Sometimes you feel about worthless. Or useless.

It’s been an interesting and terrible day.

First of all, we were informed of the passing of one of our team members. Young guy, expectant father. Heart attack.

Had a great day in training and exam proctoring. Had 14 students decide to stick around to tackle the certification exam, and 10 passed clean, 3 did not, and one poor just had to fight hardware issues trying to get the certification exam to run on his box, and eventually gave up. I felt for him.

Then I get back to the hotel after a great meal at a local steakhouse only to find out that tornadoes have been passing through my hometown. That is not great. Looks like one little town in Leavenworth may have been wiped out.

Tomorrow I have a lighter load, with my training partner taking on the brunt of the class. I’ll take a little time and go through the pictures and get an idea as to how bad the tornado was.

Kids, my future grandchildren, go over to your search engine and took a look at today’s date, May 28, 2019, Lawrence, and tornado. I have a feeling you’ll see some pictures that will startle you.

That’s about I’ve got for now.

Peace y’all.

It’s been a long day for me, and I feel like I could fall asleep hard right now, but I need to stay at it for at least another hour. I’ve got an important day tomorrow, and I’d rather stay up a little longer and finish burning this candle, than try to sleep now and get up half a dozen times in the middle of the night.

Had an interesting conversation with a young man working on his PhD in Geology today. He was getting ready to head to Greenland, and run sensor-covered drones across the Helheim glacier to track movement. He joked that they have more data than what they knew what to do with. I wished him luck organizing his data into useful information that can be used to make decision and garner insights as to what was really going on with our climate.

I know some folks that have about as much knowledge of our climate as the I do about the operation of an internal combustion engine. Just because I know what a spark plug looks like doesn’t mean I know anything about timing belts. This young man told me a story of what he had seen first hand, and how there are obvious trends that he and his fellow scientists can track.

It was special for me, because I spoke one on one with someone who was a witness. Not many folks out there know someone who has every observed glacier movement in Greenland. I’m humbled that I met this young man and heard his story. I hope more people have a chance to meet him and listen to his tale. He’ll likely make a pretty good university professor one day.

I’d take his class.

Peace y’all.

OK, it’s time to get some words on the page. It’s a Sunday night in rural Douglas County, and there have been more than a couple of things distracting the lot of us.

No, not the ending of the Indianapolis 500.

We’re just taking a look at everybody’s commitments over the next month or so, and it’s plain to see that we’re going to be a pretty busy crew. Lisa is going to be very busy with consulting, and that immediately translates to both Dane and Gracie being busy as well. Bonnie is living the fulltime life with her recurring internship with Bayer, and I’ve got consulting and training keeping me busy for the foreseeable future.

It’s the career I chose.

I sped a little time reaching out to my family today, just to see how they were doing. I guess folks are doing OK.

I’ve got some time over the next few weeks to turn the TV off in the evenings and learn some stuff. I might branch out and study some topics that are on my wish list. It’s high time I took another look at Python and how it can work in the Axure space.

Time to think about where tomorrow will take me.

Peace y’all.

It’s been a grand Saturday here in rural Douglas County. Lisa and I got up early and addressed the day’s remaining needs prior to Bonnie’s graduation party. Stuff got done, and we’re all the more chilled out for it.

I’m trying to organize a few things prior to the work demands that kick in next week. I’ll be fine, but it’s just that I get a little anxious like anyone would in my position.

Lisa, Bonnie, and I watched Ocean’s 8 tonight. Dane is still recovering from an illness. He’s taking a number of different remedies to address the stuff he’s dealing with.

I’m jut trying to get my ducks in a row. The ducks don’t want to be in a row, that much is sure.

We’ll get things figured out, preferably between now and Monday morning.

In the meantime, we’ll focus on positive thoughts and the good kind of energy, and send it out to all who need it, especially out midwestern neighbors that are dealing with some crazy flooding right now.

(This is the part where I pad out my blog with an extra a sentence or two to get to my pledge of two hundred words per day. It’s not pretty, but it keep me honest.)

Peace y’all.

And that’s a day! Wow! A Friday, second to last Friday of the month. Lots of stuff got done today. We have some guests coming over to the house tomorrow, and Lisa and company have the house looking better than it ever has since we moved in.

(OK. Reality moment. I just had to go back and correct some of my own typing. Maybe taking some sort of training to improve my touch typing is in order. I could be so much better at my keyboarding skills. )

Lisa really did an outstanding job with the household stuff, and she has no time to do it either. Both of us are under it a little bit right now, with her summer load plus her side gigs, and me getting ready to teach a couple classes I’ve never taught before. One is a class I’ve taught in the past, but it has gone through a couple of updates since the last time I taught it. I’m teaching that course for the first time here the week of June 10th.

I find myself thinking about the load I’ll be dealing with in the coming weeks, and it’s a little crazy. I’ll get through it, and I have to confess, having a little bit of pressure on me is a good thing. I need to adapt to the situation and deal with it. I knew what I was getting into when I signed on. I need to step up my game.

We got more rain today. I went out and got some much-needed mowing done, and when the lightning started to fill the sky, a bit before the rain, I bolted for the house, and a good thing, too. The rain came down in torrents. It was a rather awesome sight, watching the rain come down do heavy. But we don’t need it. Not now. We’ve had enough.

Time to pack it in.

Peace y’all.

The clouds moved in as the sun set in rural Douglas County, and we’re expecting more rain and maybe a light show as we prepare for bed.

I didn’t sleep well last night. I was anxious about today’s class, but I shouldn’t have been. Chris and I had a great class. The delivery was positive all around, the only negative being that thirty-five had signed up for the class, and only about sixteen or seventeen showed up. I get it, things happen, emergencies pop up and life happens. I just think that if everyone had shown up as anticipated, the class might have been even better.

Tonight Lisa and I had dinner with her college mentor and his wife. They are passing through on their way from Colorado back to Wisconsin where he’s is a member of the faculty there. It was a good time with lots of engineering talk that I could understand maybe every third word.

Tomorrow I’ve got a full slate ahead of me. Meetings, meeting requests, and household prep. Add on top of that trying to get some other things taken care of, and I’ll be busy from sun up to sun down.

And then I’ll write another blog post like this one.

Peace y’all.

It’s been a mostly sunny day in rural Douglas County, and the clouds rolled in late this afternoon to deposit just a few more drops on us.

It’s been a busy day. I was focused on my preparations for my delivery tomorrow. It’s a pretty straight forward Azure Fundamentals class, so I don’t anticipate any real problems. I’ll probably spend a little time yet tonight going over a few things. The other instructor for the course is already in Overland Park, and we’ll get things sorted out as early as possible. Can’t do a whole lot at the Microsoft office until other people show up.

Hopefully everybody will have their Skillpipe registrations already prepped so we can get things moving along at a good clip.

I’m a little anxious, but then again that’s really par for the course these days. I’m getting more comfortable with each delivery, but I still have my anxious moments like anybody else does. For years I was presenting for a lot of small to medium size businesses, and now I’m presenting to some pretty good sized organizations.

It’s all good.

I’ll get to doing the other stuff I need to do. Hope all is well in your corner of the world.

Peace y’all.

And that’s a wrap! Dane has graduated from high school, and Bonnie is done with her undergraduate work. Lisa has been busting her butt all day getting ready for a little graduation celebration this weekend, and Gracie is contemplating her future and … well, I don’t need to digress on that.

I’m tired. I had a full day of work, and I’ve got more on tap tomorrow with getting ready for my delivery on Thursday. I always get a bit anxious about deliveries, even when it’s as simple as an Azure Fundamentals course.

The house is looking good. We’ve still got some decisions to make about what we’re going to do with the carpeting on the main level. I’m not too picky about it. I just want Lisa to be happy.

Almost eleven o’clock, and that alarm is not going to reset itself for later. I need to get this wrapped up and drag my old butt off to bed. It would be nice if this thing would automatically finish itself and attain the word count I pursue. That’s not going to happen, so I find myself once again writing a bunch of erroneous crap in hopes of getting to my count just a little bit faster.

And that’s what I did.

Peace y’all.

Time to write. It’s a Friday night … no wait… it’s a Monday night. My time frame is getting all jacked around already. It’s a Monday night. That I’m fairly sure I can verify. This time zone. I find myself thinking about time zones. I’m thinking about modules. I’m thinking about the next thing on the path.

I am thinking about what comes next. I work for a big company. I have an opportunity to promote the product we support.

And I’m wondering if I’m going to be motivated enough to rack up two hundred words on a topic I like.

Yes, I can. I love what I do professionally. I strive every day to find new ways to describe what I do. I sell maps.

I sell maps.

It’s a bit of an epiphany. I show people a path. I show people where their treasure may lie.

And that is something.

There’s happiness in there somewhere. Give ’em the next step.

Oh, and give the next step in a few hundred words that have meaning today, yet dissipate into vapor the very net time some one asks for proof.

Proof.

Sometime’s you simply have to take the word of a man. A woman.Someone who was there.

Peace y’all.

Yeah, yeah. I didn’t write yesterday. In my own defense, it appears as if there was a DNS issue, and I was unable to connect to my site, so that became a bit of an issue. That, and after the Game of Thrones series finale last night, I probably wasn’t in the best mood because I thought that finale was one that has inspired me to never complaining about the last episode of “The Sopranos”.

So, it’s over. I had read the first five books, having gone through the unabridged audiobooks. It was a fantastic series, and the first five or six seasons of Game of Thrones was fantastic. Last season took care of some of the loose ends, but this season… really? Late for a train? It seems like the writers on the show were working from drunken scrawls on napkins.

I loved the series as it was published, but this should serve to be a warning to any fiction writer that has received an offer to get their book series produced as a tv show. Do what J.K. Rowling did… maintain control.

I’m going to head off to a corner and wallow in nerdish self-pity. Might think about other series that could come anywhere near to the first five seasons of GoT.

Peace y’all.