My wife and I got back from Texas last night. The conference in Dallas went well and I made my official announcement that I was retiring at the end of the year. Most people were shocked since they apparently had no idea how old I was and they thought that I was retiring a bit young (I'll be 68 in August). Anyway, the organizers of the annual conference (the first of which I attended in 1977) was caught a bit flat-footed and wished I had told them sooner as they would have done something special. I explained to them that that was part of the plan, I didn't want anyone to make a big deal out of it. Anyway, they still managed to squeeze in a 10 minute segment before one of the morning keynotes as they felt that they needed to do something. They dug back into their archive of photos from past conferences and found enough shots of me either in casual situations or from when I was making a presentation so that they had a bit of a slideshow for the audience. They also gave me a card signed by all the board members. When they had asked about my immediate plans after retirement, I mentioned that my wife and I were going to Hawaii as we had never been there before. So tucked into that card was also a $2,000 travel voucher good on the airline of our choice. Needless to say, that was quite a surprise.
Also it was interesting that a guy from a very large domestic automaker with whom I've worked closely for about 30 years is also attending a conference that I'm going to be presenting at in July down in Sao Paulo, Brazil and he made it a point to say that we needed to talk while we were there so who knows, maybe I'll get an opportunity to do a bit of 'consulting' while my skills and knowledge are still fresh and salable, not that I was really looking for anything like that, but a few free trips back to Detroit where we've both still got family wouldn't be hard to take.
We also visited our oldest son and his family. The girls are all growing so fast. The youngest just turned 10 a couple of weeks ago and the oldest will be a high school senior next year. As I'm sure you've all heard, the weather around Houston was pretty bad this past week so we didn't get out much so we bought an insanely hard puzzle that me and at least the younger girls worked on for nearly two days and finished just before we had to leave. I also managed to play several games of chess with the 10 year old. Her game skills are coming along nicely and she even managed to beat me once. It was technically a forfeit when she realized that I had, two moves earlier, accidentally put my king into check without either one of us noticing it at the time.
Anyway, the night before we left the thunderstorms lasted for over 5 hours and we got nearly 4 inches of rain in Katy, where they live, 25 miles West of Houston. Houston itself got over 11 inches of rain overnight and all the schools in the area were closed on Tuesday due to street flooding. We were lucky as we were heading West in the morning so while we saw a lot of standing water off on the side roads it didn't effect the freeway, at least not West-bound but the freeways were flooded in Houston itself. We could see as we were driving a lot of the rivers/streams that had overflowed and the flood plains were all covered in several feet of muddy water. They reported that during the Monday night storm, at one point, the rate of lighting strikes was over 11,000/hour.
And while we had lots of rain while we were in both Dallas and Houston, we never actually had to use our wipers except during the drive from Dallas to Houston (Katy) on Friday. On the trip out and back, it never rained a drop the entire way. In total, we drove 3,370 miles and averaged just a bit under 26 MPG's. Those 80 MPH speed limits across most of Texas are not conducive to saving gas, but then that's where oil is still KING, as we saw on our drive out as we passed through the Midland/Odessa area.
Anyway, it's good to be back.
OCU
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