Be The Pigeon

I'm going to break my no-work-stuff rule this time for obvious reasons. Yet I'll try to keep things generic enough to be mildly entertaining.   If you actually want details, ping me on the side and I'll fill you in. After a number of years, I chose to leave my current employer this week. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life, and one that never got easier by following traditional weigh-the-facts type discussions. You see, I had a good gig going there. I had friends, respect, a good assignment, and great upward mobility. Some people thought I was crazy to leave.  Maybe I was.  And yet, there was something in me that said I should look beyond my comfort zone, consider a bigger picture, and take a leap of faith. I can say for sure that there were multiple times in the last couple weeks where I wondered if I was leaping right into a brick wall of some sort, though. To boil it down, I guess it all comes down to a simple word: "perspective." I've wan...

Here's a rant for ya.  Today I'm mad at the automated greetings on the voicemail systems of cell phones.  You know, the part that comes on after your  message and says 'press 1 to hear things you don't care about, press 5 to repeat these options, press 7 to order a pizza, press 9 to learn Tongan' and so on.  THEY DRIVE ME CRAZY.  Worse yet, you can "do nothing" and lose 30 seconds of your life that you'll never get back while this prerecorded lady drones on and on about nothing.  The least they could do is give her some super-sexy voice or something. On some systems, they've had the good sense to make #1 skip all the junk and just go to the message-leaving part.  But apparently there's no consistency in the industry on this, and on other systems #1 does nothing but anger the prerecorded lady and make her repeat everything from scratch, all in an effort to simply tick me off further.  It's working. Can we not have some consistency here?! My ...

Saturday I went mountain biking. It was awesome! It was so awesome! It was almost better than sex. Wait a minute, let's not be unreasonable here! But boy was it fun. The weather was absolutely perfect (70 and clear), and there weren't too many people to observe all my bad techniques. I'm ashamed to say it was the first real mountain-bike trip I've done in Colorado. And we started with a biggie. A friend, Ken, and I went to Hall Ranch in Lyons, about 20 minutes from here. It's right at the base of the mountains, and all trails lead only one direction... UP! We bit off more than we bargained for, but it all turned out good. The round trip was almost 10 miles, and I think we did about 1,200 feet vertically (though the site we used said 2300, which sounds nicer to post!) It was the most challenging terrain I'd ever ridden, with a couple miles being extremely rocky (think big, steep boulders and such that are more suited for climbing than riding). Side Story...

I'd like to share a concept a friend at work taught me a while back. It's really stuck with me as one of those "life lessons." He calls it The Posse. You all know what a posse is. Most often we associate it with the Sheriff, or perhaps the Old West. I think of the posse as that group of men in Tombstone days who the sheriff called when someone needed help or a bad guy needed catching. These men came from many different walks of life, but when duty called, THEY RODE. It didn't matter if funding was available, if guyA was friends with guyB, etc. They simply rode when there was a need. Life isn't all that different today. We all have events in our lives and in the lives of those near and dear that require the posse to ride. In a career sense, having a posse is SO important. It's via your network and friends that the real work so often gets done. One thing I've learned in my job is the great value of that posse, and how the good old mantra ...

Last Friday was the annual volunteer day at work for a girl scout camp up in the mountains. It's always one of my favorite things to do at the end of each summer. The camp is about an hour's drive, and it's situated right at the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. I've been 6 or 7 years now, and the weather is usually pretty beautiful. The leaves on the aspens are usually just beginning to turn. This year, however, things were a little different. For starters, it was only about 45 or 50 degrees. Usually it's in the 70's. And of course it was raining. I'm amazed whenever I go into the mountains at how quickly the weather can change. Over the course of the time we were there, the weather literally changed from rain to overcast to sun and back again about 3 times. Funny stuff. One of the things that makes this volunteer day so fun for me is the chance to build things. I always sign up for the construction projects; they're the most fun. When ...