10 Things About Me
- I had a 5″ long (10 cm) skull fracture, with probable brain bleed (pre-CT/MRI days)
- I had 5 additional concussions (knock out blows, 2 more were in bike crashes that broke helmets and other bones). No one told me about traumatic brain injuries – didn’t know until age 58 I had been struggling from TBI aftereffects my entire life.
- I never graduated from high school.
- I went on to earn a BS in computer science, an MS in software engineering, and an MBA.
- I paid for 100% of my own tuition, fees, and food. Lived at home the first 2 years, and then had some assistance with housing costs my junior and senior year of college. In inflation adjusted dollars, today’s costs at the public schools I went to are slightly more at one of them, and slightly less at the other.
- I worked from age 10 onward, starting out doing yard work, then eventually working in a retail store, then at a hospital, and then as a student programming consultant in college, and then summer jobs in industry.
- In my 20s, I rode my bike to work and ran a bunch of 10km fun runs.
- I did not visit Europe for the first time until age 63.
- I have lived with Alaskan malamutes.
- We have 3 “kids”, now adults – one is a psychiatric nurse practitioner, one is a materials science researcher, and one does everything (a data analyst with degrees in geology, geochemistry, microbiology, cell biology and genetics). My wife is a retired RN, and before that, she worked as a biochemist in pharma.