{"id":21515,"date":"2017-05-06T17:24:50","date_gmt":"2017-05-06T17:24:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=21515"},"modified":"2017-05-06T17:24:50","modified_gmt":"2017-05-06T17:24:50","slug":"happy-trails-part-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=21515","title":{"rendered":"Happy Trails, Part 16"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I’m still trying to shake myself loose from my previous life as a working stiff, but a brief encounter today illustrated how difficult that task remains.<\/p>\n

I walked into the polling place this morning to vote in the Amarillo municipal and Amarillo College election. I presented the voting judge my voting registration card and my driver’s license (with photo ID that’s now required).<\/p>\n

He looked it over, signed me and said, “Oh, you’re with the newspaper.”<\/p>\n

“Um, no. I used to be,” I answered. “I left the Globe-News nearly five years ago,” I explained. “I guess you haven’t missed me,” I joked. He chuckled and said, rather sheepishly, “I don’t read the paper.”<\/p>\n

“Well,” I said, “neither do I.”<\/p>\n

This is the kind of greeting I get from time to time as I conduct daily business here. My job as\u00a0Opinion page editor of the Globe-News more or less defined me in the eyes of many folks who read the paper and\u00a0saw my name on the Opinion page masthead.<\/p>\n

That’s all great. At some level I do appreciate the recognition that comes my way. Everyone who brings up my recent past is gracious, kind, some are complimentary; others say something like, “Oh, I often disagreed with you, but I always read your stuff.”<\/p>\n

My wife and I are still in the midst of this transition from full-time work to full-time retirement. The transition is progressing along many fronts. The most critical of them is our on-going effort to prepare to commence to get ready<\/em> to relocate.<\/p>\n

When that task is completed, hopefully sooner rather than later, we’ll be resettled in a new community where no one knows us from the past we have left behind. We’ll greet everyone for the first time and no one — except for family members who will live nearby — will know what either of us used to do for a living.<\/p>\n

I look forward to completing that journey.<\/p>\n\n

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I’m still trying to shake myself loose from my previous life as a working stiff, but a brief encounter today illustrated how difficult that task remains. I walked into the polling place this morning to vote in the Amarillo municipal and Amarillo College election. I presented the voting judge my voting registration card and my … Continue reading Happy Trails, Part 16<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10],"tags":[179,309,3920],"class_list":["post-21515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","category-media-news","tag-agn-media","tag-amarillo-globe-news","tag-retirement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21515"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21516,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21515\/revisions\/21516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}