Productive Day

Breakfast at the folks house was good as always. KJ enjoyed watching a fishing show with Papa, he sat there enthralled with the boats, water and fish. He and I then met up with my Sister, Nieces and Grandmother at the Dayton Mall. I enjoyed hanging out, Kenden loved seeing his Grandma GB. I installed the shelving in his room today, it went great and looks great. I have more talent with tools than I like to admit, I got that from helping out my father in my younger years. Measure once, cut twice he always said. The shelves are perfectly level and mounted into studs. My Black and Decker laser level/stud finder helped out a lot. Wendy then proceeded to organize his room, it's now a haven for a 2 year old's imagination. Before now, it's basically been storage for clothes and toys. Check out the picture of the room above.

Alexa and Billy came back from their Dad's tonight, exhausted from a long weekend with their Dad's Girlfriend's Daughter nagging at them all the way. It's great to have them in their own beds on Sunday nights, instead of them getting dropped of Monday mornings as is usually the case.

I had a sad moment today, after KJ's room was organized there were a lot of things cleared out of his closet and dresser drawers. In one rubbermaid container was this music box that hung on his bassinet when he was a tiny baby. It plays soothing music, sounds, vibrates and lights up. Today it was in the container and each time the container was jostled it started playing music. Wendy asked me to take the batteries out because it was annoying. I did so as she was packing up his clothes that are now too little. Something just hit me as I removed the batteries and I started crying. Wendy was there for a much needed shoulder. My little baby is now a little boy. Once I settled down, Wendy asked Kenden to give me a big hug and he sure did. I needed that. I'm finally realizing that my Mother was not quite as over-sensative as I thought she was while my sister and I were growing up. Your children can touch chords in you that you never knew your body even had. It's not going to get any easier watching him grow up is it? At least every minute of it is fun and beautiful, albeit challenging and scary. I still get a sinking feeling every time he falls down, but it's fading somewhat - he's not a fragile little infant anymore. Tonight he was trying to pull a heavy swivel bar stool around the kitchen counter to help his Mom and Sister make homemade chocolate chip cookies and he pulled it over on himself. He was pinned right under it on his belly, but I just picked him up and sat the stool up - he proceeding to tell the bar stool "Bad bar stool" as he slapped it. There's a thousand moments like that, good and bad, every day. I hope this blog will be a fun reminder in the future of as many of these as possible.

A new work week starts later this morning, my mind starts preparing subconsciously every Sunday night for the week ahead. I'll fill you in on the game plan later today or tonight. MJ.

His other shelf, and more of his room. 

Kenden likes his jammies and Sister's hat. 

KJ's newly organized room and custom built shelf. 

Network Geek Blog

As suspected, Numb3rs was great Friday night. CBS might have another hit TV show on their hands. I enjoy the shows that make you think. I'm shying away from most reality shows, they're getting pretty old. Idol is still my favorite, but I really don't even care for Survivor that much. CSI, Numb3rs, X-Files, Navy NCIS, The West Wing are some of my favorites. I really don't watch sports that much anymore, although I follow the NBA, and college hoops via the Internet and Fantasy Leagues. MLB is and will always be my favorite. I live and breath baseball stats 365 days a year. Even in the winter between seasons I play a game called Diamond-Mind Baseball. It's a very accurate statistical simulation of baseball. I play online via email and the Net. I currently own a team in 4 present day leagues, and one league which is progressing thru the 1920's right now. Some of the biggest baseball historians participate in the 1920's league and I hold my own. Some of these guys will browse old newspaper accounts of games looking for errors in stats that actually do get updated by Stats, Inc. and are proven to re-write history.

Wendy, Kenden and I took a long nap this afternoon after lunch. That was an absolutely great way to spend a Saturday if you ask me! We woke up went to Home Depot to get a couple shelves for Kenden's room with his Christmas money. Just a tip, the labels under the lumber at HD are price per foot, not for the whole board. My nine foot 1x12 of Poplar I though was a steal at $3.96 was actually ($3.96 x 9). I still bought it, it'll make a lot better shelf than the cheap particle board they want you to buy for shelves. And if we ever decide to use it for a bookshelf or something it will make a great start. I built a nice TV/VCR stand out of poplar in my Junior HS woodshop class that I still use today as a nightstand. It's one sturdy piece of furniture.

After HD we had China Cottage for dinner, it was OK. I'm pretty fond of this one Chinese carry-out/hole-in-the-wall over by my dad's shop in Kettering and nothing else measures up. Even the fancy high priced China Cottage. Then we watched Spider Man 2 up in bed. KJ fell asleep during the movie, we had to cover his eyes during some violent parts. Overall it was a good movie. It was one of the "hard to watch" movies I mentioned a few posts ago, akin to Meet the Parents. Everything goes pretty bad for Peter Parker aka Spider Man until the end. There's certainly a Spidey 3 in the works. KJ was going "Spidey... Man, Spidey.... Man". His favorites right now are The Wiggles, Sesame Street and Monster's Inc. Gotta get up in the morning to go to Papa Evan's, heehee, breakfast at Papa's. Or as my Dad said tonight Bob Johnson's or was it Miles Evan's? MJ.

Ready for the weekend

Phew, finally the end of the work week is here! I am betting on it being a quiet, relaxing weekend at home. Starting tonight with watching Joan of Arcadia, CSI and Numb3rs. Numb3rs started out with a really good first episode - we'll see if it stays that way. American Idol was hilarious the other night when Leroy Wells took the audition floor and started stomping to ODB's "baby I got your money", and then James Brown's "I feel good". "Can you dig it?" he shouted, in between unintelligible sentences. Well, I just read that Leroy had to watch his television debut from a Mobile, AL jail cell as he was arrested for shooting a guy in the leg. He got out yesterday on $12,500 bond. I bet the lawyers will be lining up to defend him. Let's just hope if he did shoot the guy, the victim gets justice. Is Leroy the next William Hung? "She bang! She bang!". We'll see. Watch the video here www.leroy-wells.com. That's if the server is up, it's had 94,000 hits in just a few days.

Kenden stayed out of day care to be home with Wendy today. He has been acting up at school this week and she took the day off to work with him on his behavior. Wednesday at daycare he hit a fellow toddler in the face with a cooking pot, punched another kid in the cheek, and busted up a wooden train track that two other little boys were playing with - in the process a piece of track hit another kid and left a mark. Now we all know Kenden is the most loving little boy, so I don't know where this is coming from. The teacher set him aside to play by himself and he dumped boxes of toys on the floor and then refused to pick them up after being asked 3 times by the teacher. He's only 20 months old, so he has a while before terrible two's. I hope we can keep working with him, so his gentle kindness and loving heart can overpower his rough housing tendencies.

Alexa had a school project this week to write about the Planet Uranus. Yes, we had some fun making Your Anus jokes, it was in good fun. Wendy and her made a great Solar System out of Styrofoam balls and metal rods. They painted the planets by placing paint in zip lock bags and then the balls were swished around in the paint. It turned out great. Billy was a little jealous and had a project of his own this week, so I helped him with it. Last night while the girls were at soccer practice, Billy, KJ and I made a mobile for his book report on Giant Panda's. It was great, he had to do a presentation on it today. He practiced several times.... describing it's favorite food of bamboo, it's habitat - the mountains of China and the fact that they have 42 teeth! We drew pictures of each of those facts and the Panda itself and hung them with string from a clothes hangar covered with construction paper. It's worth a 100 points. I think "we" deserve them all. KJ helped too, he ate the glue stick :). MJ.

Roaming The Net

I have spent the last couple hours browsing The Net for entrepreneur opportunities. I enjoy being a network engineer "aka Geek" but I've found myself searching for "the next big thing" that will make a difference, and of course make me money. Tonight I've learned you can get a McDonald's franchise off the ground for 600k to 1.2 M, or you can start up a e-backups.net company for $500. I'd choose the later of course. I might actually look into that one... for $500 they will help you set up a site using their back-end technology to allow you to sell monthly subscriptions (starting at $12.95 for 1 GB) to customers who wish to or have to back up their data to a secure off site location. Working in healthcare I know HIPAA and even Sarbanes-Oxley are requirements for Physicians, and I work with and around physicians and physician offices everyday. I'd have to quit my job though, as I am not allowed to provide service to a physician in my current position as that would be viewed as illegal. Basically I cannot provide any service/perks to a doctor's office because anti-trust law says I can't. If they pay us for a service that is allowed, but only under those circumstances. For example, we provide network support to the Docs that lease space from us, that is allowed - because we include the cost of at least 1 network drop and connectivity to hospital systems as part of their least agreement.

I found an article with some really great tips for starting up a business:
entrepreneur.com

In case you don't want to read the article, here's my favorite tip:

"Are you sucking down and sucking across? To make sales, most entrepreneurs suck up to people with impressive titles like CEO, CIO, vice president and director. Unfortunately, the higher you go in most organizations, the thinner the air, and therefore the harder it is to support intelligent life. Focus instead on the people who do the real work: secretaries, administrative aides, customer service people and technical support people. Suck down and suck across, and you'll reach the real decision-makers--and differentiate yourself from the clueless companies that only suck up."

Although a little harsh on the big whigs, that is a very true statement. Secretaries and support staff are the key "ins" that you'll get no where without in my oppinion too.

So I'm just searching around sucking up information on starting up my "next big thing". It might be many years or it could be tomorrow, but I'll find my niche - if I haven't already... after all I am a darn good network engineer, father, husband, brother, grandson, nephew and son. At least that's what I'm told. MJ Out. PS- I'm not conceded... I just know I'm the best.

I'm back

Well it was a great weekend at home. The family and I stayed in all day Saturday and cleaned house and got caught up on laundry. Alexa stayed the night at a friend's house. The boys and I played a lot to stay out of Wendy's way as she tore through the household duties. Saturday night I went into work at 11:30 p.m. and didn't get home until almost 3 a.m. I was supporting a cutover or our WAN circuits to create faster, more redundant connections between the hospital campuses. This was for both voice and data traffic. I was really just there to make sure everything came up ok after the changes. It did. To take full advantage of the situation, I completed two hardware replacements that had to be done after hours anyway. So it was a very productive night. I recieved praise for my efforts from Mgt. Sunday was pretty much the same as Saturday, except we had a friend over to watch the NFL championship games and I made my Dad's famous breaded pork chops, they were a hit of course! Kenden came up to us this weekend and said "Ducky time!" which I knew right away meant he wanted a bath. He truly loves brushing his teeth and take a bath! I wonder how long that will last, if his brother and sister are any indication, not very much longer. Work is quite busy as always thus far Monday and Today. I better get back to it. MJ.

Dad Finishes 57th

Dad finished his first FLW Bass Fishing tourament of the year in 57th place out of 200. It's good enough for a paycheck as the top 75 get money, $400 for 57th. He was fishing some tough conditions with some inexperienced "Pro's" so he did well. Next month it's back to Florida for a tournament on Lake Toho. Fox Sports Net will carry these tournaments on TV this year, so let's hope he makes the top 10 at least once so we can see him. Last year he made the top 10 at the Wal-mart BFL All-American, the most prestiougous event for "weekend anglers". He was featured on Outdoor Life Network's coverage. It was very cool.

Wendy worked until 10 p.m. again tonight, another 14 hour day. KJ and I shoveled the driveway when we got home. He loves to play in the Snow now. Another 3 inches has fallen now so the driveway's a mess again.

On call was quite busy today. One of our VP's at the hospital is 6 feet 5 inch nun, her PC was "Slow" today and I worked that issue with PC support. I think I narrowed it down to a PC in payroll with a bad NIC that was generating errors on the switch. I had PC support replace the NIC and we'll see if the problem continues Friday. Then my Director hit me with an issue where another IT employee was deploying a wireless bar code scanner system that inventories surgical instrumentation for deployment to operating rooms. She needed help with the network connectivity, no problem. But then she called me back down to look at the serial cables the scanners wireless base stations use to connect. The vendor shipped them to her unassembled, she asked it I would build them for her. I flat out told her "no way". I am not going to assemble a cable that, if done wrong, could cause a surgeon to not have the correct implements he needs to peform a surgery. It is unacceptable for the vendor not to ship assmebled cables. I told her to have him ship some out assembled or have him come on site to do it. She went against my judgement and had the vendor walk her through building the cables. That's scary if you ask me. MJ.

FLW tour

I was thinking about my Dad on and off most of the day today, he started his 2005 FLW Bass Fishing tournament this morning in Florida. The great part about FLW is that they live broadcast the weigh-in's on the Net for all to see. So that was pretty much my No. 1 priority today - don't let anything keep me from watching the weigh-in. I came up with a unique way to accomplish that.

I started off the day waking up grumpy and not helping Wendy with Kenden as I should have, but I did get Alexa and Billy to the bus stop by 8:10 a.m. That's our standard morning around here, work is OK with me getting them on the bus and starting my workday at 9 a.m., as long as I stay until 5:30 p.m. Once at MVH I drank my coffee and chatted about the reorg with James and Rik, guys on my team. James is doing the opposite of me with the forms and applications, he's printing transcripts, certificates, work records etc. etc. I pretty much just filled out the form by cut and pasting my resume into it and sent it in. Rik feels more or less like me about the whole thing, he's only been with us 4 months. James has been here 5 years and has Mgt. Aspirations, but is concerned because EVERY job description they wrote requires a 2-yr or 4-yr degree. He has neither and is worried he'll get overlooked for any future opportunities. Rik was browsing the web looking for an online degree program as well. Best choice I ever made thus far regarding my career.... Go off to college, get in right after HS and get out in 4 years, even if it means not partying every night. I did that at Ohio University and it's led me to where I am today.

The Department of Surgical Services at MVH has been complaining of slowness to their applications, I got assigned a task by Steve to look into this week. I found an issue with a fiber connection between the distribution switch in the ground of of Southwest Tower and the Core switch in the computer room. It's a 2 Gigabit Etherchannel and only 1 Gigabit was functioning. It's been that way a while and some of my teammates efforts to fix it never got completed. I set off right away to repair that issue before I would even think about looking into an issue that is dependent on that link. After James and I tried everything to bring the link up and verified the cabling was good and the link still would , I determined it had to be a hardware problem on the distribution switch. I resolved that issue and the users are watching their systems in surgery for any more problems. I'm betting it's fixed.

Next I took Rik down to 40 West Fourth to bring up a new network switch to support the new Kobrick's Coffee House going into the ground floor. They needed connectivity to our network so our employee's can swipe their badges for coffee. I'm sure we'll make it a wireless hot spot too when we roll out wireless this year. All that accomplished and it was only 2 p.m. I left and picked up Kenden at daycare and he watched Monster's Inc. while I did some work from home, then at 3 p.m. we started watching Dad's weigh-in together. It was great, he actually recognized his papa's voice on the Internet stream before his picture popped up. It was cool. Dad caught 4 fish, for 4lbs 4ozs and finished int 54th place out of 200. He's back at it tomorrow to try and crack the top 10 to fish for $20,000 on Friday. Go Dad!

Alexa got sick at school today and her Dad picked her up, I went and got Billy. All three of us boys played Tiger Woods PGA tour 2005 golf for a while and had fun, Kenden was actually winning. KJ is 20 months old today. He's such a big boy now, he can say just about any word you ask him to say. BTW, Tiger Woods 2005 is an EA sports game. It's flawed too.

Wendy arrived home around 8:30 p.m. to tuck the boys in after their baths. They were tired! I'm going to stop doing the MJ out thing, it bothers me when Ryan Seacreast does it on American Idol, so why am I doing it here. Good night. MJ.

So much to write, so little time

It's hard to decide what to write about today, I just covered a pet peeve topic in my last post, but I'd like this blog to be about my work, my family and a basic diary of events. So I'll try and cover some of what happened today. The vendor that flew in to install the lab devices left satisfied today, he and the lab manager commented to me and my manager that my service was "Fast and Good". Hey that works for me, I try and do what I can to make these requests go smooth. I especially work hard for my end-users who give me a decent lead time on their requests, the lab manager gave me a good 2 weeks advanced notice on this one, more often than not I'm left with trying to manage new installs with little or no notice. Oncall was a little busier today. One issue of note was with a remote mental health facility who reported network slowdown. When I checked it out the response times were 400 times slower than a comparable VPN location. I'm talking 800 ms response versus normal parameters of 20 ms. The site contact had already engaged Road Runner to look into the issue, since I didn't call him back "in time". I had him reboot our VPN hardware client and the problem came right back after the reboot. Road Runner noticed that when the HW client was down, the response time to their equipment was optimal, but quickly degraded as the HW client came back online. This lead me to ask the site contact to take his PCs and servers down one at a time while I monitor the response time - I was fearing a virus. Wouldn't you know it... my theory was correct, his new Windows XP server was shut down and the slowness quickly subsided. I had him leave the server offline and transferred the issue to our server support oncall for virus scanning and removal. Why the site would bring a server online w/o virus protection is beyond me, but as least I diagnosed it for him early in the problem.

I had to re-submit my reorganization preference form today. We're in the middle of a Role Redesign within our IT Division and we all have to choose 2 preferences as to what position we'd would like in the new Org. Chart. Usually CIO's would just place your name in a box on the chart and that would be that, but our CIO and directors have left names out of all the boxes and posted job descriptions and requirements for each box and asked us to fill out a form stating which box we want and provide data showing how we meet the requirements for that box. It's certainly a different approach, some of us are indifferent about it, some are freaking out. I'm pretty much a go with the flow type of guy, and believe they have already placed our names in the boxes, but just haven't told us. It's very hard to read a job description and not say to yourself "that was written for so-and-so...". So it's just an exercise in my opinion, but it does give us all a better idea of what career paths are available to us and what pay scale is assigned to the different job titles.

I turned my form in Monday with Sr. Network Engineer as the first choice, Network Engineer (my current title) as my second choice. Turns out that isn't "allowed". I can only submit Network Engineer as a choice, then the CIO/HR/Mgt. will decide which level of Network Engineer I qualify for, Associate Engineer, Engineer, or Sr. Engineer. They pay class for these positions are 80, 81, and 82. That doesn't mean much to any of us, except we know each class has a salary range, and the ranges overlap. But basically, you want the higher number. For example the CIO and directors are 99. A helpdesk analyst is a 12 and a PC support tech is a 76. It's pretty confusing, but there are no classes between 12 and 56, nor 57-75.

Since my form was incorrect, I had to pick another position as my second preference and re-submit the form. I consider a couple options, but one position in particular really hits on what I want to do moving forward. I don't want to be a network engineer forever, we are too easily replaced - I don't really want to manage a group of engineer's either. So I choose IT Facilities Team Leader. It's an entry level management position that doesn't necessarily have direct reports, but manages all aspects of the data centers and thus coordinates the efforts of many teams and projects that deal with data center infrastructure. This title is also in charge of all disaster recovery planning and efforts. With two data centers online today, and 1 to 3 more on the way, this position will surely keep one busy. But it is a dedicated position, whereas before these tasks were "in your free time" tasks for many people. The pay class for this job is 83 - which is equivalent to my Manager's class. Unfortunately, I know this job is one of those written for an existing person, and she is really good from what I've seen, so like I said before, this is merely an exercise. But the more I think about it, the more the job sounds challenging, exciting and rewarding.

Nothing dramatic or exciting on the homefront today, wife and kids are doing well. American Idol was fun to watch with everyone tonight. I'm sure I'll cover that with you all my readers in the future. MJ out.

Corporate dealings

Electronic Arts, the makers of Madden Football, The Sims and many other software games on all platforms announced deals recently that will hurt gamers and consumers. EA signed exclusing licensing agreements with the National Football League and ESPN that will make EA the only NFL game on the market. The Sega ESPN games that were so popular this year at $19.95 a pop are now a thing of the past. If you want to play an NFL game for the next 15 years or so it will be EA's Madden franchise, and you'll pay $49.95. I guess the only way to "buck" the system will be to wait a year and pick up a pre-owned copy for $9.95. Exlusive agreements lead to an anti-competitive market and thus leave consumers with games that get shipped with Maddening flaws; pun intended.

Today's corporate cutthroat tactics are disgusting. I'm glad I work in a service industry for a "non-profit" entity. Every organization answers to someone, EA is trying to satisfy their shareholders who weren't too happy with the lost market share to Sega. My IT division answers to a board of directors who see us as a cost center - not directly contributing to revenue, but always adding to expenses. We all operate under specific budgets with specific goals to achieve. I just hope our IT practices will never undermine patient care or community service to satisfy the board of directors bottom line. EA certainly underminded their customers, and will affect their wallets if they choose to purchase EA products. MJ out.

TV vs. Library

It was a slow oncall day at work today, I actually made it out early to go pick up the kids. We ate leftover pork chops my Dad made last night and then the kids all sat down to watch "Meet the Parents". I can't stand that movie, it pains me to watch it. It has something to do with how everything goes wrong for poor Gaylord Focker. There are other movies like that I just can't remember them now. Comedic disaster flicks just aren't my cup of tea I guess. So instead I sent them upstairs to clean their rooms while I did dishes, then we all piled into my Honda Passport and drove to the library. I didn't tell them where we were going, I wanted to hear the excitement when we pulled into the parking lot. It was "YEAH, the library, WOOHOO!" or something like that!

The first stop was the kids section. Kenden was a little anxious about the library, so I held him and walked through the aisles. Alexa found a Grover (sesame Street) book and handed it to her little brother, he started shouting GROVER, GROVER, GROVER! I think he's hooked on the library now. Sure, he'll still want to watch Elmo DVD's 100 times a day and sit there like a zombie (he takes after his siblings), but at least now he knows there are these things called books too.

I left Alexa and Billy to find some books and KJ and I went to the baseball section, I found a 2000 book about the Detroit Tigers last season at Tiger Stadium, a book on home poker mastery and a huge 2004 Writer's Handbook. Maybe this blog thing has me going, but I have always been and always liked being a writer. Maybe a little direction could lead to some payoff in the future. A little side gig to my daily network engineer grind.

Back in the kids section, A&B were at the PCs looking up books. Billy - Pokemon, Alexa - award winning juvenile fiction. She always knows the "hot" books for her age group. They each selected 4 books, I picked up a couple more for KJ and we were off to checkout. KJ would not give up that Grover book. I couldn't get him to hand it to the clerk, so I did a quick "grab and go" job and then placed it back in his fingers before he could alert the entire library of my thievery with his cries.

Back at home we all read our new books with no TV on. It was quite a treat, I made cinnamon toast and all 4 of us enjoyed it. We went up and brushed out teeth and read some more in our beds. KJ crashed out around 10 p.m., as did all of us. Wendy walked in around 10:30 after a 14 hour day at work and lifted the Tiger Stadium book from my hand. We chatted for a few minutes and she went to bed. I, well, made a pot of coffee and watched the rest of a movie from the other day. At least the TV wasn't completely lonely tonight. MJ out.

Nothing much...

Wendy went to a wedding shower while Kenden and I watched the Vikings lose to the Eagles. He napped and so did I for a bit. We then went to my niece's fist birthday party. I think they were over the maximum capacity for the house, but it was good to see my in-laws. I left early to take Kenden over to my parents for dinner. With Dad leaving for Okeechobee tomorrow, he likes to have a dinner with his grandkids before leaving.

Okeechobee will be the first stop on the FLW tour, and with 2004's hurricane's the lake could be a lot tougher fishing. The 100 MPH winds associated with the storms ripped up the grass that usually keep the water clear. Dad will be fishing all 5 FLW events through June, then he moves on to the Everstart northern circuit from July through Sept. It's a lot of travel and fishing, we'll try and keep his kitchen remodeling business running while he's gone all that time. I don't do much for "Kitchen's By Design" in Kettering, OH but I'll be there if they need me.

Now on to my work, tomorrow a vendor is flying in to install 12 new Lab devices for the hospital. These devices connect to my network and transfer patient blood gas levels and other stats back to the lab for analysis. I had to build out the 4th floor Seton Tower network to handle the new ports. I'm building out the network for the entire building for another project anyway, but I wasn't expecting to need the new switches this soon, I stayed late Friday night to make sure they were ready to go for Monday morning. I also start my on call week this week, it's been pretty hard on my teammates the last two weeks, so I'm not looking forward to all the support calls and outages that are probably in store for me.

Just so you know, my team of 8 is: (1 cable tech., 2 Engineers, 1 Sr. Engineer, 1 Net. Administrator, 1 Architect, a Manager and a Director). So really only 4 of us do the day-to-day network support and installs. The Network administrator is still on call with us engineer's but not for long. We support over 500 Cisco switches and routers in out network, which serve over 10,000 hosts (PCs, Printers, Servers, medical devices etc.).

MJ out

Date Night

Network Geek Blog
Wendy and I had a nice "date night", although her mother offered to watch Kenden, we kept him and ordered in some Olive Garden and watch the Steelers win a great playoff game. I don't know if they can hang with the Colts or Patriots, but it'll be fun to watch. Tomorrow's a busy day with family and friends. MJ out.

Blog Feature test

I'm testing the ability to create a post from an email account.

MJ

Normally this is what Wellman Meadows looks like. Today the water level only allowed us to see the very top 5 feet of the light post you see on the left. Wow! 

Flooding

I just got back in from a trip to Caeser's Creek lake where my father took my son Kenden, my niece Alyssa and I out to view the tremendous affect all the recent rain has had on the lake's water level. The boat ramp where we usually put in my dad's bass boat was not visible. It was underwater, as well as the entire parking lot. The road leading to it was closed, so we walked as far down the road as we could. We enjoyed picking up the thin layer of ice that covered the water and smashing it on the road. Kenden, 19 months old and Ally, 5 yrs old were having a good time - they'll probably go home and start smashing dishes on the floor! It was nice to be out with my Dad, Miles, before he leaves for a big FLW Bass fishing tournament in Florida on Sunday. My wife, Wendy, stayed home to catch up on some accounting work - like working 70 hours last week wasn't enough! My great step kids, Alexa 10 and Billy 8 are with their dad this weekend. More later. MJ out.

MJ 

Welcome Message

Saturday morning, 3:25 a.m. Of course I'm not asleep, once you get to know me you'll realize this is the rule, rather than the exception. At least I don't work tomorrow. Work - there will be a lot regarding that covered in this blog. As a Network Engineer at a major hospital system in Dayton, OH I will have much fodder to post, document and well... rant about. Glad to be here, I wonder if anyone will ever read this. MJ out.