I Never Had An Answer

That overused analogy thing has been narrowly avoided. It got bad there for a while, but I'm now back to conversing like an idiot again.

My dad is getting retired this weekend. He's put in a real load of work for the Wildlife Safari and now he's getting the hell outta there. He'll be much happier once he leaves. He's already so excited and I'm really happy for him. It's been a long time coming. Starting there in the early 80's, he's been there for over 20 years. He also recently retired from his teaching job at Douglas High School last year. He was a special education teacher there for over 10 years. The guy has been busy.

So, the family is making the haul down to Roseburg on Saturday to congratulate him on all the great work he's been doing during his lifetime in the work force. There's a dinner planned and hopefully some booze will be served so we can try to get him nice and appropriately tanked.

For his retirement present, my brother and I are pitching in on a plane ticket to Michigan to see his mother (my grandmother - duh), then another plane to New York City to visit the big apple for a week. He's never been there and this guy has been nearly everywhere around the globe. He's talked for years about getting out to "the city so nice they named it twice" so he could tour all of the amazing museums and monuments. Thinking that he would probably need something else to do during his visit, we bought him tickets to the Broadway musical, Fiddler on the Roof.

Just because he's retiring, doesn't mean he's going to quit working. Sure, he won't be an employee at the Safari any more, but he plans to head-up a new company that is committed to providing assistance to many education programs in Oregon. It's what he's passionate about, and it's just one more thing that makes me so proud of him.

With my dad's retirement coming up, it's made me think a little more about my retirement plans. When I started in high-tech geekiness and began making really good money, I put together a plan so that I could comfortably retire by the time I hit 45. Yep, that was before I got married, produced crumb-snatchers, and before the tech market crashed. It's silly to think your plans for the future will change so little and that your life won't suddenly and occasionally go thru a gigantic wheat thresher, causing drastic changes. Your manicured plans get all chopped to bitty-bits and collectively gut-laugh at you.

My new plans are much more organic and involve just spending time enjoying my family and trying not to take all this shit too seriously.

Billy finishes his finals this week and we're planning for the awesome event of cracking open that Dark Steam keg that's been fermenting for all these months. It does seem like it's been much longer since we brewed it; thinking about how far away December 17th was at the time. I just looked at my brewing log and found we brewed that Dark Steam (still unnamed) back on August 12th (4+ months ago). It's been in the keg getting all nice and tasty since September 25th. Back when we kegged it, the small taste we had when kegging provided a glimpse of how good this brew was going to eventually turn out. Tomorrow we'll see just how kind the lasttwo-and-a-half months has been to it.