Best Parting Gift Ever

This afternoon at lunchtime, I received the most amazing goodbye gift from my co-workers. It's a giant scrapbook photo album reflecting on my time at AV-Base. It's so thoughtful. It's definitely the best parting gift ever.

Cam Tran spent a whole bunch of time putting it together over the past three weeks. A lot of people pitched in to contribute on various pieces. It includes farewell comments and letters, pictures from the past year, comics, mementos - like my ever-present Pizza Pocket boxes - and a whole bunch more besides. A ton of thought went into it from everybody. It even comes with a CD with digital copies of most of the contents.

There were numerous photos included, so I'll show a few group shots here. In this first one, I'm towering over (from left to right) Cam Tran, Michelle Pedden and Lori Worthington.


Here's a nice friendly shot of Scott Murphy and Lindsay Laforge. Scott's the only employee that's been at AV-Base longer than me, and Lindsay's been with me since the good ol' days as well.

And finally, here's a picture of the four regular chess players. That's Peter in the bottom left corner, Jeff just above him and Andrew is in the bottom right corner. Invariably, I sat in that exact corner every single lunch time and the other three guys rotated each day. Yeah, the anchor is gone...

The scrapbook also had printed copies of a bunch of my blog posts. I was surprised to see how much I have written about my experiences at work. As you've been reading lately, I've learned a lot of lessons throughout my years at AV-Base, both professionally and spiritually. However, this post from back in January 2006 sort of sums up the biggest lesson that I learned during all of that time. The biggest thing that has changed is me, and I thank God for that.