Greetings all…

It’s been a minute since a posted a web log (actually since last year). DK Wyatt were talking about blogging lately and it was something (before the advent of social media sites like Twitter and FB) that we used to do a lot. IN any event, I got the urge yesterday to sit down and post this – until I ran into some craziness with mismatched USB bluetooth dongles and wireless mice around this house last night.

Any way, some of you know I’ve recently returned to the space missions industry. I’m working as a systems enginner on NASA robotic space missions at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. Nothing but happy about it, although the real work hasn’t started yet, after being there for exactly one month yesterday. The atmosphere and people are great, but it’s been mega reading for the most part. I’ve been working on documents in preparation for a preliminary design review this month for one of the missions but my immediate supervisor has been crazy busy working on a current mission, so there hasn’t been a great deal of face time outside of talking about some documentation he’s feeding me to come up to speed on for certain aspects of the missions I’ll be involved with. No complaints there, the more reading time I get the better. Having a desk with a window view can make it a wee bit distracting though.

I’ve been posting in my FB and IG feeds about this book, Deep Work. It is nothing short of a game changer for me. I’ve already began to put it’s concepts to use (although long time habits are hard to break) and can and will see the benefits of doing such. I highly recommend this book if you desire is to “starve your distracctions and feed your focus” along with learning how to produce quality and value-added work.

I have an officemate who will be working on specific aspects of the same missions I’ll be working on. Over the last few days, we got into discussions about drinking tea and coffee. Those discussions led to various tea and coffee establishments in the DC metro area. One we discussed is called Vigilante. While I’ve never been a coffee drinker, I will make it a point to visit this one, and stop by a Teavana shop before Starbucks closes them all this year.
I decided to check out Vigilante’s website and found much more than I expected. The Yelp reviews are great and I can imagine why just be visiting the site alone. I found an interesting human nature story in the blog, which turned out to be a nice read. It involved the origins of the company and former President Barack Obama. I had to work late for a Friday, but found it a nice way to end the work day. You can read it here.

That’s a wrap…it’s been a quiet Saturday, but going on 1pm – time to get moving.

Peace,
Fresh