I don't work here anymore.

My last day is over! I no longer work at Company With Lousy Management! My exit interview was soothingly cathartic. I complained and explained (essentially the same complaints that I put in that e-mail, which I did send last week) in response to the questions, and found that the guy who was interviewing me was pretty sympathetic with my point of view. Apparently he had to compile the data from a hundred and ten voluntarily-leaving employees in the past year. That's one hundred and ten (110).

And so I am embarking on one week (minus a day) of glorious freedom. Some of it will be spent doing garden-type work. Sunday I worked on the yard, really worked on it, for the first time. I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. However, I'm going to pay for my neglect; there are a million little weed seeds sitting on my future garden expanse, and there's nothing I can do except try to burn them with the little sun that October will afford me. This is what I get for procrastination. Anyway, I'm covering it up with plastic (I have to go buy more plastic, though, and some bricks. Can you believe there are no rocks in my yard? None at all. What kind of dirt is this? Back in Washington the rocks grew in the dirt) and am prepared to spend next spring mostly on my hands and knees, pulling. Plus I will be spreading new topsoil and mulch and all that good stuff. I uprooted all my tomato plants, since they were a tangled mess, and put the green tomatoes in a shoebox to ripen, and I transplanted the strawberries and the chives and picked the Asian pears and all the dill. Eric mowed down the cantaloupe. I also planted shrubs to replace the overgrown and overblown flowers I spent quite a while grubbing up on the side of the house. It looks ever so much nicer now.

And because I spent a lot of last week's work hours reading about seed saving and gardening, I'm fermenting some tomato seeds to keep and see what they grow into in the spring. I already have cantaloupe seeds from a particularly succulent cantaloupe from Anderson's. And come early spring, I will order seeds and get started growing things early. I think I really will. Now that I'm going to have a normal schedule, I should feel more settled.

But that's all in the future. I did my tomato-tending and seed-extracting, and for the rest of the week I'm going to knit and read and write and bake--I made lemon bars for work today but forgot them at home; they're delicious, so I shared some with the mothers and otherwise I'm not too worried--and get ready for a new job and, maybe, a new phase.