Good bye, my good friend

I said goodbye to my buddy Jebediah tonight. He's been suffering from a deep infection in his snout, and stopped eating about a week ago. Try as we might, there was nothing we could do. Tonight after work, he passed away peacefully in my arms.

He used to miss me when I'd go to work. He'd wait for me in the morning by my briefcase like this. I miss him already.

Deciding to get busy

I'm having a difficult time sticking to the task of studying and furthering my career, even though I'm highly incented to do so. Here's my thought and plan from my network blog:

It's incredibly difficult for me to focus on geekstuff when the weather finally starts getting nice, and I think we may be in the one week per year of decent weather Minnesotans get. My study routine is faltering and I'm behind schedule terribly.

I'm having trouble waking up early to study, which has historically been my most productive time. My schedule is to wake up at 4:00 AM sot hat I can get an hour of studying in before I get ready and go to work. Maybe I'm getting old, or maybe I'm not as motivated as I once was. I'm just having much more trouble getting out of bed and into the groove and many times I sleep right through the alarm. It's time to change the routine or fail.

When I consider the reasons I'm struggling, I think lack of sleep is a major issue along with distractions in my study area. For instance, all my guitars are sitting here, begging to be played every time I sit down to do some Routing. Here's what I've done and am doing to combat these:

1. Agreed with my wife that this is of utmost importance and I've reinforced our collective decision to move forward with this career path
2. Decided to got to bed earlier - with the time set as 9:30 PM to be in bed. The way things work out now, I get to bed by 10:30 and we sit up and talk or watch TV until 11:00, then by 4:00 AM I'm shot and unable to get up
3. Take down my drumset and put up a "work-workstation" where I won't have anything other than work to distract me. On this "workbench" will be my laptop, some paper and pens, my study materials and various routers and switches. There will be NO GUITAR or MUSIC RELATED ITEMS HERE.

Focus is the key, once again.

Slept in today

And loved it. The birds were singing like crazy all morning, the windows were open and I just decided that life is too short to rush around today.

I'm glad I did.

Tuesday is "Guitar Night"

Because man does not thrive on EIGRP alone, I'm trying to designate a couple nights a week as "Guitar Nights." I'm cutting my study short tonight, doing some reading and blogging at "Greg and the Network" on what I'm learning to keep it all in my mind and engage a few different senses, and then playing some guitar and forgetting all about it for a while.

I'm dying to play my SRV strat tonight, so I'm keeping this short. I'm currently reading "Soul to Soul" by Keri Leigh. It's amazing to read about the life of such a gifted guitarist and one of my favorites of all time, and at first I spend a lot of time listening to SRV's music, followed closely with never wanting to pick up a guitar again. After that, I feel the excitement I felt in 1983 when I read about this Texan who played on David Bowie's "Let's Dance" album and released his first solo album after performing at Montreaux as an unsigned act. I didn't know what I was in for, but I knew it was something I needed to know more about.

Almost 30 years later, I still want to know more. I still want to play more. Every time I hear SRV play a note, I think "Yeah...that's what I mean."

Goodnight. I need to play.

A place for everything...

I started a new blog today. I call it "Greg and the Network" and the purpose of it is to keep my geek reviews separate from things that normal people might like reading. So, if you want more thoughts and musings about geeky network stuff, please visit and comment here. Otherwise, I'll make a few checks in here as well.

The normal person news is that I've gone through a bit of a job reshaping at Marco and over the next several months I have some exciting objectives to work on. Most of these objectives are relating to network infrastructure specifically, so I'll be concentrating on that discipline in my study and professional life.

I have some tall orders to fill between now and 2012, but I'll try to keep everyone updated as often as possible, and still get a few chances to play and write music. Man does not live by bits alone...

Spring begins and so do I

April 1st is always an interesting time for me. It's usually the point where I realize that the new year is no longer the new year and I take a look around at what has happened since January 1, and try to decide on the best way to move forward. Typically, that day is accompanied with a serious "Where did the first three months go?!"

There are a lot of really exciting things going on for us right now, and I'll hope to blog about them more as we move forward. One of the exciting things for me is a recent job modification at Marco. I had the extreme pleasure to work with much of the management team over the past week to define some new goals and objectives for my job and career, and I'm planning to blog about what we're doing in the next couple months. (NOTE: For those of you who don't really dig the extreme geek-stuff, I'll try to keep some things in here that are interesting to human beings, also)

I'm in the process of defining those objectives and "putting some hair around the ideas" so to speak. But I thought that I would give a brief bullet-update on the Greg and Sandra Rolling family to keep up to date:

• Greg has new job responsibilities
  
• Sandra developing a new line of clothing for children that I'm excited to see on her blog before long.
• Adrian doing exceptionally well at St Cloud Technical College, which surprises only himself
• Amber and Nick doing well in Ohio - Nick looking at schools to begin a career change
• Grace has a spring recital with the Stroia Ballet Company coming up May 21
• Jeremiah trades his violin for the piano and loving it
• Jadyn finally realizing she is a "big girl" and no longer "the baby"

I'm excited for the summer and ready for the change. There's something about the new growth of spring that always makes me feel a little introspective and hopeful. There are lots of things coming up in the near future, and I'll try to keep everyone updated here. I hope your winter ends with great blessing and the spring brings new life to you.