Funs Between Works

Thirteen years spent as a common laborer with limited skill sets, taking college coursework as time and budget allowed during that span of years before beginning a professional careeer which would carry on for thirty years, twelve of which would entail operating my own company, the path was long but not as arduous as expected. Along the way there were always lots of fun times experienced between stretches of work, and even most of those were a joy to have lived through, even if some were dangerous and very risky to life and limb.

WORKS First job earning money from strangers involved the odd art of monoculturing in a humid subtropical land, officially known as USDA Hardiness Zone 9a, where tropicals and subtropicals grow long and lush unattended. And yet humans strive to keep their yards well carpeted with a single species of mown grass at all cost to budgets, environment, and sanity.

There's nothing like the racket of engines on each and every single, calm Sunday morning.

FUNS after works that summer involved heavy rubberbands, snake tongs and pillowcases. The rubberbands stunned agile little lizards, the tongs, agile cottonmouths swimming in inky waters. They all ended up in pillowcases if we were agile enough to nab them on the run. We weighed and measured all of them and pickled some of them in formaldehyde for science.

Daydreams extended that fun with visions of becoming a bayou dweller with our dog Tanji.

WORKS The lawn mowing continued after moving to a harsh, dry, barren land where the water was bad and was inhabited by a mischievous gang of hippie kids, The Pickwick Players.

FUNS We spotted them as we arrived in town and were having first look at our new neighborhood. Dad said "Look at all the hippies." and we all laughed over his insightfulness.

On my first day at school, those hippies kidnapped me and took me to their theatre where I was encourage to play my guitar and improvise on stage in front of them all. The director, Mr. Grascyk, liked the way I played House Of The Rising Sun and Classical Gas on twelve string guitar, but wasn't impressed by my acting abilities. Still he agreed to let me join the group for a tuition fee. I told him I had no money and my parents would not spring for it. He thought about it for all of five seconds then reluctantly granted me a scholarship to join up.

After seeing the Monahans Sandhills, premonitionary visions of roaming over dunes ensued.

WORKS The stint performing with The Pickwick Players was fun, but by the next summer work on a pig farm in Illinois beckoned. Its stench was pervasive but Rob Roy Creek was cool.

FUNS Ice skating on Rob Roy was cool, too. Rob Roy is where The Fox–aka Rey–would conduct secretive meetings with Royco of the Chicago Daily News to tell all about his most recent nonviolent acts of environmental vigilantism, like the times he plugged smoke stacks with giant stoppers and dumped barrels of polluted sludge on the floor of U.S. Steel's lobby.

WORKS Aside from giving private guitar lessons to a few kids living in the next harsh, arid land, getting around a city of four million people was sketchy work for a teen who could not speak any Farsi. Soon, though, it became apparent that carrying a guitar made it a lot easier.

FUNS That task had a fun side, too, when opportunity arose for venturing beyond city limits into surrounding verge of desert land seeking adventure. Having read the first of Frank Herbert's trilogy, and with unenviable prospect of dying in a foreign jungle nation called Vietnam while fighting a futile, unwinnable war of attrition, it was fun entertaining ideas of gaining means of transport across vast expanses of wild sand to become a desert creature.

Our choir teacher talked us into performing Peace Train and Horse With No Name on stage at the University. The audience was appreciative, and as we played, TV cameras rolled onto stage to record. We found out later it was to be broadcast over the national TV network.

WORKS Returning to the States, after eagerly consuming every American dish and entertainment craved while living abroad, a job at a gas station helped me learn how to lube vehicles and pump gas into them all day long. Not enjoying that work much at fifty cents per hour, a search for more interesting work began in earnest. Soon I had dropped out to tune in as a jug band member working days at a lumber yard on the shores of a high mountain lake.

FUNS The audition with the jug band went well and we agreed to keep at it, but living and working at high altitude as winter snows began to fall, my mistake soon became obvious. Thanks for the opportunity, Guffy. I've always regretted not following that dream to fruition.

WORKS Deciding to return and finish highschool, and after Nixon had stopped sending troops to Vietnam, I took a job as a convenience store clerk and considered enlisting in the Air Force. The recruiter informed me that myopia and strabismus would keep me out of any kind of cockpit. Another quick misadventure to OKC convinced me not to enlist in the Army.

Taking on a rough nightshift job at a truck stop fixing semi truck tires, the swarm of flying bugs I had to strive hard not to allow to fly into my mouth as I yawned more each moment sunrise approached, a conviction not to do that kind of work my entire life settled in quickly.

FUNS Times I wasn't too pooped to play after a week of shifts on that job were spent roaming The Breaks where I could find solace in silence and solitude of that beautiful place.

WORKS Then I had completed serving time in the public school system and could set out to become an adult working hard as an adult should. Walking up to the rig, I saw that all of its pipe and collars were standing in the derick, indicating I would be tripping on that first day working as a roughneck on a wildcatter rig punching holes into gas pockets ready to blow.

That was interesting, more challenging work, but when it was time to promote me to chainman, I balked at the thought of throwing the chain and losing fingers in the process. So I skipped having fun that summer and moved back to a familiar place, taking on a job making and delivering crushed ice. It was a decent job and I liked the boss, but college beckoned. So after passing the ACT and being admitted, the book learning recommenced. After knocking out required base credits it was time to embark on a higher level of learning.

After completing the first year of college coursework, a year working at a gas transmission facility and a summer job driving trucks delivering bulk cement to petroleum drilling sites, followed by a short period of roustabouting provided impetus to return to school studying what I really wanted to be studying. So I started composing and practicing for the audition.

FUNS An audition in a renowned music school for a renowned jazz guitarist somehow resulted in being admitted into the performance guitar program. And then I was in paradise.

These studies progressed well and I was learning to perform complex, demanding pieces of music under pressure. After acing my junior year jury, my guitar instructor invited me to go to Spain to study under Segovia. But I was broke by then and had to return to the workforce.

WORKS At two years in the school of music, classmates who were superb musicians much more talented than I was returned from east and west coasts starved and unemployed. This convinced me to abandon goals seeking fame and fortune as a working musician to pursue a degreen in science or engineering. Working as a weldor building boat docks on Possum Kingdom Lake, I also began boning up on algebra and trigonometry. That job was as much fun as it was hard labor, well worth the time spent on it even though the pay wasn't so great.

FUNS The job working on the lake was where the fun was that year. I camped some in various places but really enjoyed being out on the lake working for the barge company a lot.

WORKS A year later I was admitted to a good engineering school and began hitting the books hard in that intense field of study, and in more advanced mathematics. Civil engineer was the goal, and I enjoyed learning the subject matter, but then I took a course in computer programming using the FORTRAN language. That's when I finally found professional calling.

FUNS From the moment I was admitted to pursue a bachelor of science degree in computer science and mathematics, it was all fun through to graduation day, having finally found my niche. The dean of the department, Dr. Carpenter, interviewed me for consideration to be admitted into the program and agreed I was a good fit with high probablity of success considering my extensive arts and sciences study trajectory to date. He handed me a degree plan, I immediately enrolled and knocked out coursework at pace through to my graduation.

I enjoyed the course work and really enjoyed the labwork, soon acquiring a PC and compilers to do the work for all my labs at home where it was quiet and comfortable. I could see potential doing such work remotely someday as CEO/CIO/CFO/... of my own company.

And that if I couldn't immediately set up in a home/studio environment to run my company then it would be easy to do so from any city anywhere in the nation, or in the world, desired.

Imagining the ultimate situation and setup for such outcomes kept me striving to achieve it.

A brief cartography job performed for a regional water management entity building a new reservoir in Texas convinced me beyond any remaining doubt that I was on the right track.

WORKS After coding for a couple of startups which weren't much heading anywhere I wanted to follow, a global corporation doing telemetry log analysis software development needed skilled software engineers, so I applied, interviewed and was immediately hired.

FUNS Although I loved the work I was doing and thought it was too enjoyable to be earning so much to be doing it, I began expanding my horizons to have fun outside of work, too. Fun like canoeing during meteor showers; surf kayaking as seas grew high and rough or on calm bays where I could paddle right up to a warf and buy fresh seafood; open canoeing in alligator waters; observing Hale-Bopp comet from the caprock; mountain biking, snow skiing and running class II whitewater in an open canoe in the Rockies; overlanding in various places across the southwest; kayaking among Orca in Johnstone Strait at the northern end of Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada; and even jumping out of an airplane which was not about to conk out and crash.

While traveling across the southwest, I began planning my escape from The Hard Gray Edge.

WORKS Seeking new skills and related employment where those skills could be leveraged toward success in a career which was rocking along much better than I ever expected it would, a pair of new jobs were landed in the realm of financial management software solutions. These jobs were city-bound but they allowed me to attain skill sets and experience which encouraged me to chase the dot com bubble and acquire web applications development work out west on the Front Range, a life-long goal was now well within sights.

FUNS That job was more fun than toil and having mountains within short driving distance in every direction except east, I was living a dream long sought, one of the most fun aspects of which was being able to bike along a beautiful stream all the way from my home at the edge of a regional park to the office building where hot coffee and bagels were waiting to be had.

WORKS Then the dot com bubble I had chased to the Front Range burst and I was laid off by the B2B startup I had so eagerly sought employment with eight months before. Fortunately, winter had passed and I was able to spend spring and part of summer along the front range and into the deeper reaches of the Rockies as an indie singer/songwriter performing my orginial songs and tunes for five glorious months of the freest time of my life. This work eventually led to winning third place in the Silverton Jubilee songwriter's contest in 2002 where I was invited to perform that song and another on stage beneath the big tent.

Five months and four or five interviews later I was offered several positions in a City Dysfunctional including a job in software engineering working for a state government not too far from the homestead property I had purchased only a few years earlier. Eager to begin construction on that property to create an off-grid home/studio thoroughly embedded in wilderness where its natural beauty and quiet solitude would allow creation of wonderfully-crafted solutions for clients of still unknown kind or cloth could commence sooner than later.

FUNS During time spent as a government employee I learned a lot of what I wanted to know and what I didn't care to know about bureaucracies and the people running them. But that did not dampen desire to get out and seek fun in an enchanting land chock full of fun stuff.

WORKS Six years later that dream was achieved in spades and I found myself living year round at the home/studio no matter how severe the weather or how deep the snow drifts.

Next up: The Big Fire