaches do their best to push people out of their comfort zones and help them set new limits for themselves. That means there will be a lot of jumps that don't come anywhere near to following the plan. But my defensive skydiving skills have been honed to a fine edge by years of people trying to kill me at various boogies and conventions. I'm sure everything will be fine, as long as nobody does anything stupid.

I wanted to attach a picture of the hip flask I received from the gang at my former place of employment, but the battery on my camera went dead, They had it engraved. The silver plate on the front reads: "Yippee! It's Tuesday"