Understated achievements ~

Over the course of my life, as I have achieved more and more, I've learned that I prefer to achieve things in quiet and just keep moving. Major things, even.



When I worked in fast food, when we would have a rush at lunchtime, I would cook more burgers than you could imagine. And when the rush was over and they were still handing out the food, I was taking a break because my rush was over at the grill.



In air traffic control when I would work and set things up so that everybody would get to where they were supposed to go safely and efficiently, I would get it done and then be given a break. It hadn't happened yet, but it was all set up.



That was even more amplified when I was in traffic management where I was planning out the evening shift due to thunderstorms and setting things up in the morning or middle of day so that they could be successful in the evening while I was at home. I would negotiate delays and reroutes and get everything set up and then have to leave because my shift was over.



Recently I achieved a couple of life goals. After over seven years of effort, I captured all of the slides that my parents had from my childhood in the 1960s and 1970s. I put them online for my family and sent them postcards with the web address so that they could view them at their leisure. I got no response because I made this life accomplishment that took over seven years in the quiet.



Another major milestone is publishing a book. I self-published my first book recently. I struggled with the final moves that I had to make to get it through the process, and I had to rework the cover several times in order to get it the right size so that the do. But once I published it and it was available solar system-wide, I turned my computer off and went to bed. Glowing, of course, and it was hard to sleep, but understated achievement.



At times, approaching things this way is challenging because I see others being lauded for their achievements, and I see others celebrating and having a big time. That's really not me.



Sometimes, I think something's wrong with me because I don't want to be like that. I celebrated a retirement from a long career by quietly leaving and working myself out of a job over the last two years of my career.



I celebrated turning 60 by celebrating another person's birthday and the birth of a granddaughter.



I like the way I do things, even though it's so different from everybody around me.



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Unpredictable ~

One of the things I've been called is unpredictable. I find that funny when I don't feel pain from the attack.



When I learn that someone has said that about me or feels that way about me, all I can think is that they don't really know me and they haven't taken the time to ask or get to know me.



At work, when people would say that, it typically meant that they couldn't control me. And I agree with that, but I am unpredictably consistent in so many different things, streaks and apps, things that I do each day, things that I do each week and each month and even each year, things that excite me change, but they're similar often, although I have been stretching and reaching out to do different things lately.



No, if I'm seen as unpredictable, that usually means they don't really know me and don't want to take the time to know me.



Good luck with that! You'll never figure out what I'm doing next...



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Kept a messy car ~

I kept a messy car for a really long time. When I started driving in high school and I ended up with my own car I would put stuff in the back seat and in the floorboards. As I got older and I would eat out at fast food places I would put the garbage in my car and leave it empty it out every month or so. It was gross.



As I got older I would leave things that I thought I needed in the trunk and in the side pockets and in the places underneath seats and it never moved. When I had garbage I would put it in the backseat if I had an empty cup or empty can or bottle it would go in the floorboard of the backseat and this continued well into my adulthood.



Even when I had children I threw stuff in the floor and didn't clean it up.



One day I had to let some people ride with me to lunch while I was at work. One of them was my facility manager and one of them was the assistant facility manager and I was embarrassed by what they had to move to sit in my car and then what they said about my messy car.



They didn't put me down and they didn't make fun of me, but it was embarrassing. After that, I cleaned up the inside of my car.



I'm still not very focused on washing and waxing and cleaning the outside of the cars because I'm just not into that.



I don't want my car to be shiny and look new and I don't want to really impress anybody, but I do try to keep the inside clutter free and garbage free. And I feel a lot better about things when I have to have somebody ride with me.



It makes me happier. And I like that.



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Broken belt ~

This past summer, while out of the country, my belt broke. It was the loop that held the excess belt in place. And the rest of the belt was pretty worn, but still held together. It was leather. Because space in my luggage was crammed full, I had only brought one belt with me.



When the loop broke off, my brain raced. Always in the past, I would have thought that this is what happens. And I knew something bad was going to happen on this trip. And my brain would automatically start searching for the next thing that was going to go wrong.



And quite often, I found it. But after much effort and many years of trying to change, I went down a different street. I shrugged my shoulders, said a bad word, and put my belt on without the loop. I spun it over so that the excess belt didn't stick out like something that sticks out from the front of a guy.



And I just kept rolling. I thought about the paracord that I had brought with me and how years ago when one of my sons didn't bring a belt at all to a trip, I had to fashion a quick belt out of paracord. I figured if things got rough, I could do that and maybe start a new style in the country we were visiting.



The big thing for me was that I didn't get upset. So different from the way that I used to be. I was reminded of that when I finally bought a replacement belt five months later.



I'm glad to have been able to make these changes in my life. While I do still get upset over things, it's not the same.



And it's not as often. Thank you, God, for my freedom!



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Different travel goals ~

My goals when I travel have changed as I have gotten older. I remember when I was growing up looking forward to when my Dad would come home from his temporary duty assignments overseas. He would bring me something and it would be fun.



A couple of times he didn't bring anything back and that was okay, but it was just weird because my mother made a big deal about it and everybody was, oh, what'd you get? And when I started going on trips myself, I would make a point of buying something for my mother and my father and bringing it back.



And I always bought a physical souvenir because that's what I was taught. You collect things and you get a physical souvenir and that's a sign that you went somewhere.



We have four children, and so whenever we would go on trips with our four children, we would come back with lots of little things because everybody got something to bring back. And we taught them what we were taught, that you bring a souvenir back to show your love to whoever didn't get to go and to your parents. We even would bring back gifts for other people. And that was fun for a long time.



But I've reached an age to where I don't want any more stuff like that. And I don't want to spend my time in gift shops every time I go on a trip. And I don't want to figure out a new place to put something that I just got on a trip.



I like to send postcards and for a long time that was a priority because the only place I could get them was in the gift shop. I had to remember to bring stamps. Otherwise I had to figure out how to buy stamps and send myself a postcard and send others a postcard while we were on the road so that they could participate and I could share with them the joy of what we were doing.



I was always so eager to share with my parents and family.



Now with modern technology I can take a picture on my phone and use an app called TouchNote to send postcards to anybody both nationally and internationally. Because it works on the internet I usually make a calendar reminder when we're on a trip to send a postcard every night around 9 p.m.



I send myself and my wife a postcard just so we can remember what we did that day and be able to share it with others or look at it and talk about it. At the end of the trip, I try to send a postcard to family and share with them the joy that we just experienced.



But I don't really buy things when I'm traveling. I don't want to have to carry them and I don't want to have to put them in my luggage and hope they don't break.



Funny how things change.



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Hit by partition ~

I remember having a partition fall on me at work.



I worked in a very large dark control room for many years of my career. One time I was working a position that was near the supervisor's desk in the middle of the aisle between our areas of specialization.



These desks had been put in the middle of the aisle in an effort to bring the supervisors of the shift closer to the action in the operation and make them more available. Once the desks were put into place, of course, things were modified and cubicle partitions were brought down and put partially around the desks to give the supervisors a little bit of privacy while working and especially when talking to trainees or discussing private matters with different employees.



An operational environment is challenging because you have to be in the middle of it but you also have all these administrative things that are outside of the bounds of the operation that still have to be done.



The partitions had been put into place by staff people, and they didn't have all the parts that they needed, and so they were being held up in different ways.



One partition was held up the way it was supposed to be. Another partition was taped together. Another partition was held together with a bunch of rubber bands. They didn't have any money to do what they did, and so they had gotten partitions from another building and brought them in.



One day while I was working a position it had been a particularly strenuous session where I had had to express myself clearly to people that were working other positions. That's a polite way to say that I probably made several people mad that day. So i was hunched over my position concentrating on what i was doing. All of a sudden I felt this weight hit my back with a lot of force. It hurt but I was working a live position and i couldn't just stop what i was doing. So I said "ow" and then I started hearing movement. The supervisor and several people came rushing down the aisle. They lifted this weight off of my back. All I thought was "Wow, I really must have made somebody mad that they came over and decided to pound on me!"



What had actually happened was one of those partitions had fallen from the supervisor desk and landed leaning against the back of my chair and hit me on my shoulders and back of my neck. The supervisor and the other managers were very very apologetic. They got me off the position and made sure I was okay. I had to fill out a couple of forms and life went on.



But it was so funny thinking that I had made somebody so mad that they had to come and take care of me.



What a life!



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Fun museum visit ~

Recently, my wife and I went to a museum in a town in Pennsylvania. The museum had a lot of cool static displays showing the way things were in the past and different things that had been used in the city as it developed.



They had examples of Victorian bedrooms and 1800s general stores and that sort of thing. In one of the rooms in the museum, they had some electronics equipment that was very fascinating. They had an old telephone switchboard that had the little headphone-looking jacks so that the wire could be swapped from one connection to another when somebody called and said connect me to BR549.



It was funny because the one from the 1940s was very simple with very few lines. Then they had an operator's console from the 1950s and it had a lot of plugs on it. What caught my eye though was the cheat sheets on the console in front of the places where the wires got plugged in to connect people to other people.



The cheat sheets were cut down pieces of notebook paper or typing paper and they had lists of names and numbers. Some names were people and some were businesses and they were laid out in 2x2 grids so that somebody could easily look up a name listed in the alphabetic list.



The reason it caught my attention was this was like what I used when I was working in air traffic control. At each position we had lots of telephone lines that we had access to When we needed to talk to another facility or a position in another facility We had hot buttons that we could press that would connect us to them we had Numbers that we could dial to talk to different positions in our control room There were so many Connections that we could make that we had cheat sheets on the consoles Beside the keypad and in front of the buttons that connected us to them a Lot like that old-timey telephone operators console Thank you.



I thought it was funny that in our modern age we're still using the things that people came up with in the 1940s and 1950s. Sure they take a different format, but it's still the same stuff.



On a side note, it was neat to see a manual typewriter and to share with my daughter that my father had been able to type 80 words a minute on one of those manual typewriters when he was young.



Fun museum visit.



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