Our California brethern.

What if the drought that California is facing is part of a long term environmental cycle, nothing to do with global warming. Just a cycle. What does the government do? The president promised aid, but what aid. Will water trucks soon be on the road carrying millions of gallons of water to the parched landscape. Will the billions of dollars in lost farm revenue be made up by the government with low interest loans. What if the answer is that the man made irrigation systems and the incursion of humans into an area that is not able to sustain their agricultural effort has reached an end. What if the area really needs to be abandoned back to nature. I do not believe we can do it. We may spend untold amounts of money trying to change the course of Mother Nature, and we know who will win that round.

Free at last, Free at last, Thank God Almighty, Free at last!

I am really making light here. I have come to realize that my adult work career has not been a trap. I have been fortunate to be in positions where I could exercise my creative forces, I've lead people, developed high performance teams, and earned the respect of my people, peers and colleagues. Isn't that enough? Yes, it is.

Now my first couple of days after retirement. Oh, I'm on leave for several months, but still I will not return to work as I know it. So what's different? Not much. I still find myself checking work emails. I still have a couple of memos to write trying to promote some people that I feel deserve consideration. However, I have wiped clean my browser history at work, I have stopped looking at my work calendar and the school's website. I have taken my office keys off my car key ring so they no longer can remind me of that place. Perhaps the biggest change is I am realizing this weekend that come Tuesday morning I will not get up and go to work at ANC. I shall get up and decide what I want to do at home. 

That is what I meant about Free at last! Other than appointments that I may freely make I don't have to be someplace at a predetermined time. Other than commitments I shall freely make I don't have to do anything I do not want to do. I have a sense of freedom that I believe will expand in the coming days and I am looking forward to. Thus ends the first blog.

Pending Retirement

Thursday February 5, 2014 I will cease work at my current employer. I will go on leave for about five months, I have enough accumulated leave time to cover it, and my permanent retirement will be June 30, 2014. However in my mind this coming Thursday is it.

I am filled with thoughts, none of them sad or bad. I have spent my adult life managing the efforts of others. I am tired of being responsible for people's performance, output and ultimate success of the organization. I want to do something for me. I want to use my head, my hands and whatever limited capability I have physically to do things for me, my family and that is all.

That will probably change as time goes along, but right now all I can think about are the projects and tasks that I have looked forward to doing, myself. The list is long, it is ambitious, and some of it may not be possible, but I assure you the attempt will be made. My wife and I own the property we live on outright, I think we shall have sufficient income to carry us in retirement and we are eager to begin on our own agenda.

I am starting to make a clean break with my past life and start anew in this undertaking. I wish I weren't so old, 69, or physically weakened but I can still manage most things. So c'mon Thursday, I can't wait to get started working on retirement.

Simple truths

My wife and I have a morning meeting that begins most often around 5 to 6 am. We have a pleasant sitting area in our bedroom and discuss the day, issues that have cropped up we may have to deal with, gardening, recipes and whatever may come to mind. It is a treasured time.

Recently we were talking about my impending retirement. I voiced some concern that my working life was ending and sometimes I felt like I was waiting to die. Terry asked, haven't you been doing that all of your life? It's true. Work has always defined me. I love a problem and a challenge. My work life has presented me with that ongoing opportunity and I've done well. If provided for my family plus it provided me with an outlet for my strange creative powers. I'm not a musician but I'd like to be. I'm not an artist, but I'd like to be. Still I have developed an ability to direct the work of others and very well thank you.

So now I find myself in a "limping waterfowl" work situation. My focus has altered to home and projects I've been wanting to tackle for a long time. I no longer go to work feeling like there is a mission to accomplish, or a challenge to take on. In fact, because I have to endure fecal incontinence due to my two bouts with colon cancer work is more of just getting through the day. I'm not in pain, it is just distracting to have to get up and use the bathroom a number of times during the day especially when you don't have the comfort of being home.

In reality nothing has changed in my life. I have always looked forward to and enjoyed change. This is no more than a transition. I hope I have at least ten good years, by that I mean where I am physically able to care for our property, work with my wife in the gardens and flower bed and to still cut brush and built things. The changes I am contemplating, wood working and such don't require a great deal of physical effort if you have the right equipment and that I am in the process of acquiring.

Once again a simple observation from my wife is very relevant to the situation I now find myself in. I don't often think of death, I probably am more concerned with the process. I have a home, a nice piece of property and a wonderful wife. I do not want to end up in a nursing home or a hospital. But that is somewhere out in the future and other than trying to take care of myself I shall not worry about that now.

Are We Becoming a World According to Google?

A recent article on CNN referenced Google expanding the capability of Maps. I use Maps. Not a great deal, it is handy when my wife doesn't know a yard sale location, or if we have to travel to a site we've not visited before. I've used it to check out travel routes, even though I know the way by heart just to see if a more direct or convenient route has opened up. I can find where a friend has moved to, or if I wanted to visit them how far would I have to travel. I find the response and convenience astounding and to me it has a very practical application.

However, this article referred to the idea that Google was expanding the Map software to become an interactive software that will record your inquiries and suggest points of interest, restaurants, etc according to your queries. Sounds nice, I might like to know what restaurants are nearby a place I am going to visit. However, over time the data base will be full of my travel, my exploration on line, my preferences, my likes and dislikes. In short the data assembled will form a pretty complete picture of who I am, what I do, where I go, and a whole host of personal information. 

We already have huge amounts of data stored in data bases out in the cloud, now we shall have another type of data. I wonder, how far will this go. It won't stop, there will never be a time that the data bases know all they want to know. The issue is how will it be used. I'm not sure we can stop it. After all, a lot of the convenience we enjoy such as on line shopping, banking, ordering theater tickets, plane tickets, hotel reservations, etc involve the transfer of data about ourselves. This data is already accumulated by such firms as Axiom. How many times have you researched a topic on the internet just to find an email from a related topic in your in box the next morning. I just did. 

Under the guise of Homeland Security, anti-terrorist security and the search for pedophiles, pornographers, sex-slave rings, and a whole host of evil doings the access to information about our personal lives has to be of compelling interest to those agencies. Therefore, I do not think we can stop information gathering and classification. I'm not sure I want to, but we certainly are forced into a trust of our government to properly use the data. Can they be trusted. I think most would say not. I wonder how one gets off the grid?

Too much convenience?

I like convenience, particularly in my computer and electronic "stuff." I like a remote that is easy to use and is multi-functional. I like the ergonomic keyboard that Microsoft came out with years ago, I have big hands and a regular key board forces me to keep my elbows in and forearms straight to type decently. The ergonomic board allows me to keep my arms relaxed and the raised bottom provides wrist support. I like speed in my computer. I recall when the Internet first came out and I was up to date with a 14.4 Kbs modem. I'd fall asleep waiting for the screen to refresh. Now it is much quicker, but I'd like instantaneous. I like excel and the power of word processing.

I like having my banking on line and used auto-download for entering my spending transactions into Quicken. I order quite a bit from Amazon.com and am mostly pleased with the speed with which I can order things and complete the transaction, sometimes with less waiting time than in-store purchases.

However, I was yanked back a little the other day when I saw and essurance ad that was extolling the speed with which they could give you a quote on car insurance. The ad said, a couple of clicks and we'll have all your cars that you can get quotes on. One part of me likes the speed and convenience. The other side of me says where are they getting the data from and how so quickly. I've read articles about huge data bases that house our buying, banking, and spending habits. Many of us pay with either credit or debit cards and all of those transactions are recorded someplace. Now with the capability to compile and query, vast stores of information are known by some machine that concern our life style. This is disturbing. I don't think I have any transactions that might be taken as surreptitious, but then I really don't know my life style pattern that a third party might become aware of.

I think we, as citizens have to be more vocal, more action oriented, and more on guard about what our government advocates and/or allows. Privacy is becoming more and more of an issue. Now with the war on terrorism the government, probably with good reason, wants access to private transactions and in fact has a profile(s) used to uncover potential acts of terrorism . So is it unpatriotic to fight against the invasion of privacy for the sake of safety? Or should we take the stand that we  hold privacy sacred above all consideration. This seems to be a very tough question for our society to meaningfully debate. I stand with privacy, yet my logic makes the need to know all manner of information rational and just. So I am torn and have not really been able to think my way out of this box yet. 

I'll let you know.

A Life Passed in One Day.

Certainly a woman as wonderful as my sister Carol should have more than an hour of visitation, and hour of service and an afternoon of gathering. After all, doesn't her life mean more to those of us who knew her than the one day we spent paying our respects. That is all the time we are allowed, some have to get back to work, some have to travel long distances and wish to return home, and then how much time can you really spend telling stories and reliving memories?

I have read of great people, I have seen biographies, I've witnessed the action of the great and powerful in public life. We don't know of Oliver North traveling on his own to a distant hospital and putting on his uniform, even though he was retired from the military to visit a young person who wanted to meet him before he died. We often do not know of the personal involvement of the great and powerful in small events that are critical to very few.

I have come to realize there greatness is not limited to great and powerful people when it comes to caring for you fellow man. Everyone has an impact. My sister no less. The visitation and service for my sister was held in a packed church. People from a variety of areas came to pay their respects. I think most understood the difficult health issues Carol had the last three to six months of her life. Not being able to breath with ease was a cause of anxiety and fear that few people know. Yet she persevered. She played bridge, she attended church functions, partied with her Red Hat group, and went to plays and concerts with her friends. She never failed to have a positive effect on people. You would never know she was in trouble until she called a dear friend and said take me to the ER, I'm having breathing problems.

Carol was a tireless worker in the community, but her biggest impact was on her friends. She had many. So if the theory that if we touch one life we may touch many, I am sure she touched many. Probably as many as the "great and powerful." I am also sure her impact was positive. Plus if you count the remarkable family she raised and the grandsons potential for impacting our lives, she was a very remarkable women. 

I shall miss her. Many shall miss her. She was a great and powerful woman.