Last day at work

Yesterday was my last day at work here in PA. My head was filled with mixed emotions: excited to be one step closer to Rochester, sad about leaving some great people in PT, admittedly a bit nervous about not having a job or health insurance yet. I'm so bad at goodbyes. I'm always incredibly awkward and feel like I never say or do the right things. And yesterday being the last workday before a holiday, everyone was rushing to get out as soon as possible. So I didn't get to say goodbye to some of the people I'd wanted to see. Some people I kept running into, though, and said goodbye several times to them. Does that mean it evens out? Probably not. There are a couple of the PT's with family in Rochester, who I'll hopefully get to see when they come for a visit.

I finally left around 4:00, having to stop home before my final guitar lesson with Eric at 5:00. I only live 3 miles from work, which is usually an 8 minute drive. But of course, with my luck, I got stuck behind 2 trains on the way home, and it ended up taking over a half hour. The first train just passed through. The second one came by, stopped at the station, went in reverse to switch tracks, pulled forward again, then repeated the maneuver. Unfortunately trains take a bit longer than a car doing a 3-point turn. I am usually able to suppress my roadrage, but I did find myself yelling at the #*@&! train. So I got home at 4:30, still enough time to drive the mile-and-a-half to my guitar lesson at 5:00...or so I thought. Here's the problem with Harrisburg's roads. There's only one main road going in each different direction. And when there's an accident on one of them (which there is just about every day), the re-directed traffic backs up for miles. So yesterday morning, before 6:00, there was an accident involving a propane truck on I-83. At 5:00 pm they were still working on cleaning up, and traffic was backed up everywhere. When I left for my guitar lesson, it ended up taking me 45 minutes to go about a mile. I turned around at 5:30, when my lesson was supposed to finish. That was one person I'd really wanted to see one more time before leaving, but now I won't be able to. Damn you PA! Just let me leave as I want to!

Getting back home around 6:00, we finally left for Michaelene's parents in NJ. This proved to be yet another source of frustration. An hour later, we'd only made it 20 miles. Once away from Harrisburg, though, it was fine. Symbolically so, everything was good once we got away. And so one of the worst travel days of the year was made exponentially worse by living in Central PA. Starting with my drive home from work, I essentially spent over 6 hours in the car, instead of just 3. Ugh...

So now we're finally here for Thanksgiving. It's always interesting when this family gathers in large numbers. This should be fun.