If only we could Apple-Z Steve's departure.

Steve Jobs died yesterday, and I've been feeling as depressed as I was when Jim Henson passed. We all have our personal stories about Macs in our life, and I won't bore anyone with mine.  But at work today, the big TVs in the break room kept showing Steve's 2005 commencement speech at Stamford in 2005. I'd never seen it, but I couldn't keep from stopping to watch it over an over each time I passed through. It's simple, it's brief, and it hits you between the eyes.

The basic message is, "Life is short, so don't waste it doing things you don't love." A corollary is, "Do what you love, even if you don't see the value, and one day you will see how it got you where you want to be."

He asked whether what we did today would have been what we'd chosen if we'd known it was the last day of our life. That hit me.

So tonight at the closed board meeting as the Impossible Board Member's Unbalanced Wife presented her gate design plan, and I tactfully mentioned that what she was presenting as a finished product was not what we'd selected for her to finish, and as she made a huge scene and accused me of having no taste and attacking her personally (this despite my pointing out a number of times that the design we'd chosen was one of HERS), and during the interminable discussion about bed bugs, and watching Impossible Board Member and the two new guys talk and strategize without even bothering to look at the three woman board members, and when the treasurer flaked and didn't show, which meant we couldn't discuss the budget, and as I reflected that I put a ridiculous amount of personal time and energy into this board and I really just don't want to any more, and that I'm burnt out...I realized that of all the things I would not want to do on the last day of my life, this is right up there, slightly behind a root canal. And that because I'm too taken up with responsibility, I have no time for fun. And I AM fun, not this angry, frustrated, irritable shrew that all of this has turned me into.

So after the board meeting I went to a neighbor's apartment (she'd been president too and had also dealt with Impossible Board Member), vented, got a little tipsy on wine, came back to my place,  and calmly sent my resignation to the board.

A huge, HUGE weight has floated off of me.

I'm going to start doing things I like to do.  And I'll type about it on my Mac.

Thanks, Steve.