Retired
Single
3 Children
7 Grandchildren
Information update: 04/18/2021

When I say there is a lot of my story I don't feel very good about, there will be some of you with your own versions of that. Most may point out that despite this there were the good parts, and/or that we eventually made it past most of it. A few will wonder if your own stories were perhaps a little more onerous than the others. That group would include me.

There is a lot in my first forty years which was good. But! Most could and should have been much better than it was. A lot was simply not good enough by any standard. And far too little to be proud of. My fault. I didn't grow up when those who depended on me needed me to. I need to recognize that here. It happened that way. I was that way. Let me move on.

In those first forty few years I was in and out of college continuously. I would get my GPA back up and they would let me in again. And then again. I wound up accumulating a huge number of credits. Which was great from the standpoint of living in a fabulously interesting world. But not so great when one needs to get out and get a career going. Through a lot if it of it I would have been called a "professional student" and deserved the epithet, as I largely made it a substitute for going out and earning a living. In the end there almost never came an end to school - I have continued taking classes ever since. Especially since the company paid for it for almost 25 years. Sure beat television!

Too often, even in my late thirties, I didn't have the confidence to to either take or keep a decent job. Which relates to having done too many different kinds of work in my life to want to list. But here goes anyway: grunt, handy-man, TV / electronics fixit man, UMD computer operator. Computer programmer, math tutor, statistical and experimental design consultant, welder, salesman, telecom systems analyst/disaster-recovery wizard, power systems engineer, Microsoft certified systems engineer, truck driver, night watchman, airport security guard (loved being the only one with a gun and in uniform - who would you shoot first if you were the bad-guy?), medical lab tech, photographer/instructor, First Responder First-Aid instructor, sailing instructor, parts department manager, Honda and Evinrude trained mechanic, more, more, and more. Oiy! In the end, I retired from Qwest Comm. as a senior engineer when I was 62. The job was the kind that one would consider killing to get or keep. I loved it. I really did. But some fantastic buyout packages were being offered . . .

I still live on Park Point where my grandparents on both sides lived. I belong here. It couldn't be better (never mind my whining about the weather and the taxes and the tourists and . . .) I will continue to enjoy the underwater world in far-away-places-with-strange-sounding-names until age interferes. I did quit Ski Patrol after 22 years. I do miss that! I don't do the thrill-seeking ski trips anymore either. I scuba dive (mostly in tropical waters) instead. Lots and lots! I don't feed the fish in the Duluth Aquarium any more. I very much enjoyed helping new divers learn, but don't do that anymore either. I race my good old sailboat and vacation on it in the Apostle Islands. I enjoy continuing relationships with a number of people I have met in far corners of the world - truly good stuff! Except that I would like to be as good with people up close as I am at a distance. I miss my German Shepherd, "Madchen". I still love things that go BANG! really loud! Most of all, I'm way too busy to do everything I want to do.

So in all, my first 43 years notwithstanding, I have much to be thankful for. At some point I found myself pleased to be me. Whatever life yet brings my way I will have come out way ahead in the game. Deserving or not, I guess maybe I've won, or something.

Over the long time I have been single I have a few cherished if shorter relationships with women who taught me much that I needed to learn. I have a couple of deeper and longer relationships that have grown my world and richly fulfilled my life each in their own way, most recently reaching our 14th year in 2021. I hope that in each I returned as much as I was given.

Oh, and along the way I noticed that this is a truly beautiful planet I happened to come to. Lucky me!