The View from the Hermitage, Day 179

I have submitted the "default letter of resignation" that my soon-to-be-former office sent me. The boss signs and submits it, and then puts everything in motion. I was professional--and nice--and set the dates so that it looks as if I'm giving two weeks of notice. It's somewhat numbing. With the exception of August 1989 to October 1997, I have had an official connection to the University of Virginia since August 1978 when I arrived for graduate school. That's more than half my life at least for a couple more years. I've had over a year to get used to it, since I originally said I wanted to quit at the end of May 2019 then used the months following as leave before saying in August that yes, I wanted to quit. I agreed to stay on in a consulting role to answer questions as my colleagues took over doing the projects I'd been doing. Now that we're through more than 12 months, and all the projects have been done once, I'm outa there. 

It is likely that the office will want to mark my departure in some way. I hope they don't mind when I say that I'm not doing social gatherings these days. And truth be told, there are really only a couple of people there that I feel any real connection with. And given that my job was part-time, flex-time, and outside the walls of the physical office that I'm not sure any "celebration" is in order. Maybe I'll tell them we'll do it post-pandemic by which point they'll have forgotten about it.

I have been boxing up our collection of vinyl records that I removed form the master bedroom closet for the repainting and floor finishing. I don't want to put them back in the closet, though. For now, they need to be somewhere other than where they are. We're getting a new heat pump on Monday, and the LPs are partially blocking access to the storeroom that contains the furnace. I need to move some other boxes as well to clear a path from the door.

I'm having a bit of a hard time believing that the aides around HWSNBN actually let him do 18 on-the-record taped interviews with Bob Woodward. It seems, at least in retrospect, not to have been a good idea in terms of his being up for re-election in the near future. Mind you, I'm glad they let him do it given the "dirt" (for lack of a more polite term) he dished. Self-control is not a skill he mastered along his way through life. His base, though, will likely not care that he downplayed the novel coronavirus, contributing to the deaths of so many more people and basically putting the US on the world's pariah list. A stanza from "Blowing in the Wind" keeps running through my stream of thought; to play on something HWSNBN recently said, you know which one.

Also according to HWSNBN, the US has a new weapon or weapons system. Will details come to light soon? The anticipation will be tangible. Something explosive, perhaps? Chemical or viral is out, or should be. We don't need to be any more of a pariah nation than we already are. 

We interrupt this typing to report that the new university covid-19 numbers have been posted. There was an increase of 24 students testing positive. I know that the Labor Day or move-in parties likely haven't hit yet, but could it be that the students here will pull off the responsibility not shown at a lot of other schools? I'll believe it in about two weeks. 

I was going to make Mongolian beef for dinner last night but got distracted so frozen pizza, it was! I'm making Mongolian beef for tonight's dinner but need to pack a few more boxes of albums first. Then the husband can weigh in on just where we will put them.