Pat Clements

So this is my BLOG.  I write something once in a while, when there's something I want to broadcast.  I write emails for work, for nonprofit work, for personal reasons.  I write endless Facebook one or two sentence updates, sometimes I tweet.  Recently I decided to hand write a few letters.  I'm not sure how I really came up with the idea, but the Art of Manliness article says it best "Because sending a letter is the next best thing to showing up personally at someone’s door." In my usual Keep reading [...]

There is a good kind of stress - the kind that makes you obsess, the kind that drives you to think, create, wake up on the middle of the night with a new idea, inspires, drives you to do more than you think you can do, the kind that motivates you to exceed the highest expectations you even set for yourself. It's the new opportunity, it's the change that inspires.  It's the freedom to be outside the box.  It's the opportunity to search for the edges of that new box. When have you had that opportunity Keep reading [...]

I started out with a John Deere tractor I wanted to trade for a TIG welder (I couldn't sell it.) Dad died in 1998, he worked in Mobile, AL in the summertime (between college to be an engineer) as a welding apprentice in the shipyard. Not a very good job. As I grew up, he had a stick welder, and was pretty good at it from his summer job. Every time we wanted to stick aluminum or stainless together, he would say "We would need a 'heliarc' for that." Since I was a kid, I always wanted one of those [I]exotic Keep reading [...]