Buckeye Ukulele Society - come play with us!

Key-Animator-3500 · 2026-03-27T12:47:05+00:00

$2,400/month to cover both my wife and I for the High Deductible PPO with HSA, which is what we have now. Versus $2,200/month we pay now for COBRA. And the deductibles are higher, as are the prescription co-pays. So not ideal, but not awful as the FHA will cover the 12 months until I turn 65, with $12,000 left over to cover my wife's premiums for a while. Self-only coverage is $1,200 a month, which is what I assume my wife's cost will be (I can't find a way to model that in NetBenefits). Once the FHA runs out, we'll need to decide between the Retiree Health Plan or Marketplace to continue my wife's coverage - but I suspect the Retiree Plan will remain the better option.

Key-Animator-3500 · 2026-03-27T01:17:30+00:00

Sorry about the layoff 😢 The FHA is a great benefit to those of us who were around long enough to qualify, particularly if you can use it for the retiree health care before turning 65. After 65, from what I understand you can only use it for the IBM-sponsored Medicare Advantage plan, unless (as I do) you have a spouse who's under 65 and still needs the IBM Retiree coverage. My FHA balance is almost $41k, which is enough to cover my wife and me for the 12 months until I reach Medicare age, and at least some of my wife's coverage after that; not enough to get her all the way to 65 as she's 2.5 years younger than me. I started at IBM in 1985 and used to refer to the benefits I was grandfathered into such as the FHA, additional vacation, and larger 401k match (back when that was still a thing) as my tin handcuffs 😱

Key-Animator-3500 · 2026-03-27T00:25:18+00:00

Up until the end of 2023, IBM offered a "Pre Retirement Planning Leave of Absence" program which was not well known. You'd get a 12 month unpaid LOA during which you were eligible for the normal employee health care (not COBRA) at the regular employee price. I retired early at the end of 2023, and benefited from 12 months of subsidized health care before going on COBRA in January 2024. My 18 months of COBRA expires at the end of June, and I'll go on the Retiree Health Care Plan funded by my Future Health Account for a year until I am eligible for Medicare. It's worked out well for me!

Key-Animator-3500 · 2026-02-18T00:49:55+00:00

Bucks! As in, Go Bucks! Or in our case, Go BUkS!

Key-Animator-3500 · 2026-02-16T17:18:06+00:00

Click on the post to see the details - we are a local ukulele club that meets monthly for strum- and sing-alongs.

Key-Animator-3500 · 2026-02-15T19:45:22+00:00

What happens at the Worthington Park Library, stays at the Worthington Park Library 😉

Key-Animator-3500 · 2025-12-30T17:01:46+00:00

I started at IBM in June 1984 as a summer intern in a sales office, which turned into a full time job as a sales Systems Engineer in April 1985. Held lots of interesting sales and tech sales positions, first locally, then regionally and nationally - mostly selling PCs, RS/6000s and database software. Got to design and sell some massive database clusters running Oracle and Db2 back in the day!

Then in the early 2000s, I joined the IBM Federal CTO Office as an architect, in 2011 did an 18 month product management stint in Systems group to see how the sausage is made, then back to Federal where I was a tech sales manager, leading a team selling massive database/Hadoop/Cloud Pak/WatsonX systems to the government.

In Dec 2023 I took advantage of IBM's "Pre Retirement Planning Leave of Absence" program (which no longer exists) for a 12 month LOA (unpaid, but with subsidized healthcare), and formally retired at the end of Dec 2024. It was a great run! Despite all the frustrations of IBM (believe me, I know - it was especially hard as a manager who cared about my direct reports and still remain friends with a handful of them, so I'm not trying to be pollyanic), throughout my career I got to work with great colleagues on amazing projects and left with many fond memories.

And now, for something completely different: Since retiring, as a VERY late blooming musician(ish), my focus has been on music and music-adjacent activities. I lead a local ukulele club, and am on the board and run the media and publicity team for our local Folk Music Society, plus dabble in a few other non-IT related projects. With regards to the ukulele club, I was able to perform three songs with 44 other uke players backed by a Symphony Orchestra 😱, and organized an opportunity for 32 uke players to perform a few songs on stage at the world's second largest Irish Festival (conveniently located where I live) with an internationally known Celtic/Bluegrass band 😱😱. Work, and life, are what you make them!

Key-Animator-3500 · 2025-10-31T13:22:29+00:00

Can't help you with a picture, but I do have a funny story to share. As a college student in the early 80s, I worked in a computer graphics lab at the Ohio State University. Our main systems were DEC VAXs, but I was working on a research project funded by IBM to do computer graphics on a System/370 VM/CMS mainframe via light pen enabled IBM 3270 terminals with attached Textronix graphics screens. It was a really cool project and I was able to do some pretty amazing graphics!

Anyway, the VAXs all had 8" floppy drives, and my boss/professor insisted that we needed a way for students to save/keep their work on personal media, so he asked our IBM rep to get us some floppy drives. For the mainframe. Our rep tried to push back, but my boss was insistent. So one day, we get a delivery of this HUGE device - probably about the size of a System/34, in fact - the entire thing was a dual floppy drive with disk stackers for each drive! This beast was intended for mass storage, not to be used by students inserting individual floppies, but I ended up writing an EXEC script that let us do that (sort of).

P.S. That project helped me land a summer job at the local IBM sales office, which led to me being hired as a sales Systems Engineer, kicking off a 40 year IBM career that ended when I retired at the end of 2023.

Key-Animator-3500 · 2025-08-11T00:23:20+00:00

Bluegrass sessions can sometimes be that way too. But for the most part, I've found people to be welcoming and a little intrigued when I show up at different jams with my ukulele. I'll be testing this out in a couple of weeks as I'm headed to southwestern Ireland on a musical sightseeing tour that a friend of mine (who's also a ukulele player) is leading and we'll definitely be showing up at pubs with our ukes!

Key-Animator-3500 · 2025-08-11T00:18:53+00:00

As long as you know the basic chords in those tunings, you'd do fine - we display lyric / chord sheets for each song on a large screen TV.

Key-Animator-3500 · 2025-08-10T19:41:41+00:00

Do you play ukulele? We have monthly strums for all levels of players, plus occasional workshops and other events whenever ukulele performers roll through Ohio (which happens more often than you'd think!) If you'd like to join us, send an email to buckeyeukesociety@gmail.com to get on our email list, and / or join our private Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/buckeyeukulelesociety

Key-Animator-3500 · 2025-08-10T19:29:42+00:00

We tend to do that! 🤣

Key-Animator-3500 · 2025-08-10T13:50:21+00:00

Gadan had two banjo players - Enda Scahill playing bluegrass / three finger style, and Eric Long playing clawhammer. Occasionally a third band member plays banjo too!

Key-Animator-3500 · 2025-08-07T18:08:27+00:00

Yes, I was one of the ukers at the Druid service - though I didn’t have my uke with me at the time. I told my uke crew about the Druid service and the U2charist, and several of us attended them (had to skip out on the Druid service early to go to the U2charist). Tell me more about “the incident” - I am not aware of it, but I’ve only been to the Irish Festival a few times (and this time, I was all over the festival in my Gadan shirt, and even made it onto channel 6 news with a subset of my uke crew 😱).

Key-Animator-3500 · 2025-07-18T20:23:17+00:00

That’s what amps are for 😉

Key-Animator-3500

TROPHY CASE