Well Hello There... Here is my purpose for being

My recent life at work has involved a lot of planning of the strategic variety and I think it has taken over key parts of my brain.  Because I feel compelled to explain myself here.  To provide myself and any readers with some objectives which necessitate the blog's existence and will guide it into the future.  So here goes:

DBAD Objective 1
To connect with other like-minded folk.  And by like-minded I don't mean "has to share my every opinion." I really enjoy intelligent discussion, debate and conversation.  I say up front, most of what will be posted here is my opinion and I would never presume to want anyone to feel exactly as I do.  If we all saw things the same way, the world would perhaps be a bit less wacko but it would be mighty dull.  Anyway, I get pretty seriously dorky about a few of my relatively dorky interests and yet most of my friends are perfectly sane, normal sorts of people and so I don't really have an outlet to let my inner dork shine.  In fact, I suspect I may be a little afraid of my inner dork.  So I'd like to let her free and see if I can convince any other dorks out there to jump in the pool with me and... umm.. have a conversation.  Yeah, not sure the pool analogy really works. Basically, to quote the dearly loved Ms. Austen:

"My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company."

DBAD Objective 2

I need a creative outlet.  In my younger days I was a total humanities student.  History and English, theater, flute, piano, forensics, dance, choreography. And then I became a scientist.  I mean, I love what I do and there is opportunity for creativity in science but you've got to be a whole lot smarter than I am to play in that field.  I feel like I was an okay writer in my youth but then I got banged around the head with the scientific writing stick for a number of years. Nowadays much of what I write for work is somewhere in between scientific and popular writing and, well,  I feel like I now kind of suck at both types of writing.  What does all this mean?  I want to become a better writer and feel that forcing my stumblings on unsuspecting strangers will help me be more disciplined about my practice and that eventually I will improve.

So that's why I'm here.  I still need to work on setting up some quantitative measures in order to determine whether stated objectives are being accomplished and if they are moving the plan forward by accomplishing the overall goal: to be a happy and fulfilled person and not look back when I'm 70 and say "OMG, How lame was my life??". I'll keep you posted on that.