I never walked a tight rope. I don't think I could even in my prime.

I exit using a line that was connected at the top of the balloon to swing out and do multiple flips. The rope was really long so you would get a huge amount of speed and fling off the end.

I jumped...

Some say I'm still falling to this day.

In all seriousness, balloon jumps are a unique experience in skydiving... Because you go from dead silence to the rush of air at terminal velocity. Sure you can jump a helicopter that is hovering, but they are louder than airplanes.

Exits from a balloon also tend to catch less experienced jumpers off guard, because you can't fly your body till the speed builds up. First timers tend to flail a little. By the second jump they do just fine.

I have taken off in a hot air balloon a dozen times or so....

Not once did I land with it. Even good landings seem to leave some things to luck.

Edit: added forgotten T.

I have 4500 jumps over about 13 years in the sport. My interest was in competition, which is weird as I'm not really a competitive person normally. I joined a recreational 4 way team and just fell in love with it. That lead me and some friends founding a 4-way/ 8-way competition team and we competed in Open against the likes as Arizona Airspeed, Team Fasttrax, and The Golden Knights. We were normally competitive with them, but it's hard to match teams paid to be there. I actually trained with Team Fasttrax for a short time as John Hart got his start at my home DZ.

That experience parlayed into doing Demos. Part of my competition team started doing Demos at just about every place you can imagine. I did have my PRO license for a few years to be able to get insurance. The highlight of that was doing a Demo at an airshow where Gen Paul Tibbets was doing a presentation on World War II. He came up to me and one of my team mates to ask us about skydiving. It was a surreal experience. He had a lot of interest in what we did during the show. Definitely one of those memories that will live with me forever.

What ended it all was internal team politics. My competition team was intertwined with the Demo team, so when barely held together relationships finally came crashing down on one, it brought down the other. By that time I was around 4000 jumps. There were a lot of hard feelings all around and I made the decision to pull back completely. Going back to just fun jumping just did not keep my interest. I took on students, but I always worked as a coach for jumpers just off student status... But again seeing my team just blow up like that really took its toll and I just grew disinterested. It didn't help that I was in my early 30's and my lifestyle pretty much precluded any type of long term relationship. Women think hanging out at the DZ to be pretty cool the first few times. However, every weekend with good weather and some with not so good weather just hanging out all day gets dull really fast.

So landing after a fun jump and gathering my chute I looked around hard at the landing zone and just felt... Nothing. I was bored and not interested in trying to create another team. That was October of 2003 and in March of 2004 I met the future Mrs. CanopyFlyer for the first time. I did around 400 jumps the 2003 season, 2004 I did 20 and sold my gear in 2005 to help pay for the wedding and put a down payment on a house. My last jump was the summer of 2006 on student gear of all things and it was the only jump I made in 2006. Skydiving was my chrysalis going from who I was to who I am now. I look back on those years with fondness and often talk about the lessons I learned during that time. However, I never went back and never plan to. Actually now age and age related injuries have made going back nearly impossible anyway. Which I'm OK with, I would not be who I am today and married to the woman I am without those years spent in the sky.

Today my wife and I have two boys and it's satisfying watching them grow and start doing those things that I wanted to do at that age.

Skydivers

Sigh... Yeah, we're all a bit mental in one way or another.

With that said we're generally not the "adrenaline junkie" type. There are those types, but they typically don't last long in the sport. They either get bored, get scared, or get themselves hurt. A jumper that's been in the sport for a long time is a master at managing risk. The old adage of "there are no old bold pilots" goes double for skydivers.

It's 100% WFH and it's as awesome as it sounds.

I've done work like this job for a very long time so I can get things done very quickly, because I've done it all many times before. That gives me a lot of free time at home.

My company is a real manufacturer that is one of the few and best in the world at what it builds. The product is something that peoples' lives depend upon. So much so that profit motive is not the #1 consideration in regards to our products. Safety is absolute and profit takes a distant back seat. Contrast that with my last employer that makes household goods destined for a land fill and there were entire teams dedicated to making products cheaper, but be able to charge more for them. Absolutely hated my last employer.

Corporate culture is an interesting mix of old school, stay with the company till you retire and bringing on new ideas and integrating them. Always keeping an actual eye on the important things, such as the aforementioned product safety.

Needless to say, I love my job.

Some cons: The main one is that I'm not really learning anything new, but I've been in this business for 30 years. While I do try to learn, a lot of the things that are being pushed these days are the same as I've seen before, just with new labels. That actually has been true for my last two employers, so I think it's a symptom of my age and experience rather than an issue with the companies.

My boss, who is fantastic, is wanting me to step up and take over his position. Which would raise my importance level in the corporate structure quite a bit. The problem with that is I took this position, which was a major downgrade for me, just to avoid being important. Fortunately, this is not an UP or OUT type of company. I just need to be careful to remain relevant.

Vintage audio equipment particularly if it's distressed.

It's satisfying to bring these things back to life.

I am unable due to having signed an NDA.

But let's just say the world is still here. You're welcome.

A few years ago my wife and I decided to finish the basement. The first step was to clean it out, which involved going through all the junk that I had inherited from various family members. My mom always asserted that all of it was very valuable and CONSTANTLY checked that I still had it all and was taking good care of it.

I went through each item one by one and looked them up. Dishes, nick knacks, all of it. It took me hours. The highest value item was maybe $10. Several large and heavy boxes that I had been obligated to haul around to all of the places I lived for the last 30 years, as my mother constantly asked me about them. It was all worth maybe $100, if I made the effort to attempt to sell it. Which would have taken a lot of time as we're talking dozens of fragile things. It just was not worth it.

I shoved it all into the trunk of my car and took it to the dump. My Mom died in 2011, so she wasn't around to check up on all that crap.

God damn I was so pissed. 30 fucking years of hauling that worthless junk around probably cost far more than it was worth. My mother was so insistent that I even had it sitting around taking up space in my basement 12 years after her death. Just another one of her little power plays.

Wisconsinite here where the badger is native and the mascot for the University of Wisconsin is the Badger.

This meme is inaccurate.

The American Badger will also remove your kidneys and sell them on the black market as well, to support their meth habit.

And where...

THE FUCK...

Is the FBI?

If that's not a terroristic threat, then what is?

Over 150 Major Incidents in a single month.

Formerly, I was on the Major Incident Response team for a national insurance company. IT Security has always been in their own ivory tower in every company I've worked for. But this company IT Security department was about the worst case I've ever seen up until that time and since.

They refused to file changes, or discuss any type of change control with the rest of IT. I get that Change Management is a bitch for the most of IT, but if you want to avoid major outages, file a fucking Change record and follow the approval process. The security directors would get some hair brained idea in a meeting in the morning and assign one of their barely competent techs to implement it that afternoon. They'd bring down what ever system they were fucking with. Then my team had to spend hours, usually after business hours, figuring out why a system, which had not seen a change control in two weeks, suddenly stopped working. Would security send someone to the MI meeting? Of course not. What would happen is, we would call the IT Security response team and ask if anything changed on their end. Suddenly 20 minutes later everything was back up and running. With the MI team not doing anything. We would try to talk to security and ask what they changed. They answered "nothing" every god damn time.

They got their asses handed to them when they brought down a billing system which brought in over $10 Billion (yes with a "B") a year and people could not pay their bills. That outage went straight to the CIO and even the CEO sat in on that call. All of the sudden there was a hard change freeze for a month and security was required to file changes in the common IT record system, which was ServiceNow at the time.

We went from 150 major outages (defined as having financial, or reputation impact to the company) in a single month to 4 or 5.

Fuck IT Security. It's a very important part of of every IT Department, but it is almost always filled with the most narcissistic incompetent asshats of the entire industry.