Today is the day!

I’ve been working since I was 15 years old. 40+ years later, Life 2.0 begins…

Today, August 28^th, 2026, is my last day of work. Ever. To describe my mood, giddy would be close, but not quite covering the full weight of this, because this day signifies not only retirement, but the beginning of the process of moving – permanently – to the Philippines in 2027.

This has been a work in progress for some time, and we have broken up the various pieces in stages (2 solid Type-As in this house), beginning with Jason’s retirement, August 29, 2025. His immediate assignment back then was prepping our home for sale, while I continued working. March of 2026 saw the sale of our Riverdale home, and after 16 years there, we moved into a rental loft so that we could focus on the details and paperwork of relocating to Asia.

This won’t be easy, and there are many things that we must look into and take care of, hurdles to jump and a dog to safely transport among them, but as we always have, we’ll take things on together, focus on the end goal and get things done.

Why now, at 57 years old, when I could carry on? Well, in the 7 years that I have been happily working at York University, I have had kidney surgery to clear an obstruction (2021), brain surgery to stent an aneurysm (2023), a stroke I didn’t know I had until it showed up on an MRI (2024) and heart surgery (2026) to close a hole in my heart that had been there since birth, and was discovered as the cause of the stroke. In this same period, we lost our dog, Jason’s mother, Jason’s brother, and my mother.

We can’t have gone through all these things without a massive realization of, or shift in, priorities – life is short, and we get one chance to do it.

I fully understand that not everyone is able to grab life – things get in the way – but we are blessed to be able to. We are going to make the most of our lives and retire while we are still relatively young and fit. Oh, and get the hell away from Canadian winters!

I am very proud of the fundraising work I have done with York and other organizations over many years, and I take those memories with me – but now it’s time for me.

So here goes: Life 2.0. I can’t wait to see what the next chapter looks like.

And feel free to sign up and follow along here if you want. (No, I won’t ‘monetize’ you) 😊

Peace.