Three years and back at

Okay it's been 3 1/2 years.

Raising three grandchildren and working full-time do eat up a lot of spare time. And frankly reading political blogs eats up a lot of time also.

So now the grandkids are ten, eight, and six years old. It makes a lot of difference in how closely they must be monitored. A month ago my wife started a new part-time job. She is now a lunch lady at the elementary school that the grandkids go to three blocks away. Three hours a day five days a week. A year and a half ago I went back to third shift. There are some definite pluses and minuses. The biggest minus is being tired. The biggest plus is some free time in the middle of the day. There is no one here from 10:30 AM to 1:30 PM. I don't usually wake up until noon but that still gives me one and one half hours to do what I want.

I have been working on a couple of things. The first is learning a software program Called  FREECAD. I am working on learning it well enough that I can write a textbook on the subject. There is a very definite need for a good book. The online documentation is less than wonderful. It does not mention some of the worst gotchas. It would be nice to have a longer text that Has a fuller description.

I believe I've spent at least three weeks on this. I do understand the basics of the software. There are still a few things I need to work through.

Now for the hard part, writing. I have spent at least a week writing different chapters. I'm not thrilled with any of them. I have taken the last week off and been goofing off.

I will get back at it tomorrow. Last night I was poking around my old bookmarks. One of the things I found was blogger and these old blogs.

Today I am using Dragon speaking naturally and dictating directly into blogger. No background grandchildren and it's working fairly well. Seems Best when I speak three or four word bursts. Still needing to do "correct that" a lot.

For the rest of this post I'm not going to do any correcting. We will see if it's reasonable.

In three more months I will be 64 years old. I would like to retire as soon as possible. But I have an Excel spreadsheet that shows monthly income from my pension and Social Security and my wife's Social Security with different retirement dates. I like the numbers or dollars if I retire Two or six years from now. The only way that retiring now works is if I have a part-time job. Writing it could be a part-time job.

Okay one book is not a part-time job.  Need more books and more subjects.
Possibilities are:
TurboCAD,
geometric dimensioning and tolerancing,
building a CNC machining center,
building the electronics to control the CNC machining center,
printing and binding a hardcover book,.


well time time to close for today
question do I want to save this as  draft or post this. No one is reading and it's easier for me to find if I post. Warts and all.

Ok I posted and then came back and looked at this five hours later. Had at least ten strange spelling and word choices thrown in by Dragon Speaking Naturally. I believe from now on I will save to draft and correct and post later. The warts were embarrassing.