Last Day at Bartlett

Today was my last day of work at Bartlett Tree Experts. It was a kind of difficult choice to make, but I'm confident it was the right thing to do.
In January, I told my boss that I was looking into other job options. He was really good about it and offered a contact or two into my field of interest (botanical gardens, namely). Then, around the middle/end of January, he came up to me and said, "We need to figure out when your last day of work is going to be."  I replied that the end of February would be a good ending time for me because I'm going to Utah for a week in the beginning of March. He didn't seem too keen on that because he pushed right ahead and said, "Well, I have a new guy and I want him to start on Feb 11, so let's have your last day be Feb 8. Is that alright? Great. Have a nice day!"  Great.
My (rather half-hearted) attempts at networking with the people I need to apply to didn't yield much feedback. It's been difficult to apply myself to the job search, because really, I have much more exciting things to plan for and research on the internet (although that, too, seems to be going really slowly right now). But I'm kicking it into high gear next week and hope to have something lined up for when I get back from Utah.

 So, last day. I worked with Nick and Jaime. Jaime has been my consistently favorite coworker, so it was nice to work with him on my last day instead of someone less likable. We worked at a little family cemetery in Lilburn. It was kind of cool, and I liked the symbolism - last day of work=cemetery, etc.

 The work was easy (raise up some red-tip photinia that were hanging all over the drive and remove a smallish pine tree and dead oak spur), and the next door neighbor provided our entertainment for the day:

      He came over demanding that we turn our machines off and tell him exactly what we were doing and nobody wanted to be able to see the cemetery and dead people don't care what it looks like and we don't need a bucket truck to do that removal and we'd already been over in his property cutting stuff down [false, btw] and WHY WERE WE STILL CUTTING STUBS?! 

We had to get the sales rep, Art, over to talk to him so we could just do our work and not incur any physical altercations. I was pretty amused. Not a bad last day of work, really. I didn't get to say goodbye to everyone, but other than that, really not bad.

I find cemeteries to be pretty peaceful and interesting places, overall. There were headstones there from 1980 back to 1863 or earlier. That's pretty cool. This was the coolest one I found:

A WWII soldier, died in Italy in 1943. 

As a side note, I really enjoy Atlanta this time of year, because we start getting spring flowers blooming. Here are a few pictures from recently.

Lots of daffodils are starting to blossom right about now. 

Cherry blossoms! Pretty common now days. 

Ok, so not a flower, but it was an incredible sunrise from Monday morning. Seriously, the sky was hot pink and this picture does it no justice at all.