May has been a busy month! A lot has been going on at work, the improved weather has made yard work come due, and the era of Caesar has come to an end. I believe I’ve already spent too much time on YouTube covering Caesar’s passing. So I won’t spend any time here except to add the link to the announcement and his memorial video.

I would like to say that I do feel that we should honor our veterans, especially our fallen soldiers. They have given the ultimate sacrifice to the country and so should be honored. Especially those from the civil war, and  WWI & II.  And so I salute them and pray for their surviving families. However, I do not believe that in any situation war is a means to a good end. When I came out of high school I was heavily recruited to take this “Marvelous Job” that was in the military, or even to become a fighter pilot, with promises of skills that would give me a six-figure salary in the commercial world. Nothing was ever said about invading foreign countries, killing people, possibly women and children, and possibly being killed or disabled myself. Everything was about how wonderful life would be after being in the military. I had a number of friends who were a few class years ahead of me that were lost in Vietnam. They were drafted for the most part, and today we have a volunteer army. So I’m a little distraught about the way the military sells itself to young kids with no direction in their life about how it’s a great thing to do. And of course our society dramatizes war and makes it a hero’s life to go into the military and be successful. And I don’t want to imply that most people aren’t successfully fulfilled, but an awful lot of our returning veterans from our current overseas wars do not return without a lot of  baggage and problems that they would never have had had they not been in the military. I believe that every one of our congressmen, senators, legislatures, and presidential candidates should all put their children in the military at the front lines of the battle if they’re going to vote for war. (I hope that isn’t too much politics)

I will be releasing a video for memorial day honoring some of the fallen and some of the participants. I hope you will enjoy it.

Around the house, we have the backyard almost completely grassed and the weeds under control. We have fixed the hose faucet so that we have a working hose now. We cut up a tree that had been falling down and trim some bushes. It was quite interesting to start the chain saw up and begin to cut the limbs on the tree and then find out there was no chain on the chain saw !!  Quick trip to Lowes !!   I’m absolutely amazed that the rose bushes that were way over grown and scraggly all over the front and side yard that I cut down right to the roots actually came back, and are very nice looking rosebushes, with plenty of flowers. All except the one that Dakota straddles every morning and pees on. That one is not doing too well, I think it has an inferiority complex. I’m pretty sure it’s getting enough fertilizer.

If you’ve been following my new career moves, you know that I have taken control of the safety program from the plant manager who was trying to save his job. He announced a month or two ago that he was leaving the company. He is a German ex-pat that has been working in the states for quite a number of years and his visa finally ran out. He is working on applying for a green card so he can stay and work along with his wife and 12-year-old daughter, but he is leaving the company. Unless of course the green card doesn’t come through, and then he will go back to Daimler Germany. But I have been following up on the audit items and we believe we have them all cleaned up. So he is happy, and feeling good about me. Giving me kudos on an practically daily basis. I will miss him, because he understands how things need to happen to get them done. The only thing he doesn’t understand is how much work it is to get something done. He thinks things can happen in a day. And sometimes they can, but not all 27 things in one day. So I wish him well and hope he will stay in touch.

Beyond him leaving, my new boss seems to be an extremely thoughtful guy who’s slowly learning the cadence of the plant and seems to have  confidence that the current protocols will continue to keep everything running smoothly and compliant. The truth is we will find out this summer as all the safety engineers and corporate safety  people and union safety reps will be going from plant to plant and do a week long audits on programs and practices. We have done some quick internal audits at my plant and because our training programs are so abbreviated, we find the comprehension of training programs from the union floor people isn’t as good as it should be. So we will see what this band of Auditors thinks. I’m working on a machine graded quiz process where people actually have to show us how much they know in order to complete training. My training people are a little excited about it, so I hope it works.

Well, I think that’s all for this week (which has taken more than a month). I should have a lot more to post in the next 7 to 10 days since I just put $200 down on a puppy. So more on that and possibly pictures in the next blog. Stay safe, be happy, life is too short.