i appreciate your endulgence .... cause i'm going to kinda let my hair down.....

i noted a comment from graham to one of my silly comments in which he said i was young and i took that as basically having time to deal with things. t'would that it were!

i'll say i have past that half century mark and slightly beyond. i turn 51 tomorrow, the 28th of august. all in all not a bad thing. but now, well, i've got some things i need to do and i'm not sure how to go about doing them.

my father died at 53 years of age. i haven't dwelled upon that fact over the years but the closer i come to 53, the more i realize that life on earth is truly a precious gift and very short in time. dad's been gone 21 years now. not so long in the greater scheme of things, but in life as we know it, thats a long time. i guess the mortality thing sets in and i'm just trying to deal with it in my own way.

i've been fortunate enough to support a family to fruition. my daughter is 500 miles away with her husband and bringing up her family and my son is getting married in just a few short weeks to start his own. i say 'my', but i mean my wife of 29 years and myself. we've brought up a pair of good kids. i even wrote a song about them called There They Go.

anyway. I've spent my entire adult life working for the "other guy". not that i've done bad. just that what i've done has enhanced the other guy and i remain status quo.

(side note: hamish, i have to love you, man. You mentioned once of traveling 30 miles, round trip, to pick up something at the store. my daily jaunt to work is 130 miles round trip. ) i'm just tired of doing that.

i have some talent in the field of woodworking. I haven't used that talent for sometime. but this past summer, or winter for graham , i've purchased a number of wood tools and have been working on the woodcraft. i've made a few things and have had a positive response from a number of folks. some family and some not. either way it's been encouraging.

you know, i'm kind of confused and i'm not too sure where i'm headed with this .... but let me say, i work for someone else, and i don't want to do that any more. i want to work for me and i want to work for my wife cathy, bless her heart for putting up with me for this long.

i guess where i'm headed is i want to let go of the corporate life, start my own life and go from there. no doubt there is a financial question, but i'd just like to know what others think of giving up the corporate umbilical cord and replacing it with your own umbilcal cord.

best regards,

ambrose

sorry guys ... and gals... for this bit of rambling