Life is a Project

I love going to modern coffee shops like  Starbucks . There are so many amazing choices!  When I go out for ice cream, I am sometimes overwhelmed by the amazing options and flavors at establishments like  Baskin-Robbins .  The United States of America is a country that strongly identifies with a concept of being unique and different.  The rights of the individual is more important than the rights of the collective.  So, why do we only have two major political parties to choose from?  Really??!?!   Democrats  or  Republicans ?  I have more choices for coffee and ice cream options. If you feel strongly that one or the other of these parties reflects your core values, that is great.  If like myself and many other citizens in the USA, you feel that you need more choices, I agree.  When I tell people that I have only voted for a major party candidate once for President of the USA, they are often offended. They claim my choi...

Today I finished the Stuttgart Half Marathon within four minutes of my goal time.  I am very happy that I kept a solid pace and met a wonderful person along the way.  When I first saw the balloon, I thought it was a pace runner, but I learned that she was actually just a runner with a balloon.  She was on Team Sanwald and we ran almost 20 kilometers together.  It was a great experience and I enjoyed the views along the route. After the race, we enjoyed a post run beer , as advised by German researchers.  I felt really good after the race and even after a few hours, I'm not as fatigued as I have been after previous half marathons.  I really attribute my success for both my run time and my recovery to proper training.  All of the time that I put in prior to this day was really worth it. I am a big fan of  Hal Higdon  and his great training plans.  Whenever I have followed a plan, especially the long runs, I have better race times and ...

Recently we have been getting a lot of rain in Germany and I have been trying to schedule my runs around the rain storms.  For those familiar with risk management as defined by the Project Management Institute , there are a few different options to handle a risk once it is identified.  The four options are risk avoidance, acceptance, transfer and mitigation Risk transfer is when you can pass the risk on to someone else or another company.  This is great for IT projects, but not really an option as a runner.  It would be great to have someone else complete my run for me, but that doesn't actually help me with my training. Risk avoidance is a technique which I have been practicing the past few weeks.  I research the hourly weather charts and then try to calculate the best times to run with the lowest probability of ending up in a rain storm.  This reduces the chances that I will be in a rainstorm and getting struck by lightening.  Of course not runni...

Lee Hillman Brown had a dream of having her family surrounding her during her golden years.  Her oldest son, Lt Col Mark Wood, was less than a month from retiring from the US Air Force and moving to Seattle with his wife and two daughters.  The plan was for all five of her sons to live in the greater Seattle area with her grandchildren. On 27 May 2016, everything changed, Lee Hillman Brown had a stroke from which she did not recover.   Lt Col Mark Wood was in London for his last mini-break in Europe, when he received the news of his Mother's passing. Lee was always able to relate to the Air Force lifestyle, being an Air Force brat herself.  Lee was born in 1946, two years after her father had escaped from a German prison camp.  Lee's Father,  Donald E. Hillman , moved the family a lot while Lee was growing up from Maine to Alaska, from Florida to California. Lee always maintained the skills she learned as an Air Force family member, to include flexibi...

My friend and coworker at the US European Command in Stuttgart Germany is retiring from the military after 22 years.  Fortunately, life in the Air Force as a cyber warrior has trained him to be prepared to deal with the unexpected.  Until an ill fated call over Memorial Day weekend, the very organized Lt Col Wood was on track to return to the United States and transition to life as a civilian.   Lt Col Mark Wood - Cyber Warrior He, his wife and two daughters decided to take one last trip, before retiring in Seattle to spend more time with his extended family. Immediately after checking into their hotel in London, Mark received the devastating news that his Mother had unexpectedly had a stroke. Before he could arrange transportation back to the United States, she had passed away.  The final mini-break to London had went from excitement over tickets to Harry Potter World, to the realization of how fragile life is and how important it is to expect the unexpected. Re...