First off, a hale and happy birthday to my brother-in-law and kind host. Hope your young lady lets YOU sleep through the night tonight.
Meanwhile, up north, I’ve been thinking about the passage of time…
…it’s ten years this spring since I left Vanderbilt. That’s a mighty long time, and yet, ten years doesn’t really seem to cover it. It feels more like two or three lifetimes. Consider: when I left Nashville, Danny only had about 125K miles. Now there are 205,495 on the odometer and the car is about to be donated in favor of a fifth-generation Golf that was only on its third generation at the time. When I left Vandy, Mac OS 7.6 was the new hotness, the stock was under $20 a share, Gil Amelio was still technically the CEO and every sentence written about the company included the word “beleaguered.” When I left Vandy, the extent of my professional IT experience was a line at the bottom of the department website acknowledging me for creating their original web presence. To those who know me, this will sum it up: when I left Vandy, I didn’t own a single pair of Docs and I was on only my second cell phone ever.
The last decade…I could write a book. Maybe someday I will.