I basically watch Tropical Storm activity because they can adversely impact our lives here in Florida.  I don’t care what the politicians say, global warming is a reality.  Man made pollution is contributing to our weather cycle and I am quite impatient with those who say otherwise.  Katrina was a big wake up call because it devastated a major American city.  You can argue all you want about whether or not New Orleans should even be there but the point was a CAT 5 hurricane pretty well obliterated that part of the Gulf Coast.  More recently, Tropical Storm Sandy became a superstorm and made the Jersey shore a wasteland continuing up into Vermont where flooding decimated many picturesque small towns.  And, folks, that is not the end of the story.  I recently read that we will be in “superstorm” potential until at least 2100.

I watch tropical storms so I can understand their potential impact as far in advance as I can.  In fact, I watch the Saharan dust activity which is a good indicator of a potential storm.  Mostly, I watch the NOAA ( NHC) and Wunderground web sites.  Over the years, the tools that they have developed are amazing.  I can see the storm as it comes off the tip of Africa.  I can understand the atmospheric conditions that impact storm developments (dry air masses and wind shear).  I can understand the future weather conditions that will drive the storm’s directionality.   However, as advanced as these tools have become, Mother Nature is quite the teacher so I have learned to REALLY respect her and her vagaries.

Tropical storms also sometimes develop out of large masses of low pressure that come together.  This tends to happen mostly in the Caribbean, Gulf, and South Atlantic.  These masses show up on NHC maps and looking at weather conditions, I can usually successfully see which storms will develop and which will be bad rainstorms.  Analyzing storms now takes about half the time that it formerly did because of the advances in meteorological science.

I began posting my little status updates on Facebook a couple of years ago.  I have a number of people who follow the postings up and down the East Coast of the US.  This has become a small hobby and my knowledge of tropical storms and what drives them as they develop grows almost daily.

Since retiring to Florida, we have noticed a phenomenon where people who have been disciplined and on time to most everything suddenly find they have to arrive up to 30 minutes before the event.   Even being “on time” to an event might guarantee you that everyone else has left for the planned destination.  It can be frustrating.

This is why I am on-time.  First, it is polite and courteous to be someplace at the time you are expected.  Second, I have been in a disciplined time mode virtually all of my life.  Third, in some places I have been, it can save your life.

I come from a Germanic-Welsh genealogy.  These are people who are fairly strict about being on time.  My parent were both “on timers” and raised their children that way.  All through secondary, high school, college, and beyond, you lived by the schedule.  You were to be in your class at a set time, no exceptions.  Late meant seeing the Principal or worse detention.  Late in my College meant the possibility of losing a letter grade for X number of times late or with an unexcused absence aka “cutting class”.  In many classes, exam questions were often in material covered in the first few minutes of class..  In my era, not getting your date back to the dorm on time meant real problems for both of you.  You weren’t late in getting your papers or projects  to the Professor as the penalty could be as much as a letter grade.

From College, I entered the US Marine Corps.  You were NEVER late under any circumstances .The penalties could be severe and often included loss of rank, humiliation, or financial penalties.  Missing a troop movement could land you in jail.  The strict discipline was all geared to one thing and that was survival in the battlefield.  Remember the earlier comment about saving your life?  In Vietnam, if you arrived, say at an assault point  too early, you could die in preparatory fires.  If you were patrolling and arrived at a checkpoint too early, you could die in friendly H&I fire that was designed to protect you.   The Marine Corps is strict and we were always on time, period, no excuses, and,  end of subject!

When I joined IBM, in the first moments of the orientation, being on time to work was covered as a condition of employment.  IBM started every shift at 8:18 AM.  You had better have hit the clock before 8:18 or spend some ugly face time with your manager.  When hitting the time clock was stopped for professionals, you still needed to be in your office at or before your scheduled start time .  Your arrivals were tracked by the time you logged onto your office computer in many places.  Being on-time was a point in your annual performance plan.  I personally fired four people in iBM for their failure to get to work on time.

In IBM, arriving at meetings on-time was strictly enforced at all levels of the business.  I worked for Managers and Executives who closed the door on time.  If you weren’t in the room, you did not attend the meeting.  I closed my doors for meetings that I called 5 minutes after the meeting was scheduled to start.  Hardly anyone was ever late.

In IBM, I was a frequent global traveler.  You needed to be on-time to catch your flights especially if you had a complicated itinerary as I often did.  With one exception, I always made my flights on time.  I had some early training for this because our family owned a small cottage on Martha’s Vineyard.  You arrived at and left the Island on the Steamship Authority Ferries which is a tough ticket in the high season.  When I was working on the Vineyard during College, I caught the ferry every morning with a truck, drove to a warehouse, loaded it with milk, and caught the noon ferry back to the Vineyard.

Being on time has been ingrained into the fiber of my being.  This discipline remains with me today. and take some pride in time management.  I don’t plan to change because I am retired.

In early June, 2013, I saw a news program about a man who had transcribed the entire Bible.  He was motivated in a deeply religious way.  I thought about that for a while.  Finally, mostly out of intellectual curiosity, I decided that I would write one book of the Bible.  I quickly settled on one of the four Gospels.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptic Gospels because they include many of the same stories and parables.  They are mostly used for historic information about Jesus.  Church readings, Sunday Schools, and Christian religious schools primarily used these Gospels.  Most of my early memories came out of these Gospels.  I knew that John was still the story of Jesus life but a much deeper insight into His justification of his divine role and the agonizing discussions on getting people to believe in Him and in The Father (God). John was different and this appealed to me.  Additionally, I was named for James and John even though my Grandfather was James John.  My mother once told me that these were two of Jesus’ favorite disciples hence my name.

I was raised in a very religious atmosphere.  My father and his father before him were both Methodist Ministers of an evangelical genre that frankly could, at times, get oppressive.  My early social life revolved around the Methodist Youth Fellowship and organizations that were tied to the Church including our Boy Scout Troop.  Continual prayer was a norm in my little world.  So, my spiritual roots run deep.  However, as with most PKs (Preacher’s Kids), a rebellion set in which despite my parent’s attempts to crush, it continued to develop.  Throughout High School, I tugged a bit at the leash but always seemed to be back in the fold at the end of the day.  When it came time to go to College, I went to West Virginia Wesleyan College, a Methodist School in the Appalachians which was a focus area for the New York and New England Conference of the United Methodist Church.  Even my early declared major was pre-ministerial.

That ship sailed somewhere in the first semester when I discovered that there was fun to be had in College and I had fun.  I was always pretty well focused on scholastic endeavors but there was wine, women, and collegiality that more appropriately balanced my young life.  I didn’t attend Church very much but I still had a well ingrained spirituality that I chose to express in different ways.  I also became very fascinated with Science in College which caused me to think much more broadly about the Universe and its origin.    Eventually, after graduation, I became a combat Marine in Vietnam.  What happened there could uproot one’s entire belief system.  Everyone discovered God again in the foxhole.  However, I have to think of  that a method of trying to survive an ugly situation.

I doubt that I would have come back if it were not for my wife, a devout Lutheran.  She insisted on going to Church and so we did.  We were members of a Church everywhere we lived.  Although my spirituality was never quite the same, we were active.  This changed when we found our little Congregational Church in Brookfield, CT.  I went through a sense of spiritual renewal after a long brutal period in IBM’s transformation.  I actually looked forward to Church time and then came retirement.  We moved to Florida which is the home of the “mega church” with TV screens, thousands of members, and multiple services every Saturday and Sunday.  That was and is a turnoff for me.

So, what did reading the Book of John do for me?  First, I am glad that I went through this experience.  It was spiritually refreshing and somewhat fulfilling.  John recounts the story of Jesus life very differently.  The major events in his life were chronicled but the focus was on “the word made flesh”.  Jesus was the incarnation of God on earth.  The book was about the struggle to make people believe in God and the Holy Spirit.  Jesus performed eight “signs (never called a miracle in John) to inspire trust and confidence in “The Father”.  With this said, I found the communication from Jesus to “the crowd” to be difficult to understand at times.  This is reflected in a thread of misunderstanding and confusion whether it was “the crowd”, His Disciples, The Pharisees and High Priests, or Pilate.  Whether or not this was deliberate to “fulfill the scripture” is a question I leave to others.  If there was anyone who could have used a good PR person, it was Jesus.

There is the question of science.  The “works” or “signs” stretch the scientific mind to an extreme. For example, in a scientific mindset, no one walks on water, raises people from the dead, or feeds 5000 from a few fish and a loaf of bread.  This is a historic theological debate that continues to be played out.  At the end of everything, the answer seems simple to me (I am no theologian); you have to believe and have faith through this belief.   That is where I am  and that  is where I will leave it. 

I should mention something about the task itself.  I wrote 55 full pages and completed almost 16,000 words.  I enjoyed writing and it was a pleasure to start within the time I had allotted each day to the task.  I never got tired of actual writing although it has been easily since College that I wrote one document of this magnitude by hand.  I wrote out the passages, usually about 600 wordss each day.  When I finished writing, I went back and spent some time contemplating what the passage meant.  As the passages in John are almost all narratives, it became very interesting to put yourself into one person’s shoes or another.  I thought, in each case, how could I have done this better, or could I?  I could not know the undercurrents or the politics in depth that surrounded the passage so thinking through these things was also very interesting.  Lastly, it was wonderful to again discover cursive writing rather than typing.  It made the passages come alive for me in a way that I had never experienced.  I recommend it!  

We visited the traveling Wall yesterday.  A walk along those panels is never easy for me as there are too many names on those slabs that were from my Vietnam Battalion.  I was there in 1967, a distinctly difficult time for the US as combat operations were intense, building, and increasingly complex.  History tells us that those months were the prelude to the 1968 Tet Offensive but in 1967 we didn’t know that this was the objective.

One name on the Wall is especially poignant.  Corporal Jedh Barker was my best friend during the training that led to our deployment.  We met in the Infantry Training Regiment.  He was a good guy.  He was from a poor family in Park Ridge, New Jersey but he had enrolled at Fairleigh Dickinson in Madison, NJ after High School.  The cost was too much so he transferred to North Dakota State University where he played football.  Jedh was also a true patriot.  So, at the end of his sophomore year, he enlisted in the Marine Corps for a two year period.  Training in the Marine Corps was no fun.  We discovered that we had similar interests.  He wanted to become a teacher.  I had already graduated from College and was married.  He was close to being engaged to his childhood sweetheart.  When we were transferred to Staging Battalion at Camp Pendleton, we were in the same squad.  At the end of the training day, we would often just sit, exhausted, on top of a hill with a beer and talk about what we hoped to get out of life.  We talked about future jobs, family, and what we wanted to do after we got out of the Marine Corps.  He wanted to go back and finish College and then move west to teach.  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do but was leaning toward  a career in International Relations in the Foreign Service or maybe the CIA.  We both knew what was to come.  We were both 0341 mortarmen so expected to be assigned to a Mortar Platoon but we both were assigned to the Infantry in Vietnam.. We rode over together and then in our assignments he was sent to the Third Marine Division and I to the First.  He went to provide security at the Airwing in DaNang before heading north to join his Battalion.  After a few months, we lost touch and I didn’t know what had happened to him.  This was before the Internet resources.  Some time later, I learned that he had died falling on a grenade to save his squad during a firefight.  It wasn’t until 1997 when my first Grandchild was born that I learned via the internet where Jedh was buried.  He was in a cemetery not 20 minutes from my daughter’s house.  I immediately drove there and when I entered the cemetery saw an American flag.  I drove right to the flag and found his grave.  I sat there weeping while I told him my life’s story to that point.  I have never forgotten Jedh.  He was an optimistic guy who found a silver lining almost everywhere.  So, every Marine Corps Birthday, I drink a toast to my comrades fallen and especially to Jedh.  He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously by President Richard Nixon.

JTDRAIG is a play on words that honors my heritage.  As far as I can determine (and this is stll a work in process), I am approximately 75% from Germanic heritage and 25% Welsh although I grew up to mostly relate to my Welsh heritage.  I really don’t think my parents did much with genealogy although my Mother had a fairly extensive pedigree and didn’t really know it.  Her pedigree goes back to 1630 in Prescott Parish, Lancashire, North England.  Her ancestors emigrated from England in the late 1600’s settling in the Boston, Massachusetts area and eventually became the founders of Newport and Block Island (Rhode Island).  Eventually, her directs  migrated to the west (The Dakotas).  Her ancestors fought in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and, the US Civil War (on both sides).  Ironically, my Father’s family have a rich heritage in North Wales originating in Amwylch, an Island off the Welsh Coast.  My Grandfather emigrated in 1908 moving to the State of Iowa where he began his career as a Methodist Minister.

DRAIG is the Welsh word for DRAGON.  JT stands for JOHN which translates the same from German into English as it is in English.  T would be the word THE.  Hence, JOHN THE DRAGON is the translation of JTDRAIG.  I created this term in the late 1980’s when I was one of the first IBM managers to use what became known as “email”.  When AOL was formed, I was one of the first to sign up.  Email names should be unusual, personalized, and easily remembered.  I always had a red Welsh dragon symbol on my desk at work and when I was trying to create an online id I tried several things until I looked at the dragon and it came to me.  I anxiously input the term and there were no matches so it was mine!  Since those days, I evolved from AOL to YAHOO and then to GMAIL.  I have never found a conflict.

I rather like the name “John the Dragon”.  It fits my personality in many ways.  It honors my complicated heritage.  In fact, while I was active in politics, “the dragon” was one of the nicknames that I had.  When I left Connecticut, my Party gave me a plaque embossed with a dragon along with a dragon lighter that shoots fire when ignited.

I have been encouraged to start blogging since I have a wide variety of experiences, interests, fascinations, curiosities, and, of course, unbridled opinions. I intend to do an eclectic exploration of any of these particular things at any given time. I would be happy to hear from anyone at any time! My opinions are my own. If I use a resource, I will always acknowledge it. I plan to have fun!

As things evolved, I have decided to use this blog to document my experiences as a career “IBMer”.  For those of you who are interested in following along my journey, welcome aboard. However, please plan to be interrupted from time to time if something catches my interest.  Also, this won’t be a daily thing.  I have a busy life and plan to enjoy it to the best of my abilities and limitations.

I am sending this link to about 20 people to begin with who have expressed some interest in staying connected.  I don’t plan to post it on FB for now.