THE HALFWAY POINT BETWEEN THE TWO ECLIPSES

This is very interesting stuff (I lifted from FB - but have not verified):

This morning, I felt I should look up the date was in the exact middle of the two eclipses. I do believe that those signs in the heavens are from God, and have important messages for us. That date is Monday, 14 December 2020, which was 1211 days after the first eclipse.

Do you know what happened on that day?

On that date, the first c.v.d v.xxes were administered! That is very significant to me, because I always felt that that beginning time was a sign to us that we had half of that time period before things got tribulation like.

The first eclipse was 21 Aug 2017

Second will be 8 April 2024 

People sometimes get a little miffed when I post something that I have not verified, but that is not the purpose of the blog.  It is a place to "store the little information nuggets" I find.  Maybe later, I will deal with the actual deep dives into a line of thought.  My job is to find stuff and mostly just put it out there for others to examine.  I am a finder; not a researcher.  There is a difference.  Occasionally, if it fits my curiosity, I will do a deep dive and really get into something - but for the most part, my fun is in reading and finding stuff; not necessarily in vetting it.  I do try and go back and correct stuff if I know it is blatantly wrong after I put it out there.  

You might say that this blog is about the quantity - not the quality.  I leave it up to those who have been Investigative Reporters, etc to get to the bottom of stuff (and yes, I have a relationship with a lovely woman from Texas who was that in a former life in major market network television - and she does bounce stuff off of me and I off of her.  She is that type of deep-diver that I am not.)

My wife can get VERY testy with me because she wants a perfect record pretty much at any cost.  I want it "good enough".  This, now that I think about it, is a strange mindset for an engineer.  But it made me a damn good one when I was working for Boeing.  When I was on the 777, we were massively behind the 8-ball on the 777-200F freighter.  Our typical (goal) was to have around 30-50 non-conformance tags in the queue for a typical day.  Reality had it that we ended up with around 200 and sometimes much higher.  I was able to massively multi-task and roll a ton out every day.  Where it counted, and it was a critical item, I made it happen.  I would get a little "sleazy" (non-purist) when it came to some things that were low on the list of important things (such as airworthiness).  When it REALLY mattered, I dug and I dug in hard.  To the point that I uncovered massive fraud in our Quality Assurance process.  I was pissed at the situation and was quite happy to ride that situation into the ground (get fired - or as one of the players involved threatened; killed like the last guy who dared stand up to the corruption).  Man, I was flaming red hot over that one....  And so it is when there is billions of dollars in the pipeline and you throw a monkey wrench into the gears of industry, power and money.

I ended up so pissed off, I took the first opportunity to jump ship after I called managers out up to the fifth level in the factory over this one massive snafu that they could not cover up - or would have covered up without me stepping in and making a stink over it.  Yes, three hundred to five hundred lives would have been at stake in that airplane, so I held my ground over cost and delivery schedules....  After the Alaska Air MD-83 incident, I was not about to just sweep that under the carpet and have those lives on my conscience for the rest of my days.

YET, on the other hand, I gave myself the moniker "the slot slut" because where there was no critical structural significance to a joining fastener, I was more likely to save the "blown hole" or damaged wire and go with an easy fix and never lectured mechanics for having been "human".  Heck - again, they were all well above my paygrade in skill sets and I would have made many more mistakes, had I been in their shoes.

So, on the one hand, I am almost maniacal in my attention to detail and yet can be incredibly permissive in other areas where it simply does NOT bear the same weight.  The trick is knowing when to double down on something and when to just "let it slide".

So, over to the 747 line I went.  It was like going from the pan into the fire where we often had over 1,000 backlogged tags on any given day.  It was intense - and very fun to see if I could juggle the immense workload.  I was working 70+ hours most weeks and would literally pull off 20-30 tags every ten hour shift and often make the rounds on the airplane on my way out the door and take a handful of tags home to tap out on the laptop after hours.  It became a game for me to see what I could get done.  I was the fourth most productive MRB engineer in the Everett factory and I prided myself on it (the others were what I called "money grubbing contract engineering whores" who worked seven days a week and often 12 hour days, or more  -  one guy put one cool million in the bank after only three years of contract MRB work and he was single - so he had no write-offs other than his massive 3 million dollar mansion that he picked up for 1.2 million after the 2009 crash).  Part of my hitting the high volume mark was strategy because they wanted to get rid of me because I stood up where it was important and had been told by many 30-40 year employees that I had less than two weeks left before they figured out how to fire me for having stood up to management back on the 777 line.  That went on for years, but the Lord gave me a serendipitous situation that allowed me to leverage against corrupt management.  I basically had them by the short and curlies until I decided it was time to leave on my terms (a whole other blog piece).

Anyway, yes - so that is how I roll.  Hit on the main points, don't sweat the smaller details unless it matters.  There was one new hire engineer that was fresh out of school who would hit a single tag every few days.  They kept threatening to fire him over productivity issues and I tried to work with him.  In fact, in an "apprenticeship" type environment, I was taken aboard as his mentor as he made the rounds (much like a doctor has an internship or residency) at the various factory stations (Wings/Major Body Sections/Empennage/Systems/Final Assembly).  He was a really nice guy and a crack engineer - but he would agonize over every detail.  It was mind-numbing to watch.  Yet, on certain things, his attention to detail was super appreciated and necessary.  But big picture wise, he always seemed to be completely off the mark.

It is kind of how I approach life.  I do not believe we are supposed to be neurotic about everything - but to pay attention to the things that matter.  That was the main message of Jesus' ministry to the hopelessly bound up Pharisees and Sadduccees.  They could not see the forest for the trees.  But, as with all things, there is balance.  And most of us never find that balance.

My daughter and I had an interesting discussion the other day.  She is smart.  Very smart - but she understands the need for balance in all things.  She has seen where I have been somewhat extreme in my views of many things - but realizes even at her young age, that this is sometimes necessary in limited circumstances.  She made the connection to those who can be extreme and those who seem to crash and burn - and this is where the rub in life is.  Get too lazy or lackadaisical in life and you completely miss the mark.  Get too extreme (laser focused on life or a goal, etc) and you often miss what is most important.  There is truly balance - but when it comes to the Gospel, this becomes tricky as we are told that we need to be all in when it comes to being cold, hot or luke warm in our approach to things.  Jesus implied that those with mediocre attitudes simply will not make it and even implied that if we have an element in our lives that controls us (lust as seen through an eye), then we need to pluck it out.  As a raging hormonalist teen (not by my choice), I always wondered what that implied for even things like reproductive organs, let alone eyeballs....  Does one become a eunoch in order to keep the law perfectly by knocking the hormones down to a manageable level which graciously came to me as a 50 year old?  Obviously extreme, but I grappled with that question as a teen when I began to read the law and try and put things in perspective that made sense.

So - anyway.  Something I have wanted to put out there for quite some time.  Finding balance in our lives.  It is my number one concern as I move through my life.  Balance is not easily defined, nor achieved.  Only through Jesus can we find a truly balanced life where we do not sweat the small details, but we have the details covered in a way that we simply cannot get it done.  He is the way the truth and the life!  It becomes more readily apparent as this world careens more and more out of control.