Exit 78

The hike to the bottom of the Tower Creek canyon and the base of Tower Falls in Yellowstone National Park has always been one of our favorite hikes. It’s been a fascinating place for people to visit for many, many years. It was named by the Washburn Yellowstone Expedition in August 1870 and Nathaniel P. Langford described it in The Wonders of the Yellowstone. (I’ve published part of that description at Haw Creek Out n’ About.)

Unfortunately, this year, we were not able to make it to the base of the falls. We had gone most of the way down when we came to a sign that said that the trail was closed. Apparently there had been a slide in 2006 or before and the trail was blocked. We were a little upset about hiking all of that distance only to find that the trail was closed. There should have been a sign at the top saying that it was closed or the trail should have been closed higher up. There are a lot of people who have used the trail over the years and many probably remember it fondly — though climbing back up can be rough, especially if it’s hot, you didn’t bring water, and you’re wearing the wrong kind of shoes.

I send a complaint to the park service about the lack of posting higher up, but, of course, there’s been no response.

That was just part of a day that didn’t go the way we intended which I posted about in Today sure didn’t go as planned, and I didn’t get some of the photos I thought I had — but that’s okay!

I had always assumed the Old Faithful got it’s name because it was faithful in it’s eruptions over a long period of time. Not so. If you’re interested, I’ve published a small narrative by one of the men involved in naming the geyser. It’s over at my Haw Creek Out ‘n About blog.

Several years ago — OK, it was a long, long time ago — I was attending college as a non-traditional student, finishing up my degree while working full-time. George Herbert Walker Bush was the president of the United States and Al Gore was a United Sates Senator who hadn’t invented the internet yet.

One of the classes I was in was a college algebra class. It was the first college class that I had ever had that required a calculator — the only calculator I had used in high school had been a slide rule.

The airhead I was sitting behind was having difficulty getting the answers and kept asking the professor questions about how to do the calculations for the problems on the black board.

Exasperated, the professor finally asked, “What kind of calculator do you have? It’s supposed to be a scientific calculator.”

The airhead replied, “Well, of course it’s scientific — it’s a solar calculator!”

Funny Monday

This time last year I had pretty much settled with myself when I was going to retire — and I wasn’t keeping it a secret!

There was some question about waiting to see what would happen with the so-called alignment that no one seemed to know much of anything about –other than that those who wanted a job would have a job. There was talk that some people would get some sort of severance package.

“Don’t you want to wait around for the package? ” I was asked more than once.

The answer to that was easy. “No.”

If I had thought that there was a chance I would get one, it might have been different. However, in almost every other situation where packages had been offered in the past — whether it was called it reduction-in-workforce, down-sizing, right-sizing, or some other kind of sizing – the group I was in had only gotten offered packages once or twice. Even then, it had been a very limited offering to only a couple of people out of a hundred or so.

Back then that was great for me, because I wasn’t close enough to retirement that it was feasible for me to take a package. With so few offered, it represented job security for the rest of us.

So was retiring the right choice — rather than waiting to see if there would be a package offered?

Yes!

The alignment process was very secretive and took much, much longer than advertised.

If I had stayed thinking that I would know something in the next month or two, I would have been disappointed. I essentially left work on January 15 when I went on vacation. I wouldn’t have found out about my job until October, nine months later.

And then, it looks like I was right about the severance packages. None were offered to the group I was in.

Perhaps if those of us who retired earlier this year had stayed, then there might have been packages. If there were, chances are that they would have been offered to someone else and I’d still have a job.

I didn’t want a job.

Since the odds weren’t very good in my favor, I retired.

No, this isn’t about the legal implications of blogging — though I’m sure that there probably are some for some people that probably need a common sense how-to-keep-out-of-trouble-101 course .

Susan Cartier Liebel writes in I’m still in law school. Should I be blogging?, “Blogging is the least expensive, most productive and powerful marketing tool available to law students today to market…you guessed it….themselves!”

It seems to me that this is probably true for just about anyone who has a desire to market themselves for anything these days.

A good blog could be especially valuable in some areas for college who are going to be looking for a job sometime in the the next few years. Imagine including the address of your well-written and perceptive blog in the resume that you send in with your job application. You would be providing potential employers the opportunity to look at work that you’ve actually done.

Of course, a blog written as a personal marketing tool would have to be constrained in ways that most blogs don’t have to be — but then, it doesn’t have to be the only blog you write. You could alway have that other secret blog with a pseudonym where you write what you really think about the “capitalist pigs that ruin run today’s world.”

Note: I stumbled on Ms. Liebel’s article via the blog of a law student - Above Supra.