A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

So, with a new job title of "corporate instructor" in August, and a continuing, steady and reasonable salary, I decided to move the family out of the little apartment we'd rented in Omaha. In fact, I wanted to move us out of Omaha altogether. There were a number of small towns within commuting distance of work. I decided on Blair, which was only a half-hour's drive away. And, for less money than I had spent on the apartment, in Blair we could rent an entire house!

Granted, it was an old house. And, as houses go, it was small. We put all four kids in the attic, which had a low, slanted ceiling beneath which neither Mary nor I could stand upright. But it was like living in a dollhouse for the kids; they seemed to enjoy it. I set up two sets of bunk beds there and they had all their toys.

And I so loved watching them grow. As a perk from my job as corporate instructor, I had access to a new invention: Video cameras! And I had to learn to use them; and what better way to do that but to take videos of the kids!—For example, the time that little Johnny learned to ride a two-wheeler.

Meanwhile, with Jenny having learned to read in kindergarten, she let me take a video of her reading to her dolls. (This is adorable!)

Meanwhile, at work, I had a number of "firsts" of my own. For example, I'd never had an office to myself before; and I'd never had one with its own credenza. This one had four drawers, but I did not, yet, have anything to put in them. Still, the drawers came with label holders I felt compelled to fill, which I did with labels reading, "Urgent", "Crucial", "Important" and "Vital". No one else even noticed, but I got a chuckle out of it every time I saw them.

In my new position I had to create lesson plans and class materials, as well as standing in front of a classroom of 20 or so programmers and explaining it all to them. (What I was teaching was how the code we'd sold them worked, so they could make adjustments themselves if need be. That usually also included teaching TAL (Tandem Application Language), since IBM programmers, as these folks always were, didn't know it. These were skills to which I would return in future years, when I became a contract corporate programmer, flying around North America teaching C, C++, and Visual Basic programming to mainframe COBOL or FORTRAN programmers.