Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

 All right, I admit it, I am a numbers nerd.   Seriously.  Many long years ago when I was living at home with my parents, my father worked down the hallway from an in-house print shop.  Some of their printing was outsourced, some of it was done in house.  And some of their printers had time and ... well, ideas.   I guess someone, somewhere, decided producing blank pads of paper was a good idea.  But they seemed to have a real problem with size.  Dad came home with these pads of paper which were easily 15 x 20 inches, and a good 3/4" of an inch thick.  And my favorite thing to do was to start up in the upper left corner with a random number.  I'd double it.  And continue right down that edge, then start a second column, and so on, and so on.  Until I filled the page with a number that was, sometimes, 25 or more digits long.  Mind you, I didn't have anyone to check my work, but it was ... well, I thought it was fun...

 While it may beat the alternative, the current situation around here is waiting to see what winter is going to do.   I've been here for 60 winters now, and I have noticed that there are patterns.  Not the sort that the more knowledgeable weather forecasters (and others) talk about.  What I've seen tends to carry through, which pretty much is the way the winter weather starts tends to define the entire winter.   Some of that is weather, and most of it is the after-effects of the weather.  Last year started slow but big - and ended up with our third-snowiest winter, ending up with just short of eight feet of snow.  We tend to average five feet a year, but before you snort and laugh, that does not mean every flat surface is covered to that depth.   In a typical winter, we start with some snow, then some melts, more snow arrives, and snow, as you know if you know, is mostly air.  That's right.  Snowflakes are relatively flat,...

 I've been here, just haven't been particularly inspired - or had the free time - to get here and accomplish anything. It's been a month.  We celebrated my birthday, my daughter's, our 33rd anniversary, and a few other things.  Last night we went out for dinner with the whole family for my son's birthday, which is still up ahead, calendar wise. Weather-wise around here we've gone from upper eighties to snow - yeah, that happens this time of year.  Curiously - or perhaps it was just freakish timing, our snowfall was literally on Halloween.  Yeah, I know, I lived through the blizzard we got 32 years ago on Halloween and after.  I had not yet started this writing thing, but we sure as hell got nailed by a heck of a lot of snow.  The history books do a better time of recording the whole process.  I do remember it was a day where, at work - it was a Thursday - I spent in meetings, mostly about benefits and the direction they wanted the company benefits...

 Yup, celebrated a birthday last week.  Now I'm just feeling old.   I've usually been somewhat apprehensive when it comes to "0" birthdays.  It started when I was ten.  Being a kid who loved all forms of reading, I read a lot.  My folks subscribed to a number of magazines, including Time.  And I read each issue cover-to-cover.  And the old TV Guide as well.  And we tended to watch the evening news in my house, which came on at 5:30 pm for the national news, followed by local news at 6:00 pm.   So I was probably fairly well informed when it came to current events.  And on my tenth birthday, ya know, double digits and all, I won't forget it as we had some sort of get together.  I remember sitting in the living room watching the end of a football game, probably the University of Minnesota against Nebraska, where Tony Dungy, the quarterback, and Rick Upchurch, a wide receiver, were two of my favorite players.  But th...

 This has not been the best of weeks. I did work over 60 hours last week due to some co-workers being out of the office, so I tried to pick up the lose ends.  Hopefully it will serve me well, as I'm out of the office next week. But Sunday did not start too well when my wife informed me that one of her uncles - the last one - had passed away.  His widow is still here, but we're not heading to the funeral tomorrow.  While I remember the reminder I learned in high school that funerals are not for the dead, they are for the living, it doesn't much improve things if you're not there. The gentleman who passed away was always friendly and kind to me and my growing family.  And we shared a bond that no other two men will have on this planet.  One morning, early, my grandmother-in-law was having a medical procedure done.  It involved the insertion of some sort of technology through an artery in her leg, up near hear heart.  Mind you, I was young, foolish, ...

 About a thousand years ago as an IT manager, somewhat, I had to conduct training for my users on that new tool called "The Internet." Incorrectly, as most pedants, including myself, will point out.  Granted, I did come about this knowledge back in the day when "The World Wide Web" was in it's infancy, so I suppose, the description of me still fits.  But I - as ever - digress. During that training, I informed my folks that the company would be providing them access to the internet, but we would also be monitoring their use of it.  Filters and other tools weren't invented quite yet, and the browsers that did exist were all in single-digit versions, and when improvements were released, they were noteworthy, not ... Oh, hey, there's a thing popping up on my screen telling me I need to upgrade the third time this week... But getting back to the point.  I would tell folks that it is entirely possible as this tool evolved that they may find themselves on a web...

I live.  Allegedly.   My wife began her new job this week with an out of town training trip.  She traveled to Sioux Falls, South Dakota - about 3 hours by ... well, freeway speeds, I guess, where her new employer is based.  She is doing the same thing, just new challenges for new people who have made it deeply and profoundly clear that she is valued. A quick word to all of those organizations out there looking to hire: Don't forget your current employees.  My wife's employer has changed over the past few years, with leadership changes, that see the people less as people, more as parts to be exchanged, greased, and continue to move forward. It don't work like that. As a much younger man, I was part of a small but growing organization that occasionally experienced the loss of trained personnel.  We developed a sort of metric that made sense for us after a while.  The jobs we did required a heck of a lot of knowledge that wasn't just laying around at...