T - 1: I Flit. I Float. I Fleetly Flee. I Fly

Well, today is the last day of this part of my life. I have had a great ride at this company.

For nearly 20 years I have had the freedom to pull together creative people to build new products or manage older ones in new ways. The pace of change has been exhausting, and we have had our success because the team here has been creative, smart and dedicated. And because the owner of this global company encourages his businesses around the world to act exactly as if they were running their own business.

I never thought I would stay at any one job for five years, much less 17. But really my job here has been different every year; only my title has stayed the same.

And on the personal side, it has been nothing short of fantastic. Just consider all the places we have visited on company business - London, Tokyo, Paris, New York, Beijing, Singapore, Copenhagen, San Francisco, Toronto, Honolulu, Shanghai, Athens, Warsaw, Oslo. Oh yes, Auckland, too.

Some times when I think about starting out in Rutland, Vermont, I cannot believe that I have ended up in Sydney and that we have been welcomed as friends when we have visited such places as Toronto, Copenhagen, Budapest and Hanoi.

But of course, it is the friends closer to home who have meant the most. Some of the people who worked and laughed and argued here have meant the world to me. Some have already moved on from the company, and some are still here. I won't mention any of them because I would feel terrible to leave one out accidentally. Let's just say, if you think you're on the list, you probably are.

A while back I wrote that I was thinking about my exit music in the movie of my last day. The playlist is down to five. To make that shortlist was tough. Songs had to get past Johnny Paycheck's "Take this Job and Shove It" (my Dad's choice, although I don't really agree with the sentiment); Toby Keith's "Time to Hit the Road" and the one I really wanted to go with "Funkytown" by Lipps.

So here are the five playlist finalists with the lyrics that made me choose them. I guess you can tell by the headline of this post which one was the winner.


Back to the howling old owl in the woods
Hunting the horny back toad
Oh I've finally decided my future lies
Beyond the yellow brick road

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Lyrics by Bernie Taupin
___________________________

I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin' me insane
It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more

Maggie's Farm
Lyrics by Bob Dylan
___________________________

Driver says, "You don't know where this bus is going?"
Old man says, "I just want it to get me through.
Hey, I'm staying on the ride, it's gonna take me somewhere."

Stay on the Ride
Lyrics by Patty Griffin
___________________________

You woke up this morning all the love has gone
Your papa never told you about right and wrong
But you're looking good, baby, I believe you're feeling fine
Born under a bad sign with a blue moon in your eyes

Woke up This Morning
Lyrics by Alabama 3
___________________________


So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye
I leave and heave a sigh and say goodbye -- Goodbye!
I'm glad to go, I cannot tell a lie
I flit, I float, I fleetly flee, I fly

The Childrens Song
Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

T - 2: Five Easy Pieces

Today is tidying up day. I am clearing out my office, boxing up the stuff on my shelves, wrapping my pictures in bubble wrap and generally trying to remove every file from my computer that might lead to my arrest.

People keep asking me how I feel now that retirement is so close. Some are convinced I must be sad or at least melancholy. Others are quite sure I must be overjoyed at the freedom I will now experience. Linda is positive I will just use the newfound time do things that will ultimately require bringing in contractors to fix.

In fact, I have been planning this so long that there aren't any wildly strong emotions. I am optimistic that this next quarter of my life will be interesting and fun. I am pessimistic that the world economic mess may make a nonsense out of our retirement planning, making it all very hard financially. Maybe big highs? Maybe big lows? (Think Leo DiCaprio in Titanic, lucky enough to win the ticket for the ship's inaugural cruise and then even luckier to hook up with the beautiful rich babe, only to have the idiots on the bridge dump everyone in the icy water. And if that isn't bad enough, you have to listen to Celine Dion as you drown.)

Oh well, que sera sera. (You know Celine is bad when you'd rather have that Doris Day song running through your mind all day.) Today is the final Monday of the pre-season. It is time for the final list of five things I will do when I retire. And for the first time, I can write about five things I am going to do this week!

1. Wednesday:

Start my walking regime by walking to the club next to my (former) company, where they are throwing a farewell party for me. Later start my stumbling regime by trying to walk home from the party.

2. Thursday:

Apply for my Senior Citizen's Discount Card. Grey power rules, and there are discounts and bargains galore. And I swear, this is no joke. When you go the website and check out what discounts are available, the first one that comes up is for 10% off on funerals and memorial services.

3. Friday

Start being financially responsible by organizing our accounts, setting up the software to do Linda's company's books, arranging a meeting with a financial advisor and scheduling an appointment with the bank to discuss better interest rates. Alternatively, play online poker.

4. Saturday

To the hardware store! Time to get all the gear I need if I intend to take over most of our gardeners' work -- a new weed whacker, hedge trimmers, edger, pruning shears, one of those big noisy air things that blows all the crap off the pavers, aspirin, Tiger Balm, vodka.

5. Sunday

A day of rest, so I will begin to catch up with friends I haven't caught up with lately. They will, of course, recognize it as my blatant attempt at filling up long retirement days with little to do. But if I cared what they thought, I probably would have been in touch with them before this. In fact, if that's their attitude, I don't want to catch up. I will play online poker instead.

T - 3: Clothes Maketh the Man

I am not sentimental about my clothing. This makes me the polar opposite of my darling. One of my favorite party tricks is to amaze our friends by asking Linda what she wore, say, to the first day of school in her last year of high school. Some times she's not so sure about the accessories, but she's almost always able to get the basic outfit right if the day held any significance at all.

I, on the other hand, cannot remember what I wore last night. Well, that's not strictly true. It was shorts and a T-shirt. What I can't remember is which T-shirt it was. But since I only wear T's and shorts around the house, I know it was one of them.

Which is a roundabout way of getting to today's post. I realized a few days ago that as of Tuesday I don't need - and will not use - most of the clothes hanging in my closet. Oh, there will be the odd occasion when I need a necktie or a suit, but really would God have given the world Ralph Lauren if he wanted men to wear more than Polo shirts and chinos?

So now there sits the imposing pile of my business clothes in the picture up above. I've already set aside and kept in the closet more suits, blazers, trousers, dress shirts and neckties than I am ever likely to use. However, I will get very annoyed if I have to buy anything like that down the road, so I would rather save a few more than I need.

But my dilemma is what to do with the rest? My inclination is to give them to charity, but be honest with me. When have you seen a homeless person my size? And if you have, was he in desperate need of a suit and white shirt that required cuff links? If there are some really large guys looking for used clothes on eBay, I might be able to offload a few items, but I think we all know the chances are - pun intended - slim.

I suppose neckties are one size fits all, but I am pretty sure the local soup kitchen isn't going to start requiring ties for dinner just because I've given all my Fornasettis away to charity. So what to do? Everything in me cries out that it would be a terrible waste to just chuck them in the bin, and I won't do that until I think about this more.

In the end, I suppose it will be a matter of buying more plastic storage boxes and putting them in the storage bin we rent because our garage is too full to take anymore. And here we are supposed to be paring back rather than adding storage.

Oh well, at least there is one genuine benefit from all of this. By shrinking my closet space down, I have been able to give Linda the extra space. So now she will have even more room to store what will surely prove to be even more impressive memory tricks at our parties in later years.

PS This is my sister-in-law's birthday. Happy Birthday, Sandy - have a great day. Love ya.

T - 4: The Long Good Friday

In a week in which so many things are the last this and the last that, yesterday marked a significant last. I hosted a small lunch that I christened The Last Swipe, for it was the last time I will swipe a credit card to pay for a business lunch.

For some people, that might not be a big deal. For me, it is monumental. How monumental, you ask? Let's just say that when we left Lee's Fortuna Court, Stan Lee, the owner, shook my hand as one does when an athlete completes a fantastic career. I was the Ted Williams, the Tom Brady, the Don Bradman of business lunches.

I was a good, competent luncher in the US. I have great memories of the beginning of so many lunches in New York and later in Boston. (I cannot really claim to have memories of the end of all of these lunches.)

But it was here in Oz that I became a world-class player. No weepy Marlon Brando scene for me - when I landed here I became a contender!

Susan started me on my path to greatness, When I arrived here 20 years ago as editor, she wanted me to meet and greet the top people in the industry. She was a firm believer that lunch was the best way to do this. Frankly, if I have had any mentor in this lunching game, it was Suzey. And to this day she continues to impress me with her lunching strategy and technique. A real pro!

I need to add that about six weeks into this environment, Linda complained quite bitterly. It had something to do with her not thinking it was fair for me to come home drunk every night. (Perhaps I haven't mentioned that a business lunch in Australia is considered a failure if the food bill is greater than the drinks bill.) She had a point, and I have in later years successfully solved the problem by bringing her along with me.

But yesterday was the end of this tradition. I don't want to be one of those contenders who fights one too many bouts or signs on with the New York Jets for one last year. I want to go out on top of my game.

I may be the only one who comes to this blog who regularly watches Dora the Explorer, but Lily and I love the show. My favorite character is Swiper, a fox who steals things. The audience has to yell "Swiper, no swiping," when they see him. If they do it early enough, Swiper snaps his fox fingers and says, "Oh, man!". But if you don't see him in time, he steals whatever he is after and laughs at you, saying, "You're too late."

Not sure which line I should be using, but at yesterday's Last Swipe, I do know a great tradition has come to an end.

T - 5: Never Throwing in the Towel

There are two very old blue towels in the bathroom. They sit among a dozen or so newer, fluffier, bigger towels. And if those aren't enough there are many, many more in the linen closet, most of which have never been used.

Yet it is the old blue towels to which I return every morning. They are not the best towels, but they are my towels. I like using them, even though they are in such a state that it would never occur to me to let a guest use them.

The one in the picture has a huge hole in it. Actually, it's almost perfectly rectangular, and the lines of the tear are quite straight. It's as if someone at one point brought scissors to the bathroom and neatly excised a chunk of my towel.

That, of course, has not stopped me from using the towel. If anything, it has made me even more committed to using it, knowing that at some point that rectangular gap may widen, or even tear apart the whole towel. And that will be the end of it, because as much as I love that towel, I will not love it when it is the size of a dishtowel. I have very few requirements in this area, but one is an easy two-handed buff of my wide, wet butt.

Not having the blue towels would be distressing, though. It would be like sitting in a different chair at the table or the wrong spot of the couch in the living room. It would be nearly as difficult as trying to fall asleep on the wrong side of the bed.

I don't think of myself as a creature of habit, but maybe that's one more time I am kidding myself. I don't really know why I feel so strongly that it's the old blue towels or no towels. It may go back to my childhood when I couldn't get to sleep without my blanket, not the one you pull over your shoulders, but the little one I had had since I was an infant. The one I called "my banky" long after I had stopped baby talk.

I'm not sure how old I was when my parents finally broke me of that habit, but I was old enough that I can still remember when I needed that blanket in my hand as I went to bed. I will have to ask my mother how she broke me of the habit. It would be spooky to find out she cut a rectangular hole in it.

T - 6: Itching for Knowledge

I have an itchy caruncle. In fact, it's been itchy all week and driving me crazy. I know I should not rub it, but I have such little will power.

OK. OK. I'll tell you. A caruncle is that little bit of harder, red stuff in the corner of your eye closest to your nose. (It's also the wattle of birds, but that isn't relevant here, even though I can make my double chin look like one.) My caruncle has been itching like mad this week as I suffer major bouts of hay fever.

As much as the itching irritated me, what really drove me crazy was that I didn't know the word for that part of my eye. I had searched the Internet to no avail. It was frustrating. I figured if something itched that much I should at least know what to call it.

Fortunately Samantha came through in the clinch. She very politely acted interested in my complaint yesterday. Then last night she sent an e-mail with a link to an illustration of the human eye she had located on the website of the Lucille Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford in Palo Alto. Besides winning the Wednesday Evening Search Engine Speed Test, Sam also illustrated one of the amazing things that has happened in this world of ours in the past dozen or so years. People now expect to be able to find out the most arcane and even trivial facts within seconds.

Thank God for Google, I guess. Twenty years ago I would have wondered briefly what that bit of my eye was called and then completely forgotten about it. Because before the worldwide web it was all too hard to find out and totally unnecessary. So am I better off now that I know I have a caruncle (two, in fact)? Probably not. And you are certainly not better off knowing that my caruncle itches. But there you are. It's the Internet era. I know something I didn't need to know and now I have shared it with all of you.

Happy Last Thursday of my working life. And just remember. If your caruncle itches and you rub it, be careful not to scratch your sclera.

T - 7: And My Number Is Beechwood 45789

Here's a quick quiz. What do ET, Linda and Lily's friend Aden all have in common? (Aden, you may remember, is the little boy who wanted to come home with Lily and me the other day.)

The answer: they all had trouble phoning home.

In ET's case, as I recall, the problem had more to do with distance and technology. Aden's problem was more direct. He didn't know his phone number. As it turns out, neither does Linda.

We've had our current phone number since we moved in the year 2000. However, during the transition from our other house, we kept the old number active and had those calls forwarded. In keeping with this month's theme of cutting out unnecessary costs, I decided that eight years was long enough to pay the phone company for a number we didn't use anymore and I stopped the call-forwarding service Monday.

On Tuesday, I got an angry call on my mobile. "You shut off the old number," said my darling. "But I told you I was closing down the call forwarding," said I. And in the tone of voice that has given her an 87% winning percentage over the course of our marriage, Linda said, "But you didn't tell me when you were going to do it, and you didn't tell me what our phone number is. You know I don't know it!"

So of course, it was my fault. In my defense, I had assumed Linda just doesn't care to know her phone numbers since she has never learned her mobile number, either. Silly me. I really do know better. Her life with electronics is like shaker furniture - functional and beautiful in its complete simplicity.

Take, for example, voicemail. Call her up on any of her numbers (none of which she will have given you, by the way) and the voice on the machine isn't even Linda's. Apparently, she isn't even available to record the message telling you she isn't available. Some women don't do windows. Linda doesn't do voicemail.

But it is a mistake to think LK is a Luddite, antagonistic to new technology. She is among the first to embrace new gadgets, but she is equally swift in refusing to learn all the bells and whistles (and even some of the basics) that come with them. As she says, of course she could learn them but why bother when there is someone else who will end up taking care of it for you.

That makes good sense. Until the day you can't phone home because you don't know the number.