UPDATE>>>>>

It’s time for another update to try to explain why this blog has become so sporadic.

Late last year, just before Christmas, Lynn’s 83 year old mom became sick and was hospitalized. This lady went through 4 bouts with cancer just since I knew her (23 years) and she always bounced back. This time the cancer had spread and the prognosis was not good. She passed away on January 12, 2013. This created a strain at home as Lynn tried to visit her whenever possible and I could get home to watch the kids.

Also, things at work started to become stressful. I was basically a one man department and then the owner’s lick spittle decided he didn’t want to do part of his job anymore and started piling jobs on my desk for verification. It required me to use CAD/CAM software to view and verify data, something I’d never done.

I gave the files back to L.S. and said, “I have no problem learning how to do this, but someone needs to train me on the use of the software.” He threw the files back on my desk and said, “You can read the Help files, can’t you?” and walked out of the office. Anyone who’s ever done CAM will tell you reading the help files alone will do nothing. I struggled for the next month or so, teaching myself (with the help of a couple CAM engineers who worked for L.S.) to move around in the software to do what I needed to do, but much, much more slowly.

Then I saw an ad online for a job at the place where my old friend, Mr. Mortimer, was. It was as an engineer instead of a manager, but I was looking to reduce my commute from 2-3 hours to an hour or so, which this would. I contacted Bob H. and we corresponded and it turned out they could offer pretty much what I was then making, with a promise of a review (which I had not had in 4+ years, indeed I was still 20% below what I made in 2008, all the salaried people there took 20% cuts that never came back) in 6-9 months. And Mr. Mortimer and Bob H. were contemplating retiring in 3 years and wanted me to help plug a hole when Bob H. (QA Mgr) left.

So, realizing L.S. would never leave (nor could he, since he was persona non grata with the military due to an earlier transgression, which would have gotten anyone else fired, but like I said, he’s a champion lick spittle) and would always have the owner’s ear, I had no future there and I took the new position starting April 1.

Since then, Lynn’s mom’s house went on the market and sold in 2 days and Lynn has had to work with her 2 brothers and 1 sister to clean and prep the house for the closing, going through a lifetime’s accumulation of stuff, trying to decide who gets what and what is worth keeping. It’s also been very stressful.

Also, during this past month and a half or so our main computer crashed, trapping all our pictures and videos of the kids and though I’ve bought a new one, I haven’t had time to set it up and recover what data I can from the crashed system.

Time is at a premium, obviously, and I have several projects hanging that I can’t get free to do, so blogging has fallen off the radar. I have a couple drafts of new posts, but I don’t have the time at work I had at the previous job to jot notes and sometimes even do a hand written draft (I know, I was using company time, but I only did it to clear my head and recharge for the task at hand there. It helps me sometimes to write something not work related to get me focused on writing reports for the military)