What's next?

I'm jealous of my brother.  Not in the normal sense, though.  The freak has known since he was in high school what he wanted to do with his life (and now does it) while I - like any normal person  - wander around aimlessly.  To this day, more years than are reasonable past high school graduation, I have jumped from one disparate job to another.  How disparate?  Try boat shop to space factory.  Whoa! Did that even make any sense? 

I worked for some years on boats, doing all manner of things - engine repair, hull scrapping, teak cleaning, resoration, etc.  Then one day I get a call from a friend who says  "we're doing an experiment,  do you want to participate?  We need to see if we can train some monkeys to do what our engineers are doing."  I grabbed a banana and was off to work for a space shuttle contractor.  Turns out, they can train monkeys to replace engineers.  I'm living proof - and I'll show you as soon as I'm done swinging in this tree.

During most of that tenure, I moonlighted (moonlit?) at a beer joint down on one of the bayous.  What a transition - by day a white collar semi-engineering job to a no-collar (that would be well below the socio-economic level of the blue collar worker) beer thrower/bouncer by night.  But hey, it paid the bills and kept food on the table, at least semi-regularly.

Several years, a college degree, and another contractor later, I left the space factory (and the beer joint) for good.  Which, as it turns out was not a particularly bad move considering the recent retirement of the shuttle fleet.  As I was out and about one day, I chanced upon a man who needed a manager for his newly acquired airport.  Despite not having any experience whatsoever in that field, he went ahead and hired me.  Okay, I am a pilot, and I do admit to hanging out at airports, but I think that might not qualify as actual airport management experience.

Now I'm looking down the road a couple of years and am wondering, what I'm gonna do when this gig runs out?  My qualifications aren't exactly transferable to many other things:  I was a ground controller for NASA  - nope, not many of those jobs.  I scheduled training for astronauts and managed their training facilities - not many of those jobs either.  And now I watch the grass grow and collect hangar rental checks at a small privately owned airport - very few of those jobs available.  And I'm too old too be scraping barnacles off boats.  Frankly, I was too old for that 30 years ago. 

I'm hoping my next gig involves large paychecks, fast cars, a big house with it's own gym (complete with indoor lap pool).  Kind of like the job Magnum P.I. had.  Without the P.I. part.

At It Again...

Lord only knows why I do this to myself.  In my continuing fight against old age, I have once again started up the triathlon training.  Now, since I haven't been doing much of anything for the last year, I've gotten fat and lazy and waaayyy out of shape.  Truth is, I haven't been able to do much because of my hand. 

"Oh.... that old excuse!"  Yep, that's the one I'm stickin' with.  D'Quervein's Tendnoitis.  Amazing to me just how much an injured hand can impede your progress to everything except the refrigerator.  Running shakes and jars it, can't hold on to the bike with it, and swimming is painful.   So the next course of action was - surgery.  So that put me down for a month and it still hurts about the same as before.  That may be considered a successful surgery, I don't know.  At least it's not worse.

Life is full of excuses - I hear a lot of them from Reed.  Mostly "it's the teacher's fault!" 

So here's the end of mine, I guess. I'm back out on the road, ignominiously reduced to the couch to 10K program on my iphone after the glory days of my Olympic distance triathlons.  To make myself accountable, I signed up as a mentor on the BeginnerTriathlete website.  But what help can I give them other than support and empathy?  I'm a shy, old, new(ish) triathlete (I can still call myself a triathlete 'cause I did one within the last year). 

My nutrition practices run counter to accepted wisdom, although they work for me.  Probably give everyone else heartburn.

I'm slow in every event.  I dream of a 12 minute mile in the run and 15-18mph on the bike.  I'm better at the swim than the others, but I take my time cause I like that one the best - always counts against me.  Unfortunately, they don't give extra points for attitude.  But, as long as they have beer at the end (and I don't have to drive) and cheeseburgers near by I'm a happy camper.

This is probably the definition of insanity.