At the end of January, I went back to work at the place I retired from as a contractor.  Last Friday was the last day of the contract.

For most of my career, I worked as an operations instructor in nuclear power, both in the Navy (40 months) and at a commercial plant (24 years).  As in many jobs, there was more to it than just the teaching. And, unfortunately, as the company went from a moderate sized utility to a corporation operating the 2nd largest nuclear fleet, there was a lot of additional administrative requirements.

By the time I retired, enjoyment of my job was long gone, except for the small percentage of the time that I actually spent in the classroom. That, combined with a number of administrative burdens and other issues, contributed to my decision to retire when I reached 55.

My plan was to take at least a year off before even considering looking for work.  By the end of the first six months, I had no intentions of actively seeking work.

Work came seeking me a year after my last real day of work.

Not having a job as of the end of next Friday is not a bad thing for me, as some of my few long time readers would know.

You see, I’m retired and this job was just a 7 month contract gig with 4 weeks off in the first half. So, starting next Saturday, I’ll be back to full-time retirement.

The contract job was back at the place I retired from and my office — until next Friday — is three doors down from my old office.  Except for a few weeks here and there, I had worked in the same building from April 1983 until I retired at the end of February 2007.

The last several months have been very fulfilling as I was able to do the parts of the job that I really enjoyed without getting overwhelmed with all of the administrative stuff  that in-house staff has to deal with — the kind of stuff that was part of the reason that I retired when I did.

Today I was walking back to the office with an empty cardboard box for loading up my few personal possessions when I ran into the department manager.  I remarked that there was a lot less accumulation with a 6 month temporary gig than there had been for 24 years as an employee.

She laughed and then said that they could probably find someplace to store it where it would be there waiting for me when I come back for another gig in about 11 months.

Hmmm… take a year off from work, then work for 6 months doing what I enjoy, then eleven months off and come back for another 6 month gig.  Better than working full time, that’s for sure.

Note: the guy in the picture is not me or anyone I am related to.  I was 7 years old when this picture was snapped.

Lake Dardanelle from Lake Dardanelle State Park
August 10, 2008

Last Sunday never got above 75°F and the month, so far, has been abnormally — and wonderfully — cool.

The weather has been very strange this year in Arkansas.

(The place I retired from and where I am currently working on a contract is about a mile on the other side of that hill and to the right.)

I am in the process of going through pictures and preposting again.  I want to get ahead so that there is consistent publication for those who do drop by and so that this blog will continue to be active.

Full disclosure… I’m cheating.  The images that I’m publishing here in August will appear in September in Haw Creek Out ‘n About and the images that I’m posting in Out n’ About in August will appear here in September.  The main difference will be the content.  This blog is about anything and everything that I happen to want to write about, so the textual posts will be wide ranging.  In the other blog, I’m just doing the outdoors, travel and camping.

Work… I’ve got a little over 5 weeks and I’ll be leaving my current employment location…. again.

Back to retirement!

For those that may not remember, I retired from Arkansas Nuclear One back in the beginning of 2007.  Then, after a year off, I went back to work as a contractor…. at Arkansas Nuclear One.  My desk is in an office 4 doors down from where my office used to be — and one of the doors opens into a stairway.  Coming up out of the stairway yesterday, out of years of habit, I turned to the right and started to go into the first office — my old office, where I worked had my desk for about 15 years.  The building is about 28 years old and, the way that my career worked out, I’ve spent more time working in it that anyone else, by far.  I got a job in the Training Department in April, 1983. There’s one guy still working there that was assigned to the department the same time I was, but he ended up going back to the plant for several years.  I’ve got a working session with him tomorrow afternoon.

After this contract is up, we’ll be traveling to Wisconsin to visit our daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids.  We’re planning to be gone about three weeks.

For the second time this year we have the opportunity to see them here in Arkansas.  Unfortunately, both times have been because of health issues with our son-in-law’s parents.  His dad had a heart attack in the spring and, this week, his mother had a liver transplant in Little Rock.  We’ll be in Little Rock Saturday and Sunday to visit and to take our grandkids so that our daughter and son-in-law will be able to spend whatever time they want at the hospital.  We’re planning on taking them to supper and a kids appropriate movie on Sunday before we come back home.

I’m still working this contract job and I’ve come down with a (almost) summer cold.

Hopefully, I’ll kick it before it knocks me down for the count.

At least it’s not the flu — different symptoms, at least so far.

I need to see if I can get some sleep.·´¯`·.¸¸.··´¯`·.¸¸.··´¯`·.¸¸.·z z z z z z z z z z z

Here we go again!

40% chance of storms today; 60% tonight.

Then for 70% chance Wednesday and Thursday, tapering off on Friday, with totals of 2 to 3 inches, more in localized areas.

Rain, rain, go away.
Come again –
in a couple of months when it’s HOT!

At least the weekend is predicted to be dry and, since I’m currently working, that’s a good thing.  However, I’m working late hours in the simulator this week and had sort of planned on getting some grass mowed on Wednesday or Thursday.  Everything is SO green right now and the grass is growing FAST!

With being back to work now, I have a lot more on my plate that I want to do than I know what to do with. I’m going to have to cut back on something and I’ve decided that — at least in the near term — I’m going to be doing less commenting on blogs than I had been doing. I will still be dropping in and reading posts of my blog-friends, but unless I really have something that I want to say, I probably won’t comment. I’ll just be there on occasion “lurking” without commenting.

On a lot of the blogs that are in my reader, I won’t even be doing that. Blogs like John Chow’s and Shoemoney’s will get a “mark all posts as read,” and I’ll move on to a blog of someone that I read and comment on.

I did consider stopping one of my blogs, but the one I was thinking about is used by a few folks that are doing home schooling so I decided to continue it, at least for the foreseeable future.

During the month that I was off, I didn’t get much done that I had hoped to do. I was sick with the flu followed by a nagging cold that is only now completely out of my system — I think. Our youngest daughter’s father-in-law had a heart-attack and she, her husband and our grandkids made a trip to Arkansas because of it. Our daughter and grandkids ended up spending several days with us. It was a bit of a disruption, but one that I’ll take any time. Strange weather has also caused issues as did things like income taxes. I didn’t spend as much time online as I usually do, didn’t do as many posts.

I made it out of the house yesterday for the first time in almost a week. We went into town, but I still wasn’t feeling the greatest.

I guess what I thought was a cold turned out to be the flu strain that’s been going around. Since I didn’t go to the doctor, I don’t know for sure. I was planning to go yesterday if I wasn’t significantly better.

Ran a fever for several days and was pretty much out of it round the clock. Slept a lot. Not much coughing, which is funny, because the main thing I’m left with now is a cough.

Haven’t looked at much online until yesterday.

We’ve lost power at least three times today. The generator is sitting ready just in case.

According to the National Weather Service, we’ve had somewhere between 2.5 to 4 inches of rain today and our county is in a flash flood warning. Fortunately, we live on top of a ridge so don’t have a problem with flooding. There’s still a lot more rain to come, I think.

With being sick and all of this rain, it’s hard to get some of the stuff done outside that I wanted to do during this time off.

I go back to work three weeks from today and the contract job will go until the end of August.

I’ve finally succumbed to a cold — first one this season of any consequence.

The good news is that I won’t be passing it on to anyone at work because I’m not at work — for now.

I was hired as a contractor to work through the first week of March. Then the students went to the plant to support the other unit’s refueling outage. I’ll go back to work about the 8th or 9th of April — the week before classes pick up again. My last day was supposed to be Friday, but that turned into a snow day.

The snow is all gone. Living about 500 feet above the river valley, when we have frozen precipitation, we generally get a bit more than many of the surrounding areas and it usually lasts a little longer. But, still, it’s Arkansas and March, so the snow didn’t stay around long.

I’ve taken about a 5 day break from reading e-mail and looking at blogs… I’ll get back to it. Just taking a bit of a break.

During the last couple of weeks, I’ve been looking at, and downloading, a lot of images associated with the Depression years and the dust bowl. I read a book called “The Worst Hard Time” and found a copy of the old Government propaganda documentary “The Plow that Broke the Plains.” With all of that as a starting point, I picked up a copy of Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

I read quite a bit — and I used to read a whole lot more — but I’ve never been one to get into the great classics of literature. This time, though, having spent some time getting to know the background, this book is an easy and interesting read. I’ve never tried to read it before, that I know of, and I think I would know since the protagonist’s last name, Joad, is so close to mine. (Did I really just use the word protagonist?)

As regular visitors have probably noticed, I’ve been posting less text and more images — and that’s going to be more the norm here for the near term.

I’ve got a lot of pictures — and I want to share them, which I am doing here.

I currently have 552 images in a pool that I am more or less randomly selecting from for posting.

I’m also editing images taken from last summer’s trip. All of the images taken since September 22 have been processed. The one’s worth keeping have been edited and stored, with the edited image uploaded to flickr. My intent is to process all new images as soon as possible and to work my way back through the backlog in reverse order. Today, I processed the pictures taken on September 22 on the drive from Rock Springs, Wyoming to Moab, Utah. The next set is the pictures taken on the drive from Jackson to Rock Springs and then I’ll be working on the images from the Tetons.

I have one more week on my contract job before I have a 4 week break. I’ll have completed about 5 weeks of the contract and there will be about 21 weeks left. I’ll start back about the 7th of April.

A while back, I removed all of the advertizing from this blog and a number of other blogs and web sites. I concentrated my ads on one site which I optimized for the search engines. The site isn’t significantly different content wise, but the income from the site is averaging four times what it had dropped to before I incorporated some SEO (search engine optimization) strategies. I’ll be doing some more tweaking over the next few weeks.

This is a prewritten post from last night. I really didn’t write it at 2:11 pm, because I’ll be at work then, and it would be pretty stupid to write a blog article and post it while at work as a contractor — but, then, I’ve seen some contractors get away with some really stupid stuff over the years. I’m not going to go there.

Mike Goad
22:15 pm, February 28th, 2008