This is my life so far.

I was born in the middle of the last month of 1940. At the time of my birth we lived in La Mesa, California ... but that has changed often. My first trip, made when I was a year old, was to Maryland and back, after a stay of about a month, by car when my father was recalled into the Navy for World War II. I'm told it was a difficult trip, my pregnant mother alone with me, accompanied by a cousin who was, if I remember the stories right, only 14 at the time. I remember very little of that adventure.

After that trip we were more concerned with raising chickens and harvesting avocados. Then the war ended and we took another long trip, to Berlin, New Hampshire, for the two months it took to get my father retired from the Navy. I do remember some of the second trip, primarily that the paper mills of Berlin stink in summer.

Most of my father's life was spent as a soldier or sailer. He tried the Navy first, went into the Army at the start of World War I (not a typo: First World War), then went back into the Navy. Now a civilian for the first time since his teen years, my father needed to seek work. Not much was available in San Diego, so we moved to the Puget Sound area of Washington, where he worked in the building of aircraft. That lasted for about five years. We returned to California, eventually building a house in Lemon Grove, the very house I now own and inhabit.

I didn't move again until after I graduated from high school and college, but I did travel to Japan twice after graduating from college. I had been working on underwater sound physics, writing analytical programs for a sonar array, and flew to Japan to ride a submarine around for about a month in 1964. By 1966 I had switched to physical oceanography and rode a research vessel from Hawaii to Japan and nearly back (I got off on Midway Island) to babysit the computer I had programmed for the trip. When they tried to get me to ride a submarine from Australia to India to try to figure out why they weren't getting any data on their sonar research, I quit. I quickly found a job with a Hawaiian company on Johnston Atoll, tending to the missile-tracking computers there. Two years later I found myself in Panama.

Panama was nice. I liked rainy weather, so I had no problem with their long rainy season. I liked the people of Panama and married one of them. I learned Spanish. What I didn't like was that, at that time, there were too many governments involved: the U.S. Senate, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. military, the Panama Canal government, the Panamanian government and the Panamanian military. All of them, it seemed, hated U.S. civilians living in Panama. I remained in Panama for nineteen years, leaving when it became obvious an invasion was about to take place. I had worn out my welcome.

I retired from federal civil service in the summer of 1989, credited with 28 years, five months and four days of service. It was almost enough to live on. As difficult as it was for me to find a job, keeping my jobs proved to be more difficult. I got fired from one programming job for no obvious reason (they were firing everybody). I had to quit one job selling life insurance because my migraine aura made it impossible for me to see. I lost my computer support job when the support function was outsourced and the support group disbanded. I spent more time not working than working. Then my spine gave out and I couldn't work any more. I've been retired since the summer of 2004.

	Taking a break from work -- only in my dreams! Retired! Not retarded! Just as I retired from federal civil service before turning 49, I've completely retired before I reached 65. That doesn't mean I spend my time climbing mountains. I retired because I was incapable of working.

It may be an addiction: I have sites and Weblogs all over the place. Is there some kind of Web Creators Anonymous for me?