Bio: I'm a Hoosier in both origin as well as alma mater, but there is a lot of stuff that in between and since.
My upbringing pretty well pegs me as a stereotypical nerd. I was in the Ooh Aah Smart kids class (officially called ELP) in elementary school. Twice a week they'd bus us to another school where we did all kinds of awesome things such as writing Choose Your Own Adventure stories in BASIC on TRS-80s, learning about genetics by breeding fruit flies, and researching and dressing up as historical figures for parents' night and have them try to guess who we were (I was Galileo Galilei).
Things didn't really slow down in the nerd department from there. I played trumpet in the band, was on the academic team, and was in Speech & Debate. I started with Impromptu because I'm lazy and didn't want to have to prepare like the people who did Extemporaneous Speaking. Unfortunately, it turns out I really sucked at Impromptu and was way better at the Radio Broadcasting category. It was also easier since you didn't have to see the people that judged you.
Some may argue that going into the military is not nerdy, but they just don't know the number of hardened sailors, soldiers, and marines who are big fans of Dungeons & Dragons and similar staples of nerddom. It didn't help that I went into the navy to learn to be a reactor operator on a nuclear submarine (I read WAY too much Tom Clancy in high school). I was shipped off to Orlando, Florida for about a year and a half to learn all about electronics, reactor theory, thermodynamics, water chemistry and all kinds of other things required for working on a nuclear reactor.
From there, I was shipped to Saratoga Springs, New York to learn how to apply all these things to an actual up and running reactor. I was not a fan of this kind of practical learning and didn't take to it too well at first. Saratoga Springs, on the other hand, is a gorgeous town and I loved living there.
From there, I was sent off to the USS Miami out of Groton, CT. I did two deployments during my 4 years there, once to the north Atlantic where I underwent my Blue Nose initiation, and the other to the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean. These were back in 1997 and 1998/9, so during our operations in Former Yugoslavia. But it didn't really matter. For a submariner in the engineroom as I was, the view was always the same.
After my six years in the Navy was up, I went to college in Bloomington, IN doing something as far away from nuclear power as I could get. I got degrees in Philosophy and Religious Studies and a minor in Political Science. It turns out I didn't really hate nuclear power like I thought, I just really didn't like the "office" politics in the navy. No matter, I love my liberal arts education and I have totally drunk the Fla-vor-aid regarding how the liberal arts are important for people to learn critical thinking skills that sadly aren't taught anymore.
While I may love my hippified fields of study, it doesn't exactly go far when looking for a job, and neither does military experience if you've been out of the military for a number of years. So, I moved to Texas (for the worst of all possible reasons) and finally found a job in construction as a QA tester. I tested things like concrete and mortar to make sure they were strong enough and also inspected rebar and post-tension cabling to make sure it was placed correctly. This is not a fun job to do in the summer during a very dry and very hot summer.
I did that until I found a better job with the city of Dallas. I now work in the purification division of their water utilities department, where I take chemical samples to make sure there is enough chlorine and ozone in the water and make sure everything is running as it should. It's similar to working on a power plant, but more laid back.
Yeah, that was entirely too long. Eh bien. Suffice it to say that I'm a jack-of-all-trades. I know a little something about a great many topics and can even go into some depth on some pretty esoteric subjects.
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