November 13, 2009, was my last day of gainful employment. I started to say last day of work then remembered that the day was not exactly filled with hard labor. It was, not surprisingly, a short day which I spent, as I assume most people leaving office jobs do, saying goodbye, being debriefed one last time, turning over keys and passwords, and twiddling my thumbs until time to head to the party.
Technically I retired from Solarsoft who had purchased Mattec, the company I helped start in 1983, a few years earlier. I worked there more than twenty-six years. I got the ring in the picture, one of the first pair made, after ten years. The pin next to it came after five years at Cincinnati Milacron. I was there nearly fourteen years and must have received a ten year pin but the five year version is all I could find. My only other full-time job was at R. L. Polk where I spent a bit more than two years before moving to Milacron. Over forty years, those three jobs, all involving some sort of software development, brought tons of satisfaction, pounds of irritation, and immeasurable amounts of fun. Now what? Five years ago I was as uneasy as I’d ever been starting a new job but, as I was soon telling anyone who asked, I think this retirement thing is the best idea I ever had.
The last five years have gone by as quickly as any in my life. Age, of course, has something to do with that. I’m convinced that some part of our brain measures things in relative rather than absolute terms and, as each year makes up a smaller percentage of the whole, it seems shorter. Another reason is the old observation that “time flies when you’re having fun”. Ain’t it the truth?
UPDATE 8-Dec-14: While looking for something totally unrelated, naturally, I found that Cincinnati Milacron 10 year pin. The figure on the pin is a burly metal foundry worker but he had been nicknamed long before I joined the company. At five years, employees received a “bronze fairy”. The ten year award was a “silver fairy” with a “golden fairy” coming at (I believe) fifteen years. Beyond that, diamonds were added at five year intervals.
I have now participated in every one of the Cincinnati 
We fought a war to get this country going then gave every land owning white male above the age of twenty-one the right to vote. A little more than four score years later, we fought a war with ourselves that cleared the way for non-whites to vote. Several decades of loud, disruptive, and sometimes dangerous behavior brought the granting of that same right to non-males a half-century later and another half century saw the voting age lowered to eighteen after a decade or so of protests and demonstrations.
Of course, putting something in a constitution does not automatically make it a practice throughout the land and I am painfully aware that resistance followed each of those changes and that efforts to make voting extremely difficult for “the other side” are ongoing today. I don’t want to ignore partisan obstructions and system flaws but neither do I want to get hung up on them. I meant my first paragraph to be a reminder that a hell of a lot of effort, property, and lives have gone into providing an opportunity to vote to a hell of a lot of people. Far too many of those opportunities go unused.
In the title I claim to not care how anyone votes. That’s not entirely true, of course. I have my favorite candidates and issues. I’ll be disappointed in anyone who votes differently than I do but not nearly as disappointed as I’ll be in anyone who doesn’t vote at all. I’m reminded of parents working on getting their kids to clean their plates with lines like, “There are hungry children in China who would love to have your green beans.” I’m not sure what the demand for leftover beans is in Beijing these days but I’m pretty sure some folks there would like to have our access to ballots and voting booths.
I really looked forward to the publication of this book. I certainly enjoyed reading it and expect to enjoy reviewing it once I get started but reviewing a book that is near impossible to describe isn’t all that easy. Saying it is the story of a man and dog traveling around the US on a motorcycle isn’t wrong but it sure is incomplete. The man, Ara Gureghian, and the dog, Spirit, have been traveling around the US on a motorcycle since November of 2006 with no plans to stop. I’ve followed their blog since April, 2007, and I have no plans to stop, either. When they started their journey, they were not leaving a home where they planned to someday return. They did acquire some land fairly early on and they do spend winters there but even it is more of a base camp than what most would call a home. From the beginning, Ara had called his online journal The Oasis of My Soul and the ten acres of Texas that his mother bought for him instantly became known as The Oasis. One definition of oasis is “something that provides refuge, relief, or pleasant contrast” and that is something both man and dog needed. Ara had suffered the painful loss of his son and Spirit has suffered abuse from a previous owner. Almost everything — the riding, the writing, the sunrises, the stars, the sunsets — is therapy to some degree but the writing is particularly therapeutic. Ara wrote, and continues to write, his journal for himself. He writes about his travels, his surroundings, and his thoughts. This book is something of a “Reader’s Digest” version of the journal. Neither book nor journal actually tries to be a travel guide or provide insights into living. Nonetheless, they do both.
This week I lost something I’d had for forty years. In 1974 I contacted United Telephone of Ohio to arrange for a phone in my first post-divorce home. It was a rental unit in a trailer park near Morrow, Ohio. Few things say noncommittal like renting a mobile home. Unlike the big outfits such as Cincinnati Bell, United couldn’t assign me a number when I placed the order. “We’ll have to see what works,” I was told. What worked was (513) 683-4125. I carried the number through another United Telephone served address plus three different addresses in Cincinnati Bell territory. On Thursday, the land line associated with it was switched off and, for the first time in four decades, (513) 683-4152 became available for reassignment. Here’s how it happened.
Amtrak has a simple but incredibly effective way of avoiding scenes like this at its station in Cincinnati. Eastbound trains are scheduled to depart at 3:27 AM; Westbound at 1:23 AM. That’s AM as in “ante meridian”, as in “before midday”, as in “middle of the night”, as in “dark as a black cat in a coal mine”. That would seem to be sufficient discouragement, but just to be on the safe side, Amtrak frequently misses those times by sizable amounts. On rare occasions, they might even cancel a train a day or two before departure, as they did for me in 
According to this blog’s “About” page, it may contain “just about anything other than politics or religion”. This post is a clear violation of that description but I feel it’s a fairly minor one and I’m hoping that it is one that can be forgiven. There is no question that Jim Tarbell is a politician but he is a lot more than that and Tuesday’s “Taste of Tarbell”, the event that marked the start of his campaign for Hamilton County Commissioner, seemed to be more than a political fundraiser.
