Retired!

I'm rushing out the door here, so this is not well thought out, but the short story is that it was becoming too frustrating. I have an editorial vision and the world was going somewhere else.

Or my publisher was. Or publishing is. It will take some time and distance for me to have an accurate view of it.

Reply to
Ed Huntress
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Well, a Carmichael bamboo rod brings something like $3,000 or more, so there is some money in it. But building rods in bamboo is like making guitars, if not violins. The level of craft is on a similar order.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

It will be heavier than I would like. But the price was right and should be fine after it is in the water. If the weight is a big problem , can always build another lighter one.

I have a 10 foot john boat that I can haul around in my pickup. So no problem here, but my grandson in in upstate New York and does not have access to a pickup.

Dan

Reply to
dcaster

Congratulations, Ed!

Reply to
Don Foreman

A bad day of fishin' is better than a good day at the office. We had fresh-caught fish for supper last night, as we often do. We spend most of the summer going fishin' at least once each day.

I find 'em, we catch 'em, I clean 'em, she cooks 'em, we eat 'em. Yum!

Happy retirement!

Reply to
Don Foreman

Oh, I completely get the type of frustration you're talking about. I've gone through something similar over the last 15 or so years. I've worked all my life in IT, and from 1983 until 2005 it was all as an independent consultant/contractor. Most of the early days of that was spent on installing and customizing commercial vendor-supplied ERP packages, mainly in distributing and manufacturing, with some forays off into insurance and health care. This was entirely on medium to large IBM platforms. I probably caught most of the second half of the big computerization wave in the U.S., when computers went from doing some accounting and tabulating to becoming central to firms' core business functions. The shift meant that what came to be known as IT (after earlier being "the computer room" and then "data processing") stopped being managed by the CFO and came to have its own senior executive. Except for a short spell in the very early 1990s, I never lacked work. As an independent contractor, I had a lot of control over my time, and I got a lot of the hardest assignments, which I liked. There was one firm where I spent most of a five year interval in the late 1990s, and near the end of it, the CIO got dinged in an audit because she gave me too much of the important stuff, and there was no "succession plan" if I got run over by a truck or inherited a few million and stopped working.

It all changed quickly in the early 2000s. First, nearly every medium to large firm that was going to acquire and customize an enterprise package had already done so, and focus shifted to customer interfaces rather than core enterprise functions. Second, Sarbanes-Oxley and other onerous regulations came into place that mandated segregation-of-duties and extremely cumbersome change management procedures; the change management bullshit made it harder and harder to get things done. Third, there was a huge wave of mergers and acquisitions, and a lot of big companies that had needed a lot of IT work simply disappeared. Finally, there was the surge of "off-shoring" that moved quite a lot of IT work to India and elsewhere, and also the notoriously corrupt H-1B visa debacle that put intense downward pressure on contract rates and salaries. In the heyday, I could bill $75 and occasionally $85 an hour for truly independent work, and I would get offers from contract brokers for $65 an hour; by 2006, the brokers were offering in the $35-$40 range, sometimes less. I had to give up contracting in 2005 and take a so-called "permanent" position, of which I have now had three.

Today, I work for a huge financial services company, heavily regulated, and the work is tedious and hard to get done because of all the change management and regulatory compliance hoops. They motivate the proles with near-constant reminders that failure to comply with all the regs can result in consequences "up to and including termination" - very cheerful. I have to take numerous internal training sessions annually in change management, incident management, anti-money laundering, risk management, time tracking, "diversity and inclusion" (what bullshit), and more. The work is pure systems management - no more development. There's really no challenge to it, or very little. It has become just a paycheck.

I envy your situation where you feel you can retire. I can't - married late, have a 15 year old son in private school, major expenses far out onto the horizon (unless he can get a full-ride scholarship to a good school.) If he can get his university education all or mostly paid by someone else, I'll sell everything and get the hell out of the People's Republic of California and go someplace where it's cheaper to live, and maybe then I can cut back on work or at least not have to worry as much about chasing the highest salary.

Reply to
Rudy Canoza

Maybe I'll aim a little lower to start ;-)

Reply to
Rudy Canoza

Right, more than a few people I knew retired, and were dead within months! Now, maybe they retired BECAUSE their health was going down the tubes, but it was a bit of a shock. I know I'd stay active with a million projects if I retired.

Sounds wonderful!

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

Wow, you aren't kidding! That's 10 cents on the dollar!

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

Yes, congratulations. You've earned it and it's the greatest thing since bottled beer.

Reply to
Garrett Fulton

There ya go!

When I retired back in 1999, I thought that I'd like to continue doing pretty much what I had been doing but:

*I'd play at least half of the time -- go fishing, etc *I wanted to do only what I wanted to do *I did not want to have to do anything I did not want to do *Projects would have no budget, no schedule. I didn't even have to finish them if I found something more interesting to do. NIU: Nothing Is Urgent HFIJ1: Having Fun Is Job 1

It's worked fer me for 17 years, and I'm still go>

Reply to
Don Foreman

Glad to see you again Don!

I try to practice what you preach even without being retired.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus16559

I was going to say the same thing!

Reply to
doggerel

Right - might be thin sheets floating in the water. What kind of glue is used ? Is it marine or just interior glue.

I have a pole barn shed shed with poles in the back. The former owner passed away in a fire within. Before I bought it, they put on a facade of ply to make it a building, not a burnt out front.

The end was in interior ply and sheets are pealing off - full sheets. They stick only due to hardware attached. Something I'll have to work on someday.

Mart> On Monday, September 12, 2016 at 9:14:10 PM UTC-4, Bob La Londe wrote: >

Reply to
Martin Eastburn

The sheet have no markings , but are many plys. Maybe 7 or 9 plys for the 1 cm thick plywood. So before doing a lot of work, I soaked some pieces in a bucket of water.

Dan

Reply to
dcaster

Atta Boy, Don! My goals are the same as yours, 'cept for the "no budget" thing. Funds are far too finite.

I just finished building an 8 battery box for the solar system. I figured that, at some point, I'd want more than the 2 I already bought. The 1kW of solar I have now will be installed just before the rainy season, later this month.

Also slotted are repairing all the equipment from my Gunner Runs. The drill press idler is awaiting assembly, tubes are here for the MIG tires, and I'm drafting up a table for the table saw. I just have to get the 4 tons of crap off my shop floor first, which means more shelving and putting order to that which I already have up.

I have a lot of interests, so staying busy during retirement is never, ever going to be a problem for me. Imagination breeds life extension!

Reply to
Larry Jaques

When I retired I became a bit more liberal. Will you become a bit more conservative?

Reply to
Tom Gardner

23 years now and I still haven't figured out how I ever found time to go to work. NO regrets!
Reply to
geraldrmiller

Reply to
Don Foreman

Gorgeous day on the lake today. Post-coldfront high blue sky, fish shouldn't have been biting, but I can usually find a few fish.

We caught our supper again this afternoon, fish went direct from cleaning table to pan. 6 nice sunnies, 1 little largemouth bass, one northern pike. We were out for about 2 hours. Spent another pleasant hour on a boat ride and recon looking for some new spots to try next time.

Small pike (under 5 lb) actually taste better than walleye, and bass and sunnies from this gin-clear Minnesota lake are very close behind. Egg wash, panko breading, sautee in butter. YUM! Sides were sweet corn, onion bread and cole slaw, accompanied by a very pleasant Riesling.

One northern hit my lure like a runaway truck, broke my 20 lb test line and cost me the RedEye Wiggler lure I bought just yesterday. He got away ... this time ... we'll be back! I marked an X on the side of the boat so I'll know exactly where to cast when we return.

Shop project: repaired a rod. An eyelet broke off when that northern hit. My workbench was the fish cleaning table out on the deck by the lake in the sunshine. Tools were some dacron fishing line, some super glue and a sharp knife.

Finished reading a very good novel: "Cold Vengeance", Preston & Child. I'll start another tomorrow.

Being retired's a bitch, but we soldier on bravely.

Reply to
Don Foreman

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