October 4, 2013: Ten Year Anniversary

Big day here.  Huge day. Three big things….

It is Dominica and my tenth wedding anniversary.  It is my last day with CitiGroup (technically I’m available to them tomorrow but only by phone.)  And tonight I leave Texas to move back to the north east.

Ten years.  It doesn’t seem possible that Dominica and I have been married for an entire decade!

This morning is my very last one with CitiGroup.  Let’s throw out some stats to drive home what a big day today is for us:

  • I have been with Citi for nearly eight years.  The longest, by far, run at any “normal” job that I have ever had.  Wegmans was barely over a year.  IBM was nearly a year.  OilNavigator was four months.  My longest non-Wegmans run with Dell was five weeks.  Kettering University was two years but broken up.  Citi has defined much of my career.
  • When I joined Citi I had just turned thirty a few days before making Citi practically define my 30s as a decade in my life.
  • Dominica and I were married just two years when I joined Citi (plus a few months.)  So for 80% of our marriage I have been working with Citi.
  • To add to the above, for 67% of the time that I have known Dominica at all, I’ve been working for Citi.
  • Liesl and Luciana were both born while I was at Citi – they have never known me to work anywhere else.
  • Almost exactly half of my Citi time was with me based in the NJ/NJ Metro area and half of it in Dallas.  Of the NY portion, half was in NJ then half was in NY.   Likewise in Texas, half was in Las Colinas and half was at Regent in Coppell.
  • I have been based at five different sites with Citi and have relocated offices at least nine times in eight years.
  • I have worked in the US, Canada and UK (both England and Northern Ireland) with Citi.

Liesl got me up this morning having put herself to bed on the early side she was up at a quarter after eight and needed me to get her her customary chocolate milk (pediasure) and put on a show for her (The Magic Schoolbus.)

It took until nearly eleven before I got into the office but there is no work for me to do today.  No one is having me do things, there isn’t enough time for me to follow up on them at this point.  So I am effectively done as of last night.

My only big task today is to assemble my farewell email and get that send out.  I put two hours into getting that ready but did not have time to get it sent before Jeff, Harsh and I went to Mi Cocina for lunch.  I haven’t been to Mi Concina is three or four years – not since almost immediately after starting down in Texas.  So it would have been early 2010.  Amazing how time flies.  So it was a little nostalgic eating here again on my final day at Citi and in Texas.

After lunch it was back in the office and in about thirty minutes I had the email sent out.  For the next two hours I dealt with a barrage of response emails to the one that I sent out.  I had fifty-four emails to my personal email from people at Citi before I made it home and more would come in later. Tons of LinkedIn and Facebook requests too.

I made my rounds saying goodbye to everyone and turned in my Blackberry, badge and Safeword to Harsh and was out the door just before four.  That’s it, I am all done.  That was my final day at Citi.  Eight years and we are all wrapped up.

I had to run to Dominica’s office to drop off a desktop for Ross that I had been carrying in my car all day and a monitor as well.  Then I ran to LA Burger to pick up Dominica and my last meal together in Texas.  We did our planned anniversary meal last night (from Eat Street) but wanted to eat together this evening as well.  So Dominica had requested LA Burger before I left the office.  Then on the way back to the house I swung into Walmart and picked up an anniversary card as well and got back home.

We watched The New Girl and ate dinner.  The evening was spent just hanging out with Dominica and the girls and doing some packing.  Actually got some real packing work done.

I had to run down to Brookhaven to close out my gym locker.  We had forgotten about that until now and this is, quite literally, the last chance to deal with it.  This is not something that Dominica can work on while I am gone.  So I had to do it.  On the drive there I ran into Chris driving to our house.  It is amazing how many times we’ve seen each other on the street since living in Texas.  At least five or six times we’ve spotted each other driving past each other.  I don’t think that I’ve ever had that happen so much.  He was heading to the house to say goodbye.

I closed out my locker, that was pretty fast, and ran back home.  We hung out with Chris for a couple of hours.  He played with the girls a lot while I did more packing.

Chris took off and we put the girls to bed.  That was rough – my last time seeing them for more than three weeks.  It will be only days shy of four weeks before I get to see them 🙁  Three weeks and five days without my girls.  This is going to be awful.

It was about eleven when I finally got on the road.  That was way later than I had hoped.  I had really wanted to be driving by nine with nine thirty being the latest.  But just after eleven it is.  This is going to be a rough night.

These overnight drives are difficult to blog both because of the time distortion without regular day time and night time schedules and because the exhaustion makes the whole thing a giant blur.

I made it about an hour before stopped to fuel up and grab some drinks at a small stop probably around Royse City.  I had take the George Bush to Interstate 30 and was heading east that way.  While at the gas station I ended up talking to some folks that were there in the parking lot for about half an hour while they ate some pizza.  They were waiting for their grandkids to get done with the local high school football game.  Then I was back on the road just after midnight.

I would not be going to bed for a long time yet but I will save the rest of tonight’s tale for tomorrow’s post since we rolled past midnight and that is the only good way to organize things.  I have a very, very long drive ahead of me yet.

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