50 ways to leave your love employer

Classes start the day after labor day- September 6. I'm flying Owen out to Oregon to start college from August 18-19. August 20 is my birthday, and Matt and Vicki are getting married on August 28 with a week of crazy partying in the woods to follow (greatest... couple... ever).

However, due to many factors that I do not yet feel comfortable discussing, I've realized that I should stay employed as long as possible to maximize my income before I head off to school.

For a while I considered Friday, August 19 to be an excellent candidate for Bennett's Last Day. Now that I'm scheduled to take that Oregon trip, though, I'm thinking about extending my employment here by another week. I could theoretically work until Friday, September 2, but that would involve an unpleasant amount of shuttling to and from NY and Boston, and hopefully I won't have a car of my own in the next few weeks, which could really complicate my shuttling schedule (but is a very very necessary step to be taken at this time- more on this later). I almost was going to tell work about my school plans this week, but many people talked me out of that and I'm glad they did-- I don't know if I could put up with 6 or 7 weeks of being publicly 'on the way out' and I don't even know if they'd let me do that.

I'm terrible. I've gotten really good at crossword puzzles- I almost completed today's NY Times puzzle with only a little help from my friends (at google). I really should tend to the work I have been assigned but I have one of those positions around here that people really don't care about. The interesting part of my work (the coding, which takes at least some level of thought) is basically done, now all I have to do is go through hundreds (thousands?) of text files and make sure they're correct. Arrgh.

So... do I tell 'em August 1 and leave on August 17? How about August 8 and leave August 26?

When will then be now?

Oh, about the car... so shortly after my car's whatchamacalit belt went all haywire, my car starts making squeaking sounds when turning. Actually there had been faint squeaks going on for a little while that I never got around to looking at. Well, it turns out my suspension's shot. At first the garage quoted me $1200 parts and labor, but I got a nervous call from the garage-master (?) yesterday that went something like this:

GM: Hi Bennett, how are you?
me: Doin' well... you?
GM: Good, thanks... but you won't be! ::nervous laughter::

It turns out that to replace my entire suspension would cost something to the tune of $2600 (this is an Audi, after all). The sad part is that maybe a couple of months ago news like this would have caused me to break down into a sobbing mess on the floor, but I've grown so desensitized to my car's maladies (I like to call them malaudis) that all I could do was laugh. So I'm gonna sell the fokker with a f'ed up suspension for well below the blue book value. Screw it.

And if you have any good karma / vibes / energy to spare especially after all the crap that went down in London, please send them to my grandmother, who could seriously use some now.