Gratitude

Today I ran across an article about the affect of positive thoughts that I found to be quite interesting. You can find the article here.

The premise is that gratitude has a positive impact on our lives. I won’t go into the details, but the article is great.

Here are just some of the things that I am grateful for.

1) I am grateful for the wonderful wife and kids that chose to come into my life. They define me and I will never be the same because of them.
2) I am grateful for the job I have. It challenges me on a daily basis and forces me to improve myself.
3) I am grateful for the wonderful cars my wife and I drive. It is great to have two vehicles that our entire family can comfortably fit in.
4) I am thankful for my neighbors. They help raise our kids as we help raise theirs.
5) I am grateful for the school we have across the street. It is great to watch the kids walk into the door each morning.
6) I am grateful for the staff, especially Mrs. Carow, that is making sure my daughter overcomes dyslexia.
7) I am grateful for the wonderful home we live in.

Like I said, these are only a few of the many I can think of now. I will keep writing my thoughts on gratitude in my journal rather than here, but take note: You must play the cards you are dealt. It is up to us to decide if we play them with gratitude or bitterness.

Cyber Junk

Space Junk is a term used to describe the garbage created during space exploration. This may be parts of broken satellites, a bolt dropped by an astronaut while on a space walk, or entire satellites that have ceased to operate. Most of this stuff will eventually fall back into earth's orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. But what happens to Cyber Junk?

Millions of people are creating their own content on the web through social networks, blogs like this one, and countless other mediums. What happens to all of the stuff we create? How long will articles that I write on Helium.com be active? When will this blog go away?

I started thinking about this when I got to work this morning. I had an e-mail from Plaxo reminding me of a birthday that is coming up. I usually enjoy getting these so I can send a funny e-card to the person celebrating a birthday. Here is the content of this morning's e-mail.

Needless to say, I am extremely aware that my sister would have been 26 on 4/21 of this year had she not died in a car wreck in August of 2006. I contacted Plaxo to find out about getting her account deleted. Their initial response simply suggested that I change my settings to make sure that I would not get anymore alerts from her account. While I agree that this would work, doesn't it seem odd that Plaxo would not want to get an account off their system if the person is no longer with us?

Is telecommuting an option?

After being back from sabbatical for three days, I feel like I am back in the swing of things. I already have a trip to California scheduled for later this month and a ton of things to keep me busy. I have to give credit to those on my team that filled in for me while I was away. Without them, my return would have been a much rougher experience.

Everything at home is also getting back to normal, which is a terrible way to describe a life with four kids. There isn’t much that is normal, but I love every minute of it. Beth had to run to Houston tonight to pick up our nieces and nephew. The plan is for me to get the kids off to school and go on to work. Emma isn’t feeling well, so I may be working from home with a sick kid. That’s the beauty of the internet though; I can work anywhere I can get an internet connection. All of my phone numbers route to a single cell phone, so the transition from the office to the home office is nearly seamless. This brings me to another topic: Gas Prices.

I was talking with my life-long friend Aaron tonight about the cost of commuting. I did some numbers in the back of my head while we were talking but I wanted to see what the real numbers were. I opened up Excel and here are the results. I drive 26 miles one way to get to work with an average mpg of 16. (I know this is low, but I love my Suburban.) With gas at $3.20 per gallon and assuming I drive to work 5 days per week for 50 weeks each year, my annual cost for gas just to get to work is $2,600. By working from home just one day per week, I can save around $520 per year and reduce the miles on my car from 13k per year to 10.4k per year. That sounds like a pretty compelling argument to start working from home when possible.

Back in the Saddle…

Today is my first day back to work after four glorious weeks of sabbatical. I am glad to get back to the routine and I am sure that I’ll be going 100mph for the next couple of weeks to catch up on the things I missed. I had a great time that included a trip to Disney World and many fun activities with the family. I’ll post more later about Disney.