Setting in

I worked 39.5 hours in four days this week, largely due to the fact that I was on vacation on Monday. I have a few more to go tomorrow, but not nearly as many as I anticipated.

Today was good. It started off with a clearing of the air between a coworker and myself, which was an answer to prayer as well as a positive reinforcement from God on my 1 Peter pop quiz at work yesterday. (The women's Bible study I am part of is currently studying this epistle about Christians living under pressure, and last Wednesday's lesson touched on living under work pressure, especially people who are behaving unreasonably. God has good timing.) 

It wasn't the only answered prayer today. Here are a few others:

• I had a positive outlook on the day
• I was able to delegate jobs
• It wasn't raining when I moved my computer
• We packaged up far more than expected

We still have a lot of stuff over at the old building, but everything we really need in order to work is at the new building, and we have until about June 20 to clear out the old place. That gives us almost two months to make little trips out for a day or an afternoon of cleaning and boxing at a much more leisurely pace than we've had this week.

So it was good.

Now that most of the intense bits are over, it's starting to hit me....

I'm not going to work at the old building anymore. Sure, I'll be over for some of those cleaning and boxing trips, but it won't ever be home base again. And I've worked there since July of 2001. I've spent more days in that building than I spent at college. I've "lived" there about as long as I lived at the home where I spent my high school and college years. And there is a growing list of things I will miss:

• The quiet lunch room in which I ate on just about every work day for the last seven years, and was able to read in peace for most of those days
  
• The one-stall bathroom
• The "nap room" I made in an unoccupied office, which consisted of three chairs set next to each other
• Bantering and exchanging stories with our regular UPS driver
• The "cage bars" on our cubes and the way Amanda would hold onto them sometimes when she was telling me a story through the mesh
• All the surfaces for displaying trinkets; comic strips; pictures of Apollo, other birds, and all the kids I've tutored over the past years (Jephri, Daijah, Marshelle, Hassan); etc.
• The smallness of the place...only the five of us there, and all of us within easy shouting range of each other, not that we ever had to shout that loudly to be heard
  

That place saw the two hardest years of my life and heard the worst phone call I've ever received. It was also the site of hours and hours of laughter, and myriads of scrapes and bruises and muscle strains (many of which sparked some of that laughter). Apollo came and visited several times, when I was going to leave straight from work for some time out of town. My parents have been there, and my brother, and my cousin, and even some people from my church, who came by for a pop can drive.

The new place is...well, new. While I have no real resentment of it, I have no affection for it, either. There are high cubicle walls that make me feel like a rat in a maze, and keep me from easily seeing everyone I can hear. There are dozens of people in one large space broken up only by these cubicles. I share a cubicle quad space with two other coworkers and can see four more from where I sit. There are three stalls in the bathroom. All the product swatching I used to handle is now part of somebody else's space and will soon be somebody else's job. It's all so different....

Now, after years of having it on the horizon, and months of work, and one crazy busy week, it seems the mental dust from all the moving is clearing away enough for me to start mourning the familiar spaces.