Retirement 2008

On May 16, I resigned from my position of CIO at Multnomah County Oregon. It was a good 4.5 years--I learned a lot and met many wonderful people, but I was just plumb tired. It's a hard job trying to keep 6000 customers and 170 employees happy every day! Immediately after leaving (like real immediately on May 19), Shaun and I flew to New York City for 2 weeks where I had a very interesting consulting engagement with the City of New York Division of Mental Hygiene to do a current state assessment of their IT organization. The people there were very smart, motivated and helpful so it was a great gig. We LOVED NYC! Shaun spent the days exploring museums, parks, and neighborhoods. In the evenings, we explored neighborhoods together, mostly in the area of Tribeca, SoHo, Little Italy and Greenwich Village and ate great and greater food! My niece, Janet, took the train up from Baltimore for a couple of days and she and Shaun spent one day in MoMA and all 3 of us spent the next day exploring Greenwich Village. We were fortunate to have one of the IT managers take us to the rooftop of a 35 story building right next door to Ground Zero. It was fascinating to look at NYC from that vantage point. Looking at the enormity of Ground Zero was a very emotional experience.