The following is a brief recounting of the highlights of my life so far, by no means is it complete or fully represents the experiences that I have had but it’s a starting place to understand who I am and the forces that have made me the person I am today.
My life started off simple enough when I became more than a thought deep in the John Muir wilderness on the banks of Florence Lake. My parents were at the time running the general store and operating the ferry boat to take hikers across the lake. I’ve visited many times since during my childhood and can’t think of a more pristine and natural of a place to have been conceived.
While a remember little of it my early childhood was far from normal. I spent the first year of my life in a one room shack constructed on a hill overlooking a man made lake on my grandfather’s ranch in the San Joaquin Valley mere moments from the Sequoia National Forest. My bed was a handmade cradle formed from a wooden barrel that had been cut in half and lined with sheepskin. The only appliance was a classic cast iron wood cooking stove that served to provide both heat and cooking area.
My first memories begin in the next part of my journey when after tiring of California my parents moved up to Philomath Oregon. Were I grew up as a child of the earth, roaming through the garden and getting into all manner of trouble. I loved the outdoors and spent the summers playing in the water. During this time I was joined by the arrival of my sister.
After fixing up the house in Philomath my parents decided to return to the nomadic lifestyle once again and purchased a 21’ Air Stream trailer that became our home for the next couple of years as we traveled the beaches and trailer parks of southern California in and around Santa Barbara. I can vividly remember arriving at new site every few days and running out with trash bags to collect as much garbage and old cigarette butts as possible, which I would then carry down to the ranger station to redeem for a Woodsy Owl “Give a Hoot Don’t Pollute” patch or other assorted items which I collected with pride. This proved to be a formative time in my life as I learned to explore the tide pools and identify the many animals that inhabited them (sea anemones, hermit crabs, sand crabs, and many other wonderful creatures).
Tiring of being on the road we returned to my grand fathers ranch and took over the duties of the caretaker who had recently passed away. My father, having always loved backpacking but not able to do it much with two small children decided to get some Llama’s to enable back country hiking with children. They were supposed to by less invasive on the natural environment than horses were, and proved also to be very stubborn. I can vividly remember sitting in a saddle fashioned from interlocking wood handles on the back of a Llama while it refused to go any further down the trail and sat down in the stream we were crossing. But this time in the wilderness was wonderful and has such vivid recollections for me that I can still smell the campfire and roasting fresh caught trout.
Back on the road again we took the Air Stream trailer north and arrived in Gold Beach, Oregon a small logging town just north of the California border. We purchased a 5 acre piece of property on the shores of the Rogue River 3 miles from the inlet to the Pacific Ocean. This estuary offered an amazing variety of activates for a young adventurous child. Each day would offer a low tide exposing over a 100 feet of tidelands that would trap small animals and offer hours of entertainment. Every winter the river would flood its banks swelling into the property and causing uncertainty on the part of my mother as to whether this year would be the one that washed away our house which was built on stilts. For me it was a chance to take my mini kayak out and paddle through trees I normally played around during the summer.
On this property we parked the Air Stream trailer and proceeded to construct a 24 foot Yurt to live in. This Yurts was constructed of canvas wrapped around a wooden mesh for the walls and 2×4 beams tied together in the center with a clear acrylic dome. During the winter months when winds would reach over 50 MPH through the river basin the sides of the yurt would sway inwards and I always feared it would lift off and fly away.
Having decided the yurt was not well suited for the climate and raising a family my father happened upon the idea of building a geodesic dome in its place. So next thing I know we have a series of hexagonal pieces assembled in the driveway and viola we are now living in a dome. Which I thought was the coolest thing in the world and proceeded to construct my own scale model out of cardboard which I brought into 3rd grade for show and tell. I do however quite clearly recall my father’s dismay at the act of roofing and sheet rocking this multisided house.
I was introduced to the wonderful world of computers by my Mom’s Father on a visit to their house with his Vic 20 and I was immediately hooked. I was so amazed at what it could do with a coupe of lines of code that you typed in from a magazine. I was so enthralled by it that he gave us the Vic 20 and I dug into it later upgrading to a tape drive were I could store the programs I entered without having to retype them every time I wanted to execute them. ( I still have that very same Vic 20 stored) Then commodore announced the 64 bit computer and I drove my parent’s nuts until they finally bought me one. It was the beginning of the end and I became the resident computer expert even teaching the class how to use it when they got one in 4th grade.
After going through the 4th grade in public school I was bored of class and was continually finishing my homework ahead of schedule and doing stupid chores around the classroom because the teachers didn’t know what to do with me. Having had a degree in education my mother decided to try home schooling me. This turned out to be one of the best and perhaps the most influential decisions on my life. I thrived on this learning environment, I could sit down and whip out a couple of days worth of school work and then spend time on other things that interested me. I began tracking the stock market actively following the course of a number of solar stocks with my father, which I watched soar and the tumble as the energy crisis abated. I built models, studied chemistry, tinkered with the computer, and played for hours in the outdoors with nothing but my imagination to construct wondrous worlds and adventures from.
It was during this time that I became interested in more active environmental issues when tidewater corporation built a gravel mining plant across the river from us and my father became active in the community speaking out against it’s affect on the protected Rogue River basin and the community. I would attend meetings were people like him would speak out and then get yelled at and threatened by the people representing the county government and interest of tidewater corp. Determined to do my part I read about an organization called green peace that was trying to save the whales and I made tons of signs and with pictures of whales on them and put them all along the road.
Around this time a remarkable event happened, my parents had a little baby boy. It was a real treat for me because his birth was at home and got an up close experience on this amazing miracle, even getting to cut the umbilical cord.
Having had enough of the politics in Gold Beach and wanting to move to warmer weather we decided to move to Hawaii were we had been vacationing for a few years. We packed up and moved to the Big Island and spent a few months living in condos while we looked for places we could afford to live. Finally we moved into a small one bedroom condo, which we retrofitted into a two bedroom by sectioning off the dining room into a bedroom that held a triple decker bunk bed.
I became a beach bum! With no school to attend I would what hours my fair skin could stand on the beach swimming, surfing and snorkeling. Coming in during the hottest hours of the day to play with the newest Commodore 128 and exploring ways to peek and poke and otherwise manipulate the computer into doing what I wanted it to do.
1989 – 1994 – Higher Education
Then is finally happened I exceeded what my mom was able to teach me and longed to be around others my same age. So I enrolled in public school for 8th grade. What a shock that was, here I was a skinny little kid going into a school where I knew only one person. But a quickly made friends and excelled in the honors classes. But many of us were still bored and used our free time to create fantasy world in role playing games during recess. This also marked a time period were I created two separate groups of friends, the looser crowd I surfed with after school and the geeks I hung out with in class and during school. Being able to blend in and accept and be accepted by either group seemed easy to me at the time but was instrumental in my attitude toward accepting people as they are and finding the unique qualities that each person has.
After a year in public schools I was ready to go it alone again and pulled out of the public school system for another two years. Then during what would have been my Sophomore year one of my best friends joined a new Solar racing club at the school. They had a grant to build a solar car and race against other local high schools. I participated a little but was restricted from doing many things because I wasn’t a full time student. The group went on the win the local race and traveled to Australia for the world solar challenge placing first in the high school category.
So junior year I enrolled in school so I could participate fully in this solar car program. We set about securing funds to build a brand new vehicle based on the learning’s of the first. We managed to secure a grant from the Bank of America in exchange for being part of a commercial for their entry into the State of Hawaii. Through the guidance of some amazing people like Budd Steinhilber, Bill Woerner, and Bill McKown I became the team leader and helped organize a team of all volunteer students in designing and building a second generation solar vehicle. I was consumed by the project and spent every waking moment thinking about ways to go further and make it better. Then we were shocked to be excluded for the US tour de sol race because the director of the department of energy had made a decision that only colleges would be allowed to participate. Felling that we were ready for that event and more we embarked on the planning for a first time every cross continental journey that would take us from the west coast to the east coast on Solar power alone.
After months of preparation seven students and three advisors departed Long Beach California on what was to become a 3421 mile journey across the country taking 51 days to reach the coast of Delaware marking the first time that a High school sola car had traveled across the country from coast to coast. This trip hardened me to leadership and made me think on my feet constantly. The advisors constantly pushed me as the student lead to make decisions that would affect the safety of morale of the others. I learned I enjoyed leading by helping others, by jumping in and being the first one to do the hard work and motivating and inspiring the rest to give it everything they had too.
That trip also marked the end of my high school experience and I returned from Delaware tired and ready for a break before heading off to college. I choose to take a year off and recharge my batteries, while trying to figure out what I wanted to study in college. Upon returning to Hawaii Budd Steinhilber pulled me aside and asked what I wanted to do, stuck I answered Electrical engineering. He showed me his portfolio and introduced me the field of Industrial Design. This was what I had been looking for and knew then and there that I needed to go to a school that I could study it at.
1994 – 1999 College
Western Washington University stood out as the top school, mostly because I failed to apply to a number of others and it was the only one I got accepted to that had an Industrial Design program. Perhaps it was fate or just good luck but this turned out to be the perfect school in the perfect location for me.
Industrial Design program
Bellingham house remodel
Year off and Magnolia house remodel
2000 – 2006 – Working for the Man
Marriage
Town home living
Kirkland McMansion
Microsoft (Shop.microsoft.com, Xbox, Microsoft.com (BDM, Midmarket, Enterprise, Industry, MBS/Dynamics, Windows)
2006 – ???? – Searching for Green
Bellingham
Down town condo living
Lake House Remodel
