I have worried about what I should do with myself when I retire. At seventy years old, I have to plan for projects of a more finite duration than in the past, but President Trump, with his level of vigor and age, has encouraged me to think bigger than I thought possible when I was younger. There are other criteria that become important the older I get. The purpose of this post is to provide a view of the big picture with the hope to flesh out what I am doing (and order my thoughts and plans while I go). I hope to do standalone introductory post for each one of these projects.
There are several things I am just going to continue as I am not the only participant. I can contribute to those projects, but they only depend on me to a limited extent and the point of my participation is to both finish well and make it so the work can continue when I am no longer there. The two main projects that fit into that category are the Mexico house project (the image above is one of our works in progress) and the GaugeCam GRIME Lab.
There are two new projects I hope to start within the next year or two for which I have taken preliminary steps. Lorena and I want to build a retirement (or maybe a non-retirement house the way things are going) in Texas that we have been designing and planning with Coker & Company for several years. We own the lot where we want to put it, the Historic Preservation Commission has approved the design, and all we need to do is get our current house sold so we can afford to build it. We hope to do some fun an interesting things both with the security and house automation system and the use of gray water that would be fun to document here.
The second short term project is a second Masters Degree. There is a program in a nearby university in Texas with whom I have been speaking about getting an MS in ML/AI. I am not 100% set on that yet–I might like to do an MS in some social science, too. Maybe God will give me time for two.