Stream of consciousness

 

I was born in Chelsea, MA in a hospital that’s no longer there and raised in several states (see flags, in chronological order) in the eastern U.S. while my Dad was in the Navy.  Dad retired the summer before my Senior year of high school and moved the family west to Colorado Springs, CO.

 

After graduating from high school in Colorado Springs, I went to two years of college at what was then known as Ricks College in Rexburg, ID.  After my sophomore year, I served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (often called Mormons) in the Dominican Republic, spending 19 months in the capital city of Santo Domingo and three months in the fishing/mining/sugar town of Barahona, in view of the beautiful, blue Caribbean waters.

 

After returning from the D.R., I went to school at the University of Colorado, where I received my B.A. in Political Science and Spanish two years later.  It was there that I met my wife and we began dating the week I graduated from CU.  During my three years in Boulder, I supported myself by waiting tables at Bennigan’s.  It was a pretty good gig at the time.

 

The following year we were married in Denver and moved immediately to Albuquerque, NM to attend graduate school in Spanish Linguistics at the University of New Mexico.  It was there that our first child was born.

 

My first job out of school was in the Foreign Languages and Literatures department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, VA, where we spent two years, during which time our second child was born and we bought our first house.  The name of the school never fit on my conference nametags and conference organizers would always give it screwy abbreviations that nobody could understand, so I left after two years.

 

From Virginia we moved back to Colorado, and have been here since the summer of 2001. Our third and fourth children (!) were born here.

 

I have eclectic interests.  I love sports both as a spectator and as a player, with my favorite being baseball.  I grew up a Cubs fan (wait ‘til next year) and was in Colorado when the Rockies came into existence in 1993.  I’ve since had a split allegiance, though I realized after attending a couple of Cubs/Rockies games that I generally root for the Rockies when they play each other (barring playoff implications for the Cubs).

 

I’m also quite into racquetball and I enjoy playing golf (no link here, it's too boring to read about), though nobody would ever accuse me of being a ‘golfer’.  When I'm "on", I can usually play bogey golf, though I've done better than that a time or two.  My lowest round ever is an 80, though I'm more likely to be in the nineties (or beyond).  I can “putt the lights out”, but unfortunately I’m just as likely to “drive the windows out” of neighboring homes.

 

I also have other interests.  I really dig maps, and can spend long periods of time just looking at them and daydreaming. 

 

A recent interest is in the 14,000 ft. peaks of Colorado.  In 2002, I climbed my first fourteener (Huron Peak) with Don Schmidt and Ibon Izurieta, colleagues from the Modern Languages Department.  I have since climbed over a dozen fourteeners and I'm definitely hooked.

 

 

 

Home improvement has also moved onto my list of hobbies since entering the world of home ownership.  Our first home was a real fixer-upper, and we really fixed it up (then moved one year later).  In college I worked as a painter for a summer, and that experience has come in handy.  I’ve also gotten pretty handy at other aspects of home improvement.  I love my two-car garage and I park two cars in it (I'm not one to store vehicles outside so that I can have more room to store my junk).

 

I have more interests, but I’m tired.

 

 

 

3d Animated Flags Courtesy of 3dflags.com