It was probably in 2007.
I had lived in Albuquerque for less than a year. My exodus from my home state and town had been long planned. My mother and grandmother had both died in 2002 within a month of one another, and I looked about at my life and decided it was not what I wanted. After 41 years, I felt constrained, and I was too often surrounded by the elderly, by conservatives, by those who accepted the status quo, and by mediocrity.
My life was comfortable enough. I had literally hundreds of friends and dozens of close friends. I was loved.
But, a life can be more, and I wanted to see more diversity, have more experiences, do more things. So, I decided to move away, to start over. To be sure, it was most definitely a mid-life crisis (even if I don't make it to 82.) But, true to form for my life, it wasn't the typical. Crisis meant a turning point, not a breakdown, or even a loss of confidence.
But, I'm a planner. My entire childhood had been often insecure and impoverished because my mother made one spontaneous kneejerk decision after another, dragging four children in tow, and usually ending in disaster. So, it took me until 2006 to have everything in place to move away. And during that phase, I joined JUB and was able to accept myself as gay and happily so, thank you. All of this is prelude, as Albuquerque was indeed a very calculated and challenging and surprisingly wonderful adventure. Unpredictable things happened. All was great.
And then life happened. The contract I had been hired to manage was decreased by over $50,000,000 due to the prime contractor having developmeent troubles with Congress and a loss of confidence in the project. No less than Senator Rockefeller saw to it that funding was cut. My accounting role was predicated on our contract's value requiring elevated cost reporting. Ten months into my new life, it was all changing and from no fault of mine, or my company's.
I was offered a totally different job than I was hired to do, as Proposal Manager. I had seen how awful deadlines were mismanaged by companies, and how many last minute panics there were due to low prioritizations, so I knew it was not going to be the job for me. Too many situations where you would be asked to work all night and weekends while your supporting engineers were out golfing and enjoying their lives at your expense. No thank you.
So, a new job search led to likely offers in Nashua, NH, and in Sacramento, CA, and in Anchoage, AK. The Albuquerque move had proven I could relocate and be happy, and to a place where I had no family or ties, so the world had gotten suddenly bigger. The wildness of Alaska, or its isolation was not a draw for me as it was for so many end-of-the-roaders, but the job there was on a construction project, and I wanted to see how my cost reporting worked in that environment, plus it was a novel location.
THAT was my spontaneous decision. THAT was unprecedented in my life really. THAT had almost no planning or safety net. I was going full Monty. And I lept in.
We now return you to our regular programming.