OPD

Today is OPD day. That is, husband’s very last day of going in to “the plant” for any reason whatsoever. Officially Pronounced Dead.

It has been interesting, him working for a gigantic multi-national corporation in one of the most government regulated industries there is. We’ve learned a lot. A lot of it what to avoid and what doesn’t work, but that’s still valuable knowledge. It is the land of the lotus eaters though, and a land where there is an acronym for everything so we made one up too. OPD.

When marketing killed their latest and last project (it was R&D so they developed new things), everyone knew that was goodbye. And several of us said that husband would be the last out. He’s support, contract, so he gets to turn off the servers. And you know no one can do anything these days without computers. So yesterday they got “sanitized” which means that little zeros got written down in all their places where either zeros or ones go – no just messing up the indexes, little zeros, all over. And today, as soon as it is checked to see that all the little zeros are there, they are turned off and that is it. Walk out the door.

For months, even years, he has been trying to spend less time there. It never worked. These last couple of months he has been some better about taking some time and yet, the closer it has gotten to today, the crazier some things, and some people, became.

So there is a demarcation, the last day. Once upon a time there was a first day. And that day is funny to us because it was supposed to be a three day job, running some cables for some big company that had a contract with the giant company. The three day tour, like Gilligan. Then husband got lost in a desert corporation.

I’ve no doubt he got lost because of me. I had to let go of some things and that steady check hanging ‘round his neck gave me the security to do that. But I’ve been encouraging him to quit for years now. That steady check is like a shot of heroin to an addict, hard to walk away from. It will be some months before we have any more than a trickle of income (I mean, the egg money hardly counts but that’s what we’ve got now). We should be ok for many reasons: we have prepared and saved; we don’t need much; we have prospects for different income; we don’t need much.

We don’t need much, squared, because we produce so much of our own. We could get by without buying much food. We don’t need much in the way of clothing. We heat with wood that we are surrounded by. But there is no one who lives like this, with no income. There are no examples, no role models, so it is somewhat scary just from the unknown.

Ah, well. I don’t feel very scared. I feel . . . peaceful. I feel expectant, like a kid on Christmas but without attachments to things, outcomes. Expectant without expectancies, how funny is that. Deeply into the here and now. There is no Monday to go back to work, no paycheck to wait on, no what ifs about the past, only what do you want to do here and now.

It also feels like getting on a carnival ride. Here we go!

Oh, and can I just say that this morning is gloriously sunny, much warmer than it has been (still, you'd only call this warm in January), and the moon, oooh, the moon has lit my milking the past two nights, magnificently full in the cold clear sky. And there is a nice little fire in the stove and coffee in the pot and today, for our celebration of OPD I'm going to make a scratch chocolate cake we call the Blizzard Cake because the first time we were snowed in here (for three days) we cooked our way through it and one of the things we made was this chocolate cake, forever after known as Blizzard Cake.