MikesThoughts

Its the weekend. weeeee! Well its time for another weekend of projects. But the up side is one day of sleeping in. Lots on the table for this weekend. Hardwood floors to complete in the dining room, windows to install, and finish the walls in the bed room. Also, start work on building the new bed room furniture. No way that it will all be done but here is for trying. But Church on Sunday and maybe I will try to take in a movie. The Matrix #3 starts on Sunday. Wish I had someone to go with me but who knows. The first week of the 2000 roll out went better than expected. No real big problems so we hope that next week will go as well. I have to start brushing up on my Visual Basic because projects are starting to appear on the horizon. Well, off I go out into the sun and un-filtered air.

The countdown begins. A visit to my attorney to find out that the deposition of my wife is on November 10th and the divorce trial is November 14th. It now appears that I only have 15 days of marriage left. The end of 32 years of trying to hold it together and placing her on a pedestal. 32 years of trust that was shattered with my discovery of the emails and affairs. 32 years of us and we, now soon to be me. I am mortified of being left single the rest of my life. Everyone keeps telling me that I will get over it and things will be better. What they do not realize is that this was my life and I am not ready to change. But they say there is a fine line between love an hate. Jules Verne best stated it in his novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" that the heart can be filled with hatred just as easily as love. So why do I not hate my wife for all that she has done to me? Why do I not hate her for the affairs and the lonely nights setting at home worrying a

End of another week. Yes, it is finally Friday and the work week just about to end. I am going to treat myself to a quite dinner and then come back to work three hours of overtime on my servers. Updates and Security Patches seems to be my life lately. A big weekend planned. Saturday I plan to put in a full day working on the Money Pit of a house. On Sunday, the family is planning to come to dinner. Right now it is my Brother, his wife, my Mom and Sister, and my Daughter and Grand Daughter. So that makes a total of 7 people. Wow, what a day. But most of the tasks for Saturday are small and I should be ok.

The Great Migration begins Well I have been busy getting all my users ready for the Windows 2000 upgrade. My organization is very behind the times with Office XP out for over two years and we are just climbing out of the dark ages of Windows 95. However, I do understand that trying to create a stable environment for 284 thousand workstations is a daunting task. I do not believe that we would have made the jump to 2000 if it was not for Microsoft stopping the support on Windows 95. But I also understand that Microsoft can not continue to support a product for ever. They also have to move on. So technology continues to push, claw, and sometimes trip forward. My grand-daughter has oral surgery today and all I can think of is her laying there while the yank her teeth out. But I know it is for the best. I will be spending this evening trying to neuter her back to the happy kid I left last night. Planning another big weekend on the Money Pit. My goal is to finish the remod

Saying goodbye to much lately. I am starting to feel the impact of saying goodbye to those who I care so much about. With my father passing away in February and finding out that my wife and sole mate for 32 years has found someone else that she wants more than me and now Plain Lane, the blogg that I read every day closing out. Life is getting hard to handle. I know that putting a blogg up against the other traumatic events of my life pales in comparison. But it is just another small event that brings the other events back to the top of my mental activities. I try to stay focused but when the day is done and you set alone watching TV, the loneliness sinks in. This is not the way I want to spend my life. I had always thought of growing old with someone I care for. That was shattered in May. Now as I set in church on Sunday and look around, all I seem to see is couples, not singles. I am embarrassed and in many ways ashamed that I am single at 50. Some can handle this w

Training feeds the mind. Well I am on my way home from Port Washington NY. Actually, Roselyn NY, home of Bill and Hillary Clinton. The trip so far was quite uneventful. Last night I mustered all my courage and took an adventure into the city. Went to the top of the Empire State Building, had dinner at Time Square and generally walked my legs off. But one general observation was that everyone that I meet was friendly and considerate. Not at all what I expected. It is my observation that people are people. Good and bad no matter were you go. I expected to see a lot of homeless or pan handlers hitting up on me for money or setting around on the sidewalk. But I never seen one and I was looking. The other observation was that the people in the stores were very nice and treated me with kindness. I expect that from the people at home but I had pre-judged the New York people to be very rude. This my exist but it did not in my experience on this trip. The technical training

One the road again. In my sometimes-warped observations of the world around me, I find that good customer service does exist. I realize in today’s corporate environment of quick profits and the bottom line, customer service is considered an expense instead of an investment in the future. Most companies have forgotten that customer service pays off in customer loyalty and long term customer retention. However, today I seen good customer service and just had to mention it in my blog. When starting out today I made a serious error and misread my antennary. For some reason I read the arrival time of my flight as the boarding time. I arrived at the airport an hour before my flight only to find out that my flight had left about 20 minutes before I arrived. To make things worse, this was the last flight that day that could get me to New York. The ticket agent could have just said you’re out of luck, but he didn't. He escorted me to a competitors airline and convinced them to