Big day for me

I beg your indulgence today, because this post has absolutely nothing to do with travel or France or anything else this blog is supposed to be about.

Today I want to write about me. It's a really big day in my life and I want to share a bit of it with you.

After a good 14 year run, this is my last day as an employee of John Wiley & Sons. At 5:01 p.m. today, I strike out on my own and will be either unemployed or self-employed, depending on how you look at it. At that same moment I will become both the CEO of The Infinite Monkey, Ltd. and a professional writer. Well, I'll be a professional writer in the same sense that the woman who took your order at PF Chang's last night is a professional actress and a CEO in the same sense that the head of Chrysler is a CEO. But still.

Wiley has been a truly wonderful organization to work for filled with wonderful people, many of whom will be friends for life. If you don't know what the company did for Teri and me post-Katrina, be sure to ask--it was nothing short of amazing.

It's not that I'm quitting a job or a company. I'm leaving because of the opportunity cost of staying in the job I have outweighs the rewards of plugging away at it for another 15 years.

I sent out a heartfelt goodbye memo to a whole lot of the folks at the company and got scads of fan mail in return. Quite a number of those return messages were amazingly kind and tugged at my heart. Quite a few recounted "I'll always remember when . . ." moments that were either hilarious or poignant or both.

It really was like going to your own funeral and discovering that the reviews were way better than you thought they'd be.

A lot of those e-mails used words like "courageous" and "my hero" in them. Just when I told Teri that I was getting comfortable with my newfound sense of nobility, Callie puked on our freshly cleaned carpet. That's when Teri handed me an old towel and said she had just the cure for that swelling head of mine.

I really am very excited about "the best year ever" Teri and I are about to embark upon and in which you will play a major role commencing in just a few days. In a year or so we'll have a clearer idea of whether chasing after dreams was a brilliant move on my part or the act of middle aged moron. This is a very big risk for us, and Teri is generously bearing more than her share of the risk without complaint. She didn't sign up for middle aged crazy, but she's got it, and she's coping with it better than I could have dreamed.

It's kind of a lose-lose proposition if you think about it. If I fail then it was a ridiculous thing to to in the first place. But if I succeed it means I squandered a lot of my most productive years before making this move.

Anyway, thanks for indulging me. We now resume our regularly scheduled programming.