Good Sunday morning in Houston, Texas!! It is a beautiful Fall day. 

 welcome back to my blog, "Pintail Flights"

It has been over 7 years since I have posted on this blog. A lot has happened since my last entry, so let's catch up!!!

I have been back in Houston since 2011 - some 10 years!!!! : Let me give you a quick summary of the past 10 years!! 

OMG, a lot has happened. I find myself now an Octogenarian!! I turned 80 on August 4, 2021!!!! I never thought that I would make it this far!

Since my last entry, I have left my contract job with Aramco. I spent four months in Mexico in San Miguel de Allende to fulfill my time out of the country for foreign tax exclusion in 2010. It was a wonderful time for me, but for Carolyn, it must have been hard since she had to return to Houston to take care of business at home and then she returned to enjoy the Christmas season.

Once back home in Houston Carolyn and I drove the F-150 to Austin, TX to see our new granddaughter, Brooklyn Hall, and then on to Saratoga, CA to see our other new granddaughter, Jolene Sicore!! It was a long but enjoyable drive across the Southwest to San Diego and up Highway 1 along Big Sur to Santa Cruz and finally into Saratoga.

Over the next few years we made several trips back out to visit our daughter's family in California. These trips were by plane. We went out to see our last born grandchild, Clyde, when they were living in Los Gatos. He was a beautiful infant, but he soon begin to exhibit seisures and was diagnosed with a rare form of malformation of the brain tissue that has left him as a bedridden child requiring constant care and love.

Once I was back home I picked up a consulting gig with John Wilson Associates working on a BP project for the Thunderhorse project designing and teaching a course on dropped objects for crew on the rig. I made monthly trips to Houma, LA to teach the large group of crew and visitors to that massive offshore rig. As I was working the Thunderhorse project I picked up another gig with Shell Oil Company at the Bellaire Technology Center working with Stu Furgang, a former manager for a previous gig with ExxonMobil,  in the Shell Upstream Learning where I designed and developed numerous engineering and Geoscience courses. I was later pulled into the Shell Global Learning Design Team to work on the Shell Project Academy and spent a deal of time going back and forth to The Hague, Netherlands.  This Shell gig lasted three years before the funding dried up and I was left looking for another consulting gig.

Within a month of leaving Shell, my old Exxon colleague, Brian Nicholson, pulled me into a gig with BP working through Intellinex/Xerox functioning as the project manger for BP Refining Academy and later as the US learning lead for the Chili Programme out of the London Offices. This gig was a huge global change management project affecting all subsurface activities. The projects lasted four years. 

That took me into 2016.  I had been visiting artists studios in The Sawyer Yards on 2nd Saturday Open Studios for a number of years. With no consulting gig in hand, I decided to get a studio in the newest building in the Sawyer Yards Creative Campus - The Silos, and give my art career a full time effort. I am now enjoying the community of creative individuals less than a mile from my house. I have become a fixture in the community for five years now. I do miss my consulting gigs, but my caregiving demands for Carolyn, now in late stage Dementia/Alzhiemers, make gig work and the travel involved not an option for me. I suppose that I could work virtually. I did work virtually for BP long before the Pandemic forced the workforce to do so. 

Ok, so now your are more or less up to date with my professional life. I will continue this blog as I move forward. It will explore facets of my life and the world. I will try to keep it up to date and on target to help others.

Today I will be at my studio for the October 2nd Saturday Open Studios. If you can make it please visit me at studio #227 in The Silos, 1502 Sawyer Street, Houston, TX77007

Cheers,

Richard