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    Where it all started

    I guess you could argue that it all started at conception, but lets not go down that road.  I prefer to think it started, my life that is, at Madison General Hospital in Madison Wisconsin. It's June 6th, 1961.

    I've done those "what was happening on the day of your birth" and I gotta tell you, the most exciting thing WAS my birth. Not that it was that exciting, but what was going on in the world was pretty boring. Kennedy was still in office and everything was right in the world.  The Cuban missile crisis was more than a year off...

    Let's take a look at the old place. As you might have guessed, this is not a current picture, or even taken when I was born.  I can't show you a current picture because they tore the hospital down.

    In a job interview once I blamed my many jobs on the fact that the hospital I was born in was replaced with a strip mall. I said simply: "This trend started early".

    When people hear I was born in Madison they, naturally, ask me what it was like growing up there... I have no idea.  I don't know if its true, but I have always answered that question with: "I dunno, I was only there 3 weeks".  When they ask why only 3 weeks... "I had a job, I had to move on".  I wish I knew if that was true.

    The other story I know about is apparently I was born during one of my father's debriefings to the military.  I was told, so who knows if its true, that his job was to teach Air Force sargents to fire missiles at incoming missiles to explode them before they hit us.  When I asked if these guys ever did it, my father would smirk and say: "No, by the time they got close to getting it, they would transfer out and we'd start all over with new people". Take THAT Russia.

    My father worked for SDC, System Development Corporation, a division of RAND, Research And No Development. Probably the most appropriately named companies in the world. Reminds me of a friend who worked for SOLFAN, Sick Of Looking For A Name.

    Apparently after showing how great this system worked, my father would give a debriefing to various top officials, I  guess he explained why they missed the incoming ICBMs.  But on the day of my birth some General stood up and announced that there would be no debriefing because Mr. Senour had just had a son.

    There are two big things to notice here... my FATHER had a son?  I think my mother had a bigger part in the actual birth and the second thing to notice, my father was not there at the event. This too is a reoccurring theme. To be fair, I highly doubt you can easily reschedule these debriefings and all that went before it. I'm sure it wasn't a lack of desire to be there, it was just the circumstances.  Plus I don't think having the fathers in the delivery room became popular until later in the decade.

    Winter vacation

    I took some time off from writing this blog because I needed to focus on the busy life that was swirling around me, and also I had no great desire to drive around the country, or the San Francisco bay area, in the rain.

    But the winter is slowing down, so I think its time to ramp up and get out there...

    Mac

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