Month: August 2017

It only took seven years

So, yesterday made it real. All the planning and ticket-purchasing and preparation were exciting at moments and frustrating at others, but it wasn’t actually “real” to me yet.   Yesterday I walked into the bank and completely drained my “honeymoon savings” account.  I’d been putting money into that account for the last five years. Sometimes I’d put in some one month and have to pull some back the next to handle a bill or company expense or tax payment or something of the like. These last two years I’ve been more diligent about leaving it there and trying to forget it exists. That worked pretty well overall. But honestly it just felt good to finally be able to go in there and take it all out and know I was finally going to use it for what I’d wanted to use it on since the day I opened the account. … Read the rest…

Stanly County Board of Commissioners August Meeting – Consolidation Discussion

Some of you have been following the issue the Stanly County board of commissioners has been tossing around regarding the possible merging of the Board of Health and the Social Services Board. I wrote an article in anticipation of the August 7th hearing, which you can read here if you’d like. I had the pleasure of speaking at that meeting and being given the opportunity to express my thoughts about the merger. I thought it was time to write a follow-up article and reveal a little more than I did previously. I’ve held off writing the article or any follow-up pieces before now out of respect for the candor the commissioners showed me when speaking to me privately when I called them. I won’t mention any names here in regards to any conversations I had with commissioners because I would like to preserve the opportunity to engage them in future … Read the rest…

Equality between Men and Women -my perspective on the Google Memo

You may have heard of the memo published by former- Google employee, James Damore titled “Google’s Idealogical Echo Chamber” wherein he discusses, quite candidly, the discrepancies that exist between women and men in tech jobs and lists the anthropological and psychological reasons those differences exists. If you haven’t read the memo, I encourage you to read it here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf A few days following publication of the document, Jamed Damore was fired from Google. I can’t speak as to whether I’d personally have made that decision, but I can certainly understand why a global corporation couldn’t have their name associated with the opinion piece and needed to distance themselves from it. Personally, I think the paper was spot on, but I also think maybe I’d have have fired him too if I’d been his boss. Moving on; the paper discusses a lot of ways men and women in the workforce, specifically … Read the rest…