Journal Clip Art

I had a long talk with Andrew, my buddy and colleague from our Raleigh days, yesterday. It was really good to get caught up. We talked about many things, but Andrew made mention of my journaling habit. I thought about it a lot after the phone call. Journaling–blogging in this case–really helps me stay on track with things that I want to accomplish. The writing helps me refine my thoughts and consider things I would not have considered if I were not writing about it.

I need to stay organized on several things that might actually be of interest to a few people, but that would certainly be improved with some writing to give myself some direction. I have talked about this before, but now that I am into a couple of projects, I can talk about them in more detail. I do not want to try to do too much so I am going to try to focus on just three things. I have talked about #1 and #2 before, but have really just started getting into #3. The things I want to talk about, but in more detail are these:

  1. Doing a retirement PhD — just the part of being old and going back to school.
  2. The technical aspects of the PhD program — hydrology, machine learning and machine vision.
  3. Flipping houses in Mexico — something on which we embarked almost by accident

I am doing this all for selfish reasons–it helps me stay organized and motivated. It also helps me decide if/when I am done or when it is no longer worth it. All good things.