Crawfish Today . . .

Dave and Becky are having their annual crawfish boil.  It is sort of a spring ritual, a get together of friends and bit of cooking.  Everybody brings something and their own drinking materials.

Most are old TI folks from the JSOW (Joint Standoff Weapon) days or earlier.  Some are golfing buddies.  Some are just friends.  The old TI Defense Systems Engineering Group (DSEG) has long been sold to Raytheon and moved to Tucson (we were in that group).  With one fell swoop TI divested itself of defense contracting and sold it all to Raytheon.

So some of the folks moved to Tucson and then back like Judie and I did.  Others went on to work elsewhere.  Some were able to stay with TI.  Some just retired.

A lot of the folks returned to work at the old TI DSEG plant in McKinney.  Raytheon wisely retained that facility and staff.  Today it is almost all old TI DSEG remnants working there.

When I returned to Texas from Tucson, I went to work for Lockheed-Martin.  In truth, I had run the gamut at Raytheon and there was no future for me there.  The boss I had did not like, indeed, he did not like anybody.  Unfortunately, he turned up with a bad case of cancer, I felt sorry for him.  But he is not longer in the employment chain out there.  So I moved on and got a nice pay increase, at last reaching the level I should have been years ago.

But things health wise sort of turned on me.  I had a profile change with VA developing Diabetes Type II.  Looking back, that disease was gradually coming on for a long time.  It is attributed to exposure in Viet Nam to Agent Orange.  Anyway, Social Security and VA compensation were enough income to allow us to retire, and I did.

Now I can go to all the crawfish parties I so desire.  And Becky and Dave are calling today.