khedron

I remarked yesterday that following the start of my retirement I am cleaning out old work-related stuff— both out of my mind as well as out of my shelves. Yesterday I removed a bunch of work stuff from my mobile phone so that it would no longer live rent-free in my head. Today I tackled a bunch of the books I've had on a shelf near my desk and in piles atop my desk and at my nightstand.

I decided I would largely banish those books to "purgatory", the nickname we use for our finished crawlspace. But to do that I first had to make space in purgatory for them. I did that by moving a useful multipurpose shelf we bought when our pantry was out of commission down to purgatory.



I started by moving really old books onto the shelf. These books (above) were in two boxes stacked on the floor. By shelving the books I'd make better use of vertical space and thus free up floor space— for a second shelf to hold the books coming down from my office!

As I looked at these books, though, I realized I will pretty much never use them again. Ever. Seriously, I sat there for 10 minutes in the crawlspace, just staring at them, weighing what to do next.

I've remarked before I can't bring myself to throw out books. So I decided I would donate them to my local library. Among other reasons why, these technical books were $50-65 in the 1990s. To the extent the material in them is still relevant— and a lot of it is basically applied mathematics, so it is— their newer counterparts probably sell for $150-$200 new today. Each. Times the 25-30 books pictured. I'm not looking to get money for them; but by giving them to the library I hope they help students today who struggle to afford that kind of expense.

So. I hauled those books off to the library today. That freed up my shelf-space. Then I hauled these down from my home office and bedroom nightstand:



Okay, the bottom shelf here were already in the crawlspace. Those are mostly proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH. I decided to hold onto those for the time being in case they have collector value. If nothing else they have sentimental value to me, as that field was my focus of study from my last few semesters of undergrad through 3 years of graduate school through the first 6 years of my post-academic career.

The middle and top shelves are the books I moved downstairs. As you scan the titles I think you can see why they're drastically less relevant in retirement. Oh, and I mentioned above not thinking books should ever be thrown out.... Well, there's one on the shelf I'd make an exception for. See if you can guess.

Now that my retirement started 11 days earlier than expected (my company walked me this morning in a fit of pique over me quitting) I've started the process of moving on. Mentally I was moving on— as in mentally checked-out— a few weeks ago. Today I've begun the physical parts of moving on. A lot of that means cleaning out.

Today I cleaned out my phone. I removed company email and calendars. Then I removed apps I only used for work: Slack, Google Meet, Expensify, Navan, and a few conference apps. I kept Zoom because I use it outside of work, too. Okay, so that's not physical cleanup; it's digital. But I felt lighter and less cluttered already.

The next steps in cleaning up will be physical. For example, I've got a bunch of technical books on a shelf near my desk plus a few stacked on the desk itself. There's no reason to keep them close to hand anymore. I can't bring myself to throw out books.... I'm thinking instead I'll move them to shelves in the crawlspace. I'll have to buy shelves for that. 😅

Then there's the bunch of trophies my company has sent me over the years for awards I've won. Several of the most meaningful I've set atop my desk and on a trophy shelf as pleasant reminders. The rest are still in their boxes, stacked in a pile beside my desk or shoved under my armchair. At this point I think I might just throw all of them in the trash. I simply don't care anymore. (I will give myself maybe a week to rethink that call before they go to the dumpster outside.)

Back on the digital side of things, one change I'm making here in Dreamwidth/LiveJournal is renaming my tag job to my last job.

I tendered my notice of resignation last week Friday. Before then I was often feeling apprehensive about doing it. Since then I'm just feeling sad.

You might remember me posting this meme a few weeks ago:



It's still a great summary of how I feel. I think of it basically every day. Some days twice or more.

I've been asking myself why. Why do I feel bad when I should feel great because my plan to retire early— a plan I've worked on for decades— has finally come to fruition?

I'll tell you one thing it is not. It is not "Oh, I will miss working." I will not miss working. I will not miss "friends" from work. Work hasn't provided friends for years, just colleagues with whom I have a mutually amiable working relationship. Our common interests end at the end of the workday.

What has me feeling down are the conditions under which I'm retiring. It doesn't feel like a win.

I am not stepping out at the top of my game. (I got virtually none of what I wanted last year.)

I am not leaving with a bang but a whimper.

I am going gentle into the night.

Today is "D-Day", the date I picked a few months ago for when I'd tender notice of resignation from my job unless things improved markedly. Not only did things not improve markedly, conditions deteriorated in a multiple key respects (pay, management changes, being passed over for promotion yet-again). I sent my letter of notice to my manager this morning.

Dallas Trip #4
DAL Airport · Thu 19 Feb 2026. 4pm.

My main purpose in coming out to Dallas for this short business trip has been to support a "Developer Days" trade show one of our major customers is putting on. They bring together representatives from their internal solutions groups as well as key vendors to staffs booths at a private trade show for their developers. Our company has done a few other trade shows like this in the past year.

Today's "Developer Day" was similar to one I supported in June. Same setup, same conversations... same surprising degree to which people who work at a major bank hoovered up our free merch. A wave of attendees came in at 10:30 (we started at 10am), and people were five-deep at our table, snapping up the merch. In 20 minutes we were out of everything but stickers. And we ran out of stickers before quitting time came around at 2pm.

Also like last time I played "booth babe" while my salesguy colleague stepped away for a few 1:1s. But unlike salesguys at trade shows who often step away to do anything but talk to customers, Maya was off having tough conversations with customer VPs. Staffing the booth while he was doing that was the least I could do.

Dallas Trip #2
Irving, TX · Wed 18 Feb 2026. 1:30pm.

Today I'm in Dallas. More specifically, Irving, one of its suburbs. Irving's a nice town, at least the part I'm in, with a mix of office towers, restaurants and hotels, and condos. Ah, but the trip out here took a bit of doing.

My flight today went smoothly. Even getting up at 4:45am went smoothly. I was worried it might be painful getting up that early, or that my scheduled Lyft driver might bail on me, or that I might get to the airport nice and early only to discover my flight was running 2 hours late. None of those bad things happened. And I even had a great seat on my flight when it left, on-time, at 7:05am.



I had an entire exit row to myself. Leg room and shoulder room! And this wasn't some 40%-of-the-seats-are-empty flight. It was mostly full. But thanks to Southwest's new assigned-seats policy, picking exit row seats costs extra money for people without elite status. Of course, if the flight were 100% full they'd put people in these seats for free. But this flight was maybe only 90% full, so I lucked out.

We even landed early at DAL airport. Of course, landing early meant we had to wait on the tarmac for our gate to free up. 🙄 There's no getting ahead in today's commercial aviation system. The only way to win is to fly semi-private. ...Which I'd like to try sometime. I'll see if/when it makes sense.


Taking Lyft from the airport was an odd experience. My driver called me up and yelled at me because I wasn't where he was trying to meet me. I was, I explained patiently, standing at exactly the place where the Lyft app told me to go— which was, not coincidentally, right under a bunch of signs that read "Lyft Ride App here ↴". But my driver was a 60+ male so the fact that somebody had changed the rules on him sometime since, oh, 1983, made it a thing to piss and moan about for a few minutes. 🤣

I could've hung up on him and tried another driver, but I really wanted to get going faster than canceling and starting over would take. And because I was patient with him, he eventually agreed to work with me instead of complaining I was "in the wrong spot"— which apparently was where ride apps used to do pickups, not where all the signs point today. He drove over to my spot and picked me up. I sympathized with him about "Yeah, they always seem to change the rules every few weeks"... and that was enough to put the issue to bed. We had an amiable conversation about the natural beauty of California vs. living in Texas after that.

I reached my hotel just after 1pm. They didn't have any rooms ready. That's really rare, but I accept it because it's within policy that checkin starts at 3. I stowed my bags with the helpful front desk person and walked over to an Italian restaurant a block away for lunch.

This really is a nice little corner of town with things close by & walkable. The DART light rail even has a stop a few blocks up. I'll see about getting my room again in another few minutes here as I head back after finishing lunch.

This evening I had dinner with one of my clients. We got the VP of the organization that owns our software, along with the director and manager underneath him who manage our software on a daily basis, to join us. It was an amiable meeting where we talked about a number of things. One of the topics of conversation was where everyone lives and the degree to which we work from home (WFH) or are mandated to return to office (RTO).

My company is remote-first, I've noted before. We actually gave up our last remaining office lease last year. Execs looked at the cost versus the number of person-days of occupancy we had, and decided the value wasn't worth the cost. Our customer exec quipped that his company looked at the same equation and made the opposite decision. Instead of reasoning, "Too few people come to the office, let's terminate the lease," they chose, "Too few people come to the office, let's force them to come back."

But here's the funny thing about the whole equation. The exec in question doesn't RTO. He lives 500 miles away. He works from home. Every person beneath him in his organization is pressured to spend more days in the office. It's tracked. It's a topic in performance reviews. But the VP works from home.

Oh, he's aware of the hypocrisy. Some employees are bold enough to confront him with it. Others go through anonymous feedback sites, where "You work remotely while forcing us to commute to the office, that's ridiculous" is the #1 most common item of feedback. He recognizes all this... and he treats it with the same detachment as he might note, "Huh, there's rain in the weather forecast today." He's hypocritically enforcing a policy he doesn't abide by himself... and he doesn't care.

As my D&D group continued playing through my adventure The Collector's Menagerie, aka Cursed Clue, they entered the mansion's Ballroom.



They were wary of giant spiders, having seen the empty cage marked Arinerum Magni, so the first thing they did as they entered the huge chamber with a smooth stone tile floor was look up at the ceiling. The second thing they did, since they were also worried about a mimic, aka Versipellis Furtivus, was bang with their fists on all the suits of armor posed along the walls as trophy decorations. Apparently they assumed the mimic would take the form of a warrior to bash them.

Well, they were half right. The mimic was hiding in plain sight, in disguise, in the Ballroom. But it wasn't a suit or armor. Or even a sofa. (There were several bench-like sofas along the walls of the ballroom.) It was... the harpsichord!

I passed a clue note (one of my favorite little techniques, no Clue pun intended) to the player of Ryuu-Han, who was closest to the harpsichord on the musicians' dais at the opposite side of the ballroom.


And then...





Okay, it wasn't as obvious as this pic (above). That's just something cute I found from Adobe Stock Photography when I searched for something like "evil harpsichord". Apparently Adobe keeps a library of pictures like that for when musical instruments go bad. 🤣

But this harpsichord didn't just give Ryuu-Han some side-eye. As Ryuu-Han tried to warn Leoghnie, the fierce warrior fighter, that the harpsichord might be about to start something... the harpsichord started something.



The harpsichord reached out 10' across the room with a tongue-like appendage and pummeled Ryuu. It badly wounded him and left him sticky with a glue-like slime. Ryuu found he couldn't move and had to struggle to wrest himself free, unable even to cast a spell.



The rest of the group swung into action. But the harpsichord already had Ryuu's number. It pummeled him again, knocking him unconscious. Then turned its... tongue... to Leoghnie. It gave her a wallop and stuck her in place.

Someone in the group remarked on the sticky slime situation, "We're not stuck here with it, it's stuck with us!" Except, I pointed out, the harpsichord just stepped toward the party. To make it harder for them to get away. The harpsichord was on a tear.



Herran, often the boldest one in the group, had stepped back to drink a potion to buff up. There's something to be said for the wisdom of recognizing when you're overmatched. Otonio rushed to help Ryuu, pulling him out of the monster's attack range and trying to see if he could revive him. Kiarana called out, "I'll heal Ryuu, you join the fight!"



In the next round the group managed to turn the tide of battle. Scrambling to form a plan and get people in the right places helped.



Leoghnie got herself unstuck and delivered a massive wallop to the mimic. It had been hitting hard... but she could hit harder. Especially when she was pissed and leaned in with Power Attack. Keys went flying.

"Is it looking badly injured?" Leoghnie's player asked.

"It just lost about 3 octaves."



Herran had stepped up to join the fight, and now, too, did Otonio. He bravely dashed right past the flailing monster to surround it in a flanking attack. The malign harpsichord lashed at him with one of its appendages but couldn't beat the young man's fancy footwork. (Mobility gives a +4 dodge bonus to AC against attacks of opportunity, y'all!) Otonio then skewered it from the side, finding a weak spot where the monster couldn't defend itself on both sides simultaneously. (Sneak Attack FTW!)

At that point it was all over except the crying. And lots more sticky slime. Herran slashed with his wakizashi. Ryuu, now back on his feet, lobbed in attack spells. Leoghnie unloaded another overhand attack with her greatsword— Striking the Spark, her latest tutor called it— and smashed the creature into a puddle. Kiarana finished it off with a Hammer of Light because... y'know... evil harpsichords totally might play 'possum.

Today we played D&D again. It was the second full session of my game, The Collector's Menagerie. After an action-packed session 2 weeks ago where the group got through a lot of challenges today they.... Well, it's not so much that they "hit the skids" as that they fell over laughing.



The laughs today came from two things. First, I came up with names for the menagerie of monsters they're fighting in the mansion. No, I don't mean names like "Sammy the Stirge". I mean names like... if you saw these monsters at a zoo, what would the placards in front of their cages say? Because part of the story here is that these monsters literally have cages. And they were put there by a collector... who wanted to show them off. Hence they'd have labels!

The group came back upstairs out of the basement and ventured into the Gallery next. The gallery is the large room where the collector literally had most of his exotic monsters displayed in cages. And because the collector was a bit snooty— I mean, if you've got exotic monsters in display cages between your Hall and your Ballroom you're going to want to be snooty about it— I decided the placards would be in an ancient language known only to the most learned scholars. Ergo, for roleplaying props, they're in Latin.

But how do you say "Owlbear" in Latin? I punted... and marked the cage "Ursa Noctua". Bear-owl. 😂

One of the PCs is actually fluent in my game's ancient scholarly language. And the players had fun trying to guess the monsters from their high school Latin lessons before his character translated them. I gave them these 6 monster labels:

• Ursa Noctua : Bear owl (Owlbear)


• Versipellis Furtivus : Sneaky Skin-changer (Mimic)


• Arinerum Magni : Large Spiders


• Aves Sanguinarii : Blood-drinking Birds (Stirges)


• Scutigera Cadaverosa : Carrion Crawler


• Belua Excrementum : Shit Elephant

To preserve an element of mystery there were two cages with missing labels.

The group choked a bit on the Sneaky Skin-changer— which they interpreted (correctly) as a Mimic, a classic D&D monster. They kind of assumed it, anyway, the moment they saw the treasure chest with fangs chasing someone in the cover pic (above).

The group really choked on Large Spiders. Even worse than worrying aloud that every piece of furniture they came across could be a Mimic, they fretted that there might be spiders ready to drop down on them from the shadowy recesses of the high ceilings. 🕷️

The one I thought was funniest, though, was the last one in the list. The Shit Elephant.



I came up with that monster's Latin in-game ancient language name, Belua Excrementum, by starting with the name we came up with when the group fought it in the last session, Shit Monster. "Shit" translates obviously to excrementum, but "monster".... In Latin, "monster" really refers to a thing of enormous size. Like "jumbo". "I have a monster headache" is like saying, "I have a jumbo headache." And the word for very large thing happens to be the word for elephant. Belua. So the Otyugh got the Latin name Shit Elephant. 💩🐘🤣