Channelization

Turning 65 has been weird.  For whatever reason it reminds me of being 15 when I thought people 30 were ancient.  Fifty years of working is a while.  As I look at some of my friends it appears that they've done more, made more, contributed more, etc.  Considering that is probably a waste of time.

	Today was a decent day.  Highlights including using a new 'stick' toothbrush now that my second Sonicare Elite toothbrush has failed from a dead battery.  Actually that would be my fifth Sonicare Elite that has failed.  The fourth is in a drawer with the replacement battery, some desoldering tape and a lack of motivation to repair it.

Over the course of the past two years I've been obsessed with the transition from a C-level executive to a self-employed, self-directed existence.  It's fine.  My original goal when starting the last job (which will no longer be referred to as the 27-year gig [I know longer mention the employer by name]) was to stay for 18 months.  That was a perfect plan.  The reason I failed to execute on that mid-year in 1987 was we'd just had a child.  Now I know whose fault this blog is!

Lift gets complicated. Goals are set, often too many, often interdependent (intradependent?) and we do a sidestep.  Sidesteps can leave one marching out of sequence, mis-ordered. It's time to re-group.

I distinctly remember writing a very good piece of satirical work in 1960, 1961 or 1962.  At the time I knew it was special...but did not following the 'special' I was kid, what did I know?  There was a similar experience in 1978...I backed off.  Recently I wrote what will be one of the chapters in my book, "Stories from Pop (my grandfather)." 

Throughout my professional career there were many successful creative endeavors although all within the bureaucratic and commercial business world, all within disciplines which only recently decided that innovation and creativity were good words rather than wastes of time.  Leaving my job two years ago the first thing I did was consider continuing to do what I'd done for a while, registering a domain name representative of that discipline.  The operative part of the domain name was 'innovation.'  The past two years have been consumed with the small business and certainly that has provided some creative outlet, technical challenges it's not quite right.  It seems that re-grouping is near.

The core of engineers has a legacy of channelizing meandering rivers prone to variation and unpredictability.  That's a disaster.  I'm not interested in straight lines any more.