When I am not working, I spend time in my backyard with my wife; though I have to keep a picture of my backyard on my desk, to remind me that I have a backyard. I built everything you see in the picture. My front yard on the other hand is terrible; our two huskies rule it with iron paws. To the left of the picture is my shop, a four car garage really, but it has every tool you could imagine.
I spend my life at that desk you see, more than 140,000 hours; so far. It presently has two computers plugged in, an XPS 730x i7-940 processor, and an XPS 410 quad core processor. Together, they act as a mini-main-frame. I cover the world in lightening speed with them. My wife thinks I single handedly supported the computer industry; I have owned every type of computer from the Commodore 64 on-up. She hates to hear when a new computer system comes out, and hides our checkbook. My office is on the second floor; just to the left of my desk is a 23' by 7' balcony, with a huge tree overcastting it like a giant umbrella. In one of the pictures, you can see my Japanese glass balls under the aquarium. My office cat "Mr. Bob," usually lay's on my printer next to my desk; and watches everything I do, kind of like big-bob did up north. He got his name because he lost his tall, and looks a little bit like a bobcat. When he gets too high and mighty, I humiliate him, by telling him - a real cat has a tail... or telling him, the kids down the street are using it to play - pin the tail on the donkey. That is when he usually gets the bobcat look in his eyes. Also, the last picture is of my Quadro-chess board. I invented it in 1983, when my wife said, four people should be able to play chess at a time, not two, which leaves the wives out. It took me five minutes to design the board and game rules. When you checkmate a kingdom, you take its king off the board, and you get to have its remaining pieces as part of your kingdom; you still only get one move per player, but with vastly more pieces. There are a few more rules but essentially it is just like chess, except you can build larger kingdoms. I noticed that people would allied together, towards defeating another kingdom, then stabbed each other in the back... Kind of like kingdoms have been doing throughout human history.
I build metal sculptures for fun, mostly weathervanes. I designed them to last hundreds of years as heirlooms. They have titanium-cased bearings sets, and a finish that contracts and expands at the same rate as the metal, thus never cracking the seal. As well, they are made of quarter inch cold rolled steel. However, I have never been able to sell one. Nonetheless, it is a good pastime to break the office cycle. The angel is 5' 2" long, has a 4' wingspan, and twenty-five strands of double-sided bronze hair. She is my favorite. She weighs 160 pounds. My eagle on top of my house has a five-foot wingspan and weighs 110 pounds. My seagulls weigh 550 pounds; they are a ground weathervane. My biplane is a museum quality, 19" long, replica of a 1915 Newport 11-C. In spite of their weight, they track a breeze of 5-mph. I had a great time engineering and building them all.
Over the years, I have also engraved glass, wood, and created other types of art. I am not an artist, just creative when I need to take a break from my office. Each one of these engravings took several days to compete; they are quite detailed. They are 4' by 6', 1/4" plate-glass mirrors. My tree has 22ct gold inlay for bark; and all the colors are transparent, creating a 3D effect. The oriental women are a two-piece set. My horses coming out of the ocean also have 22ct gold inlay in their mane. The woodland picture is a wood inlay on a wall. It is 8' by 6'. I used exotic door skins from all over the world, for the inlay material; and used a wood burning set to engrave detail into the trees. The last picture, though badly faded, is an 7' by 5' glass partition, with a weathered ocean tree - cut out of a single piece of 1/2" oak plywood, and sandwiched between two pieces of 1/4" smoked plate-glass. I have not engraved glass since the 1980's. I have never been able to sell any of these engravings either; I am just not a salesman. My wife says that I could not sell a glass of water to a thirsty Arab... However, I donated the tree glass engraving to a family that needed to raise money to take their little girl to Seattle for surgery; fortunately, it sold for enough money that they were able to go to Seattle on its proceeds alone. That is kind of an indirect sale in my book. I liked designing and building them, I did not have interest or time to sale them.
Family photo taken in 1967, of my brothers, sister, mom and dad, over thanks giving dinner. The little guy in the yellow turtleneck is me. I have that caught in the headlights look because I had never seen that camera before, it was a Polaroid, I wanted to take it apart and see how it makes those pictures... In those days, I was a disassembler; if it had parts, I took them apart. That stove you see in the lower right corner, I also took it apart. I could reassemble things that worked better with fewer parts; and with the extra parts leftover, I could build other things. We lived across the street from "Boeing" in Renton WA., at night, I would sneak all through their buildings, planes, and trashcans, looking for parts. I hauled a lot of Boeing stuff up into the hills behind our house, where I was building a spaceship. Also, I was still recovering from being pounded by my sister; I had taken her "Easy bake oven" apart; just after I made and ate all the little cakes. She would have still been pounding me, but I threaten to take her princess phone apart as well... She looks older than me, but she is actually a year younger; having three brothers caused her to develop faster... She was always put in charge of babysitting us - even though I was older, I guess she was more responsible. She became a doctor, and I became a citizen scientist.
In 1980, an old man drew this sketch when I was twenty-three years old. We were all stuck in the 'Otis Hotel' for two weeks during the 'Mount St. Helens' eruption. I had only been in Spokane two months when that event occurred. We got about an inch of ash covering everything; it looked like gray snow. For me it was an odyssey, walking the streets of Spokane wearing a facemask and all. For a moment, it seemed the world had come to a grayish end. Our brooms - just were not big enough to clean up the mess, Spokane was shoveling ash for more than a year. However, it had some beneficial aspects, our state is still quite green from all that ash fertilizer. As well, enterprising people were making little bags of ash and selling them to people back east for a dollar a bag. Moreover, there were a number of research projects started, looking for health effects from severe long term ash exposure; which created many new jobs in the process. It is a case of something good coming from something bad...
Photo taken 1982; I was pondering... I just got back from the Northwest Territories in Canada. I was 400 miles above Yellowknife, inside the Arctic Circle. I spent six weeks pulling a 12-foot toboggan loaded with two hundred pounds of gear; I was pulling twice my weight. I was planning to spend a year there, but the 'RCMP' kicked me out; shaking their heads, crazy American's. The average temperature was -30f, but my coldest night was -48f. It was so cold that a layer of ice coated everything, plants, trees, and my mustache too. At times, the Aurora Borealis colors were so intense, that they would reflect pastel colors off everything; even ice crystals falling from a clear sky - reflected the colors like glitter. It seemed there was always either a sunrise or sunset, with no in-between, just a perpetual twilight. It was an incredible winter wonderland.
Photo taken in 2006, of my wife 'Laurie' on the left, me in the middle, and my grandfather on the right. My grandfather is 92 years old in this photo. He died July 23, 2009, at the age of 95. He was the last of the hard rock miners. He had a 21-gun salute, "Taps" played on a bugle, and then a stick of dynamite was set off to mark the end of an era. He actually dug part of his own grave; he did not want others to have to do the hard work of mining his own grave. He is the last of the old-timers. America was built by men such as he...
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