Wow! What a good time. At the EPA retiree lunch, that is. We met at Paesano’s. It’s a really good restaurant but we don’t often go there because it’s across town and getting there is like running a gauntlet. A (late) MacMu uncle of mine lived down the street from the restaurant so usually we went when there was some kind of family event he was organizing. (But not the one where he told a bunch of us, including an aunt and uncle on the FinFam side of my family that the last time he had a party, he ate so many marijuana brownies he couldn’t remember if he had six or eight kids. Answer, six. Three from his first marriage and three stepchildren. But that party was in his back yard. My main take-away from that was “don’t eat any brownies.” I learned early on that pot makes me paranoid and I don’t touch it.)

I hadn’t seen some of these people in AGES and some of them were more familiar than others but once they reintroduced themselves, it all fell into place. Making things a bit difficult was that I was facing bright sunlight so I was seeing the folks on the other side of the table in silhouette, meaning their facial features were not very visible.

Nevertheless, I remembered EVERYONE. I worked at That Darn EPA for 15 years (or so) and got to know a lot of folks pretty well due to my presence at “The Window”. The Window was where people dropped off data sheets (hand-filled) for processing and picked up printouts from the Data 100 printer, a behemoth. Oh yeah. And COMPLAINED.

When I first worked there, it was my JOB to man The Window. I mean, I went to college for this crappy job? I think it paid something like $8,700 a year. But I am a self-starter and after a few years, I was the “technical supervisor” (something like that), teaching myself how to code FORTRAN along the way, and was receiving a more or less living salary. Various other people ran The Window by then but I was still a regular presence there, solving problems and showing people how to fill out their data sheets, or just lending a hand and hopefully some good cheer. “This is not rocket science, we will figure it out.” And we always did.

It was a smallish crowd today and that was okay with me. “Friendly Introvert” that I am, that allowed me to “ease in”. There were three women besides me and they implored me to come back again to increase their numbers. Yes. Yes, I will. I love all these people but in particular, CDP’s wife is special to me. She did not work at the EPA, she was an MSU college prof, so I didn’t meet her until much later but we hit it off PDQ. And in one of those strange twists of fate, I also know her daughter. We took community college classes together for a couple years. I left for Corporate America and I think she is free-lance but she also *taught* at the college at least for a while (she has a masters in education).

The pic is from “memories” (2025). Man was that day a mess. We hadn’t gotten a lot of snow but what we did get was CEMENT. See the branches sticking out of the snow cement on Cygnus’s veeendsheeeld? I backed her down the driveway to get some sunlight and ran her defroster at full blast seemingly forever but I can’t remember if I ever got that stuff melted or not. At least not that day.

P.S. This is kind of a higglety-pigglety stream-of-consciousness entry so I want to make clear that: 1) I did not retire from the EPA. 2) I retired from Corporate America. 3) I worked for the EPA as a contractor (Computer Sciences Corporation) and voluntarily took a layoff from that company when a new contractor took over and I decided to be a SAHM for a while. I could have probably taken a job with the new contractor or maybe even gone federal. But I didn’t.

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