Dreamwidth cross-posting appears to have failed. My apologies if this shows up twice ( Read more... )

There are several things I should have mentioned in yesterday’s entry about my education and career.

1. My father was a civil engineer. When I started college, he advised me to study anything except engineering. His reasoning was that if you’re any good at engineering, you don’t get to do it after a while. He had become, essentially, an urban ( Read more... )

Back in October, fansee asked me (in response to my retirement) how I came to be a satellite systems engineer and, more specifically, about my experiences as a woman in that field. I have plenty of other catching up to do, but I’m in the mood to write about this.

As far back as I can remember, I was interested in science. As a child in the 1960’s ( Read more... )

I had not intended such a long time since my last entry here and, frankly, I have no good excuse. I’ve just been suffering from a case of the IDon’tWannas. Which has me behind on everything that doesn’t have an actual schedule. For example, my to-do list is roughly the length of a CVS receipt.

Anyway, catching up here will cross off at least two ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I submitted my Intent to Retire form to HR (officially called People Ops or some similar abomination I refuse to use). This should not be a surprise to anybody. My retirement day is October 1st, because for some mysterious reason they make it be the first of a month. I am sure there is a whole bunch of other annoying paperwork to do, ( Read more... )

Work: I am frustrated with the slow pace of decision making, which is keeping me from getting work done on updating a plan that depends on a senior level decision. There’s not much I can do about it, but that doesn’t make it less annoying.

I have plenty of other things to get done, but I really want to check this off.

Non-work: I have continued to ( Read more... )

Celebrity Death Watch: William Bartholomay owned the Milwaukee Braves and was responsible for moving them to Atlanta, which led to baseball guidelines on local ownership. Richard Reeves was a political reporter and columnist. Princess Maria-Teresa of Bourbon-Parma, who was both a socialist and a (Spanish) monarchist, was the first royal to die ( Read more... )

Celebrity Death Watch: First, here’s a minor addition to the last edition of Celebrity Death Watch. I had completely forgotten that James Lipton also wrote the book An Exaltation of Larks. That’s a collection of terms for groups of things, primarily animals. My personal favorite is “a murder of crows ( Read more... )

Just a quick entry because I really should manage to write more than once a week ( Read more... )

American Community Survey: This is a long form that the U.S. Census Bureau does every year and my address got randomly selected for this year. You answer a lot of nosy questions on-line. They claim it should take 40 minutes to do. Ha! It takes me more than 40 minutes to find my last gas bill and electric bill (the amounts of which they want to ( Read more... )