2013: A Year of Growth – Part 4: Family

2014 is just around the corner and I can’t wait to see what it brings.  I just hope 2014 is as at least as good as or better than 2013 has been. Of course 2013 had its challenges, but through these challenges I have learned quite a bit about myself and the world around me.  These challenges definitely made me a better person. My experiences with my family, music, travel, and career all had challenges to overcome, but were all extremely rewarding to me in the end.  Over the next few days I will discuss each of these important areas of my life.

Family

2013 was a fun year with the family.  My wife is still the best thing that ever happened to me.  She is so supportive, caring and loving to my son and me.  She also is great at her job and works countless hours to ensure the service she provides impacts our community’s future.

My son is growing into a fine young man.  He is doing well with his studies overall, but when he faces challenges he works hard to overcome them.  He is becoming increasingly involved with music.  He plays percussion in the high school band and drum-line.  He really enjoys it.  He is also singing all the time. He has a great vocal range, even though he doesn’t think so.  His natural voice is very deep now.  I remember when he was a baby he called me “Singer Man” as I walked around our house playing guitar.  Now my son is the real “Singer Man”, with a license to drive to boot.

My son also spent a week this summer on a mission trip.  He and the teens he was with completed several projects to improve the housing for many less fortunate people.  I’m proud of all the work he and the other did to make the lives of others brighter. He's a lot like his mom in that aspect.

I hope that everyone has had a great 2013.  Here is to 2014! 

Happy New Year!

2013: A Year of Growth – Part 3: Career

2014 is just around the corner and I can’t wait to see what it brings.  I just hope 2014 is as at least as good as or better than 2013 has been. Of course 2013 had its challenges, but through these challenges I have learned quite a bit about myself and the world around me.  These challenges definitely made me a better person. My experiences with my family, music, travel, and career all had challenges to overcome, but were all extremely rewarding to me in the end.  Over the next few days I will discuss each of these important areas of my life.

Career

At the beginning of 2013, I was starting to feel uneasy at work.  The team I was working with was growing fast.  There were a lot of great people joining our team and a great deal of opportunity for our team. However, as the year went on I felt that even though I was in a potentially great situation, I was making too many compromises in my career path.  I could clearly see that there was a lack of alignment between the direction my team was going and where I needed to go personally.  After the realization, I did my best to steer the position to be more in line with my preferred direction. Finally I realized the gap was still significant. 

During my summer vacation to Indiana, I had a lot of time to think.  I realized that I am not a young man any more.  I am in the prime time of my career, and need to continue the positive direction I had been making.  If I was much younger I might have allowed more time to seek alignment with my employer.  But supporting my family requires me to focus more than ever.  There was no time to waste.

Upon returning from vacation, I had 3 companies that was interested in working for contact me. All had new positions that were more aligned with my goals.  I was extremely blessed to have 2 of the 3 companies I offer me excellent positions.  I accepted one of the positions and got back on my career path.

After 3 months in the new position, I know I made the correct decision. I am on a great team.  Our leadership has a clear vision that will allow our team to directly impact the bottom line.  In addition, the leadership team really practices servant-leadership.  They allow our team the freedom to self-direct our work efforts for the most part.  They provide support where needed by helping us remove barriers and getting us connected with the appropriate people at the appropriate time.

I am extremely pleased to be part of my new team.  I was the last one to join, but they seem to really value the experience I am able to bring to the table.  I also enjoy that we are very diverse team in terms of age, experience, etc…  This is the first time I’ve had any teammates that were closer to my sons age than to my age.  They are extremely talented, so it’s a blast learning new things from them.

I can’t wait to see what will happen with my career in 2014. Next up, the most important aspect of my life. My family.

2013: A Year of Growth – Part 2: Music

2014 is just around the corner and I can’t wait to see what it brings.  I just hope 2014 is as at least as good as or better than 2013 has been. Of course 2013 had its challenges, but through these challenges I have learned quite a bit about myself and the world around me.  These challenges definitely made me a better person. My experiences with my family, music, travel, and career all had challenges to overcome, but were all extremely rewarding to me in the end.  Over the next few days I will discuss each of these important areas of my life.

Music

2013 was a year of increased focus on playing guitar and singing.  For years, I’ve said that I would spend more time becoming a better guitarist, improving my singing, recording original music, and playing live for an audience.  While I still have a long way to go, I’ve made progress in all these areas.  

I started 2013 focusing on improving my guitar playing.  I made quite a lot of progress, but not as much as hoped. Business travel and other commitments got in the way. At least I have significantly improved.

My vocals have also improved.  I’ve always had a tendency to over sing.  While for the most part it was passable, I knew that most of the time I went off key or stressed my voice too much was because I was pushing too hard and not using proper breathing techniques.  Again, more improvement.

I purchased some new equipment. The equipment gave me more ability to record music and play live.  During early September I played for a large party at a friend’s house.  I played and sang well, focusing on the songs I love to play.  Mostly 80’s songs.  I also jammed with some others who brought instruments.  The party ended with a group of us playing and singing along with the music a DJ was playing.  It was a crazy party.

Most importantly, since the time of the party onward I have been using the new equipment to record again.  For the most part I have been working out a technique and getting the proper sound.  I’ve re-recorded some original songs written between 10 and 25 years ago.  I’ve also started writing some new songs. In 2014 I will continue this process and hope to have at least 8 original songs recorded.  Mainly a bucket list type of thing.  Hopefully some of the songs will be something I might consider getting published.  I’m not sure about the process for doing that, but it has been a dream of mine to create music that others would play.

Musically, I made some positive progress in the last year.  I’ll keep grinding away doing more of the same in 2014. Next up, I’ll discuss my career in 2013.

2013: A Year of Growth – Part 1: Travel

2014 is just around the corner and I can’t wait to see what it brings.  I just hope 2014 is as at least as good as or better than 2013 has been. Of course 2013 had its challenges, but through these challenges I have learned quite a bit about myself and the world around me.  These challenges definitely made me a better person. My experiences with my family, music, travel, and career all had challenges to overcome, but were all extremely rewarding to me in the end.  Over the next few days I will discuss each of these important areas of my life.

Travel

I traveled more that I have in years in 2013.  Thanks to surgery that I received in December 2010, I have slowly increased my ability to travel again without significant pain and discomfort.  Before the surgery, I could not drive more than 30 minutes without significant back and let pain.  Slowly I’ve made progress.  Traveling again made me feel somewhat younger for some reason.  Maybe because it has been several years since I had done much travel. 

My family and I were able to drive back to Indiana for our summer vacation.  It was a fun trip.  We took a different route to travel through other areas of the country that we had not been to as a family. Once we arrived, it was great to see my family again.  I don’t get to visit them enough.  It was also interesting to see how much the area has changed since I left the area so many years ago.  The new interstate is a nice touch.

We took another family driving trip in November to Laredo, TX.  A large celebration for one of my wife’s nieces. Again it was great to see most of my wife’s family again in her hometown.  It would have been even more fun if we didn’t need to leave so quickly.  We were trying to get back home before a forecasted significant ice storm arrived back at home. We slept for 3 hours after the party then drove straight through.

I also traveled for business more this year than I had in the past 20 years.  The trips were mostly to the east and west coasts.  I was even able to stay for a week on the beach in Boca Raton, Florida.  I worked all day, then at night I took long walks on the beach, had a great meal, and then enjoyed live music until bedtime.  The only thing that would have made the trip better would to have had my family with me.

Travel was a blast in 2013 and we are planning even more for 2014.  Next time, I’ll review my musical experiences in 2013.

Baby Steps

While I haven't written as much as I had planned over the last month, I have made some progress  towards my ultimate goal.  Writing music again.

Business travel and projects have been at the front of my mind, trying to finish strong in 2013. Process improvement opportunities, website development and supporting our teams goals have been both challenging and rewarding. Taking care of my family, especially during the ice storm and practicing driving with my son have been exiting too.

Maybe these limitations on my time have helped me focus. I have found some time to improve my home recording techniques, especially harmonies.  I've been revisiting some ancient original songs, trying some new chords and the like.  Most importantly, all this has led to the first lyrics I have written in quite some time.  They definitely need some work, but at least I am taking baby steps.

For my beautiful wife Juanita.

Once upon a time, years ago

Left my birthplace, for lands unknown

I thought I would find my fortune or fame

A rags to riches dream runnin through my veins

But how was I to know, what I would find

Just north of the borderline

I fell in love with a beautiful girl

she rocked my fantasy world

Her love, made me realize that I lacked a direction

Fortune and fame are nothin without some love and affection

Love of my life, you're everything, you're everything I need

When I'm down and out, your love embraces me

Things may not have turned out, like my young man dreams

But they turned out better, you mean the world to me

You Make It All Right

Do great ideas for projects, work, or other things come to you in your sleep? This happens to me periodically, probably several times a year. One of the first times an idea came to me while sleeping was the lyrics to one of my first original songs, "You Make It All Right."

In the dream, I was singing to a girl hidden in the shadows. It was strange for sure, since I asked her what her name was during the dream. She said, "I'm not 'HP'", which was the initials of my girlfriend at the time.

Most of the lyrics came to me in the dream. When I woke, the words and a basic tune were in my head. I wrote the lyrics down, then later that afternoon after class I asked my roommate Matt if I could borrow his guitar. I had no idea how to play, but came up with something resembling the chords in my head. Matt then quickly arranged it and added a bridge to a place where he could solo. I added a few additional words, and the song was complete.

We played this song at a majority of our gigs. It was received well by crowds expecting cover songs, probably because it sounded similar to Bryan Adams. We also recorded it for our demo tape to share with managers in hope of potential gigs.

After college, the song was part of the opening of our wedding video. I think that was the real purpose for this song's creation. In fact, the shadowy girl from my dream only had one feature not hidden in the shadows. Huge beautiful brown eyes. Just like my wife.

I'll close with some of the lyrics to the song.

I wonder if this is what it's like in heaven

It feels so good to have my arms around you

I wanna be with you forever

I wanna spend my whole life loving you

You are the one who makes my days bright when you're with me

You are the one with me tonight

You make it all right

Writing: Old Friend, New Nemesis

Do you have hobbies that over the years you have slowly let atrophy away to where they are non-existent?  I'll bet most of us experience this. One such hobby for me is writing. To me, writing is like an old friend I have grown apart from. In fact, it has become a nemesis. This is a story of my history of writing, why I feel writing is not my friend anymore, and how I plan to rekindle the friendship.

When I was young, I loved writing. I didn’t enjoy required writing like school reports, etc... I enjoyed creative writing. In seventh grade, I won a competition for my true story of riding a pig backward. I'll never forget the ride or the look on my grandfather's face. Priceless!

I then began writing simple songs and parodies. Weird Al was an inspiration. The first song I wrote parodied a song by Prince.  I performed the song in school, and learned that lyrics can be very hurtful.  Do not make fun of your friends, especially if they have no sense of humor!

My next parody was for a 4H talent competition. My cousin, Matt Miller and I performed the song "4H", parodying the Beatles tune "Do You Want to Know a Secret". It seems we won an award, but I am not sure what. I do remember that after our performance we were asked to try out for the State of Indiana 4H Chorus. We were selected!!

Once I began college, my writing focused on song lyrics.  Two of my roommates and I started a band along with two other freshmen.  We were mostly a covers band, but I wrote several original songs.  We recorded two of them as demos in the college radio station studio.  Only one song was ever performed.  “You Make It All Right.”  The lyrics for that song came to me in a dream.  I may write more about that song in a later post.

In the many years since my college days, I’ve occasionally written song lyrics, but no many in the last 10+ years. Recently going through storage, I found some old lyric notebooks and read through some of them.  Some were quite terrible, but some have some potential.  I decided to commit myself to writing again.

So why the nemesis angle.  I now write mostly for business communication.  Most of this writing is focused on communicating information as clearly and simply as possible.  Creativity does not typically come into play. My typical email contains less than 100 words, and my typical presentation is probably the similar with most information conveyed graphically. This post will be 600+ words before I am done. Creative writing is my nemesis because I recognize the atrophy in my ability to write creatively.  Can I still write where others might find it interesting? 

To challenge myself to write again and exercise those skills, I decided to begin writing two blogs.  This blog, Duane Long’s Blog, will focus on general interest topics.  It may include attempts at poetry, song lyrics, etc… Anything goes!  The second blog, Lean Sigma for Superior Service will focus on topics related to my profession.  I hope that blog is useful to others whose work is similar to mine.  Between the two blogs, I plan to post at least 3 times a week.  My writing workout.

So here’s to getting started!