I have been thinking a lot about planning lately, and also learning to write longer sentences, so I am going to combine those in this blog, hoping that it won’t be too annoying, that somehow I will still be able to make a point, and engage you, the reader.

The winter of 2014-2015, the all-time snowiest winter for  Boston since records have been kept, with a total of 108.6 inches of snow, snow lining the sidewalk over my head, snow in the back yard up to the deck, snow burying benches in the park, snow that destroyed our snow blower the first week, was a wakeup call for my husband and me. We had started to think about retirement as a background task, and we knew we wanted to live somewhere with milder weather, weather that didn’t assault you when you opened the door, but instead is comforting, welcoming, and inviting; and now we knew we needed that weather before it was time to retire. We settled on Santa Cruz very quickly and started on the planning process, for which the major components were him finding a bicoastal job; me getting the house appraised and ready to sell; selling our house; purchasing another, including long-distance house-hunting; settling our (college-age) children in year-round housing of their own; downsizing with minimal trash generation; and orchestrating the move of what was left.

There were plenty of sub-tasks too, of varying degrees of triviality, and one of them was my hair, which I treat as a palette of a sort, varying its color and style over the years with impunity, since modern hair color is strengthening and hair grows back. Having decided to move to California, it followed–by the logic of someone who is not a Californian–that I should become a blonde, or at least blondish, and with the help of my wonderful hairdresser Niamh, this goal was achieved gradually, over a 12-month period, to my complete satisfaction, and even duplicated, for the most part, once since I’ve lived on the West Coast.

Then the second time I blew it: a year of work gone, in less than one hour, for which I blame myself, because I asked for a slight change, then accepted the advice of someone I assumed knew what she was doing, but the first time she must have just gotten lucky, because her advice the second time was wrong, and I think about that every time I look in the mirror. I’m not just annoyed, perturbed, disappointed, and petulant, I feel it is a blight on the entire move, a personal failure, not of course the only thing about the move that didn’t go perfectly but somehow the major thing, even though it happened 10 weeks after we got here.

Why is this bothering me so much? I’m picturing the Christmas photos not-as-I-want them, new people I meet getting the wrong first impression, people who haven’t known me long thinking of me as flaky, people I have known for a while thinking (perhaps happily) that despite the move, it’s still the same old me. Reading this, one might think I would spend the money to reverse it, but I know that this is ridiculous, a minor adjustment in my appearance, not a serious problem; I know that I absolutely should not be obsessing about it, that I should accept this fate gracefully, that this is a character test.

After all, it’s nearly certain that I will face a greater trial. Heck, a challenging work deadline would be a greater trial than this.