I had my knee surgery this past Tuesday and so far everything is going well with it. The doctor found a torn meniscus rather than a cyst causing the problems. The muscles around the knee are sore but the joint its self already feels better.

My wife left for a week to spend some time with her mother vacationing in Florida. I was suppose to go but….

I start my new job in the morning so I’m off to Albion, NY for a couple of days. With my wife and son gone to Florida that meant boarding the dogs for a few days. I had to drop them off yesterday (Saturday) and I’ll pick them back up Wednesday morning when I get back.

I’ve not known what to do with myself the since I dropped them off. This house seems awfully empty.

In my last post I was sitting in an airport bemoaning my lack of time due to my long commute. I just took a step to correct that. I have accepted a job with Matrix Scientific and will start work with them the first of August. The company is located in Albion, NY and I’ll be working from home. Travel appears to be more frequent than with Factory Automation Systems but the duration of time away from home will be much, much less.

Between now and my start date I’m having a cyst removed from my knee. This has been causing me trouble and giving me a lot of pain for over a year now. I finally went to an orthopedic surgeon over this and as soon as we found out what the problem was I scheduled the surgery.

By fall I should be able to tackle hiking the Georgia portion of the Appalachian trail. This has been something I’ve wanted to do for some time now but first the job and then my knee got in the way of accomplishing the trek. I will be taking on sections of this portion of the trail on weekends.

Okay, y’all know where I am tonight and I have nothing else to do so I’m going to write. It has been a while since I’ve updated this website and I apologize to those of you who are still checking in here from time to time but there are two reasons that I haven’t written anything lately.

1. I don’t have much time anymore.

I’m on the road for two and a half hours each day going to and from work. I work nine to ten hours a day so that just leaves me with four hours or less to take care of eating, household chores and quality time with my wife, son and dog. Add into that that I’m also involved in other things in my community and my time is gone. I want to find more time to write because I really do have a lot of things on my mind that I’d like to get on paper even if no one else cares about these things besides me.

2. Even though I have all these ideas that I want to get on paper I just haven’t felt like writing.

I’ve been tired lately and just haven’t felt creative. That’s probably a function of the above but I still see it as a distinctive reason unto its self for my having not written anything.

I think with all I have put on myself I just need to become more organized with my time. Twelve years ago I began carrying a Daytimer and found it to be extremely valuable in keeping myself organized. After carrying a Daytimer around for five years I bought a Palm Pilot and, after about six months, began carrying it around instead. About three years ago I broke the Palm, actually the second one I had.

This coincided with a sort of minimalist time in my life when I began avoiding carrying anything more than I absolutely needed. I was being encouraged to carry a composition book around with me at work and I found it to be a decent enough replacement for the Palm that I never replaced the Palm.

I picked up a Franklin-Covey organizer the other day and I’m getting myself back into the habit of keeping my time organized. This may take a couple of months to regain what little organizational skills I had with my old Daytimer back but I’m thinking this might give me both the time and inspiration to write more than I have.

I guess we’ll see.

It’s after 10:00PM and I’m sitting in Laguardia waiting for morning. I missed my flight this afternoon by about 10 minutes. Actually, I probably could have made my flight had I not had a bag that needed checking.

Regardless of all that I’m stuck here for the night. My flight out tomorrow is at 6:00AM and I’m not about to go find an affordable hotel for what little sleep I would get.

I really did think I would make it. I left New Haven, Connecticut at 5:15PM and headed down a relatively lightly traveled I-95 for New York. I really did mean to leave at 5:00PM but there was that “just one more thing” that I needed to check and that “just one more thing” that I needed to relay to the electrician that was left there with me.

My flight was at 7:50. The last flight out from LGA to ATL on Airtran. I was assured I would have plenty of time on the start up, that the equipment would be ready to turn over to me at 9:00AM. Of course, this was after two days of the exact same sort of estimation on how long the work would take. I really needed a full four hours to do a complete check out and commissioning of the equipment.

The equipment was turned over to me at 2:45PM. It wasn’t that the electrician and millwrights were dilly dallying, it was just a bad estimate by the customer as to how long his workers would take to perform the tasks at hand. Still I was able to certify the functionality of the equipment with a couple of caveats.

But I didn’t intend to write this about the startup. I want to talk about Laguardia Airport.

This place sucks!

It’s Saturday night and almost everything had shutdown by 8:00PM. Even had things stayed open until 9:00PM or 10:00PM there is practically nothing here. This is my first time in and out of Laguardia and I’m really disappointed in this place. I was up this way a couple of weeks ago but used the airport in Hartford for that trip. I think I would rather be stuck there.

I guess this happens when a city is served by no less than three airports with airline service. I mean, even though this is a city of twelve million people there are just so many people flying at any given time. When you split the load up among Laguardia, Kennedy, and Newark those airports are not going to need to all be large airports.

I guess I need to quite my belly aching. I’m here for the night and there is no changing that now. I just wish they had more comfortable chairs in this tiny lounge area I’m in.

It’s going to be a long night.