I am now in the third act of my life. I enjoyed an idyllic childhood growing up on a farm in Iowa. Not only did I have a stay-at-home Mom, I also had a stay-at-home Dad! I worked side by side with them every day. That probably explains why I've seldom had a "real job"

I attended Iowa State University. It was the '70s. I majored in event planning, but that was before ISU had a degree program for that. They dismmised my studies as simply "partying" and declined to award me a degree for my efforts.

Act II. I got into the insurance business and upon the invitation of a former manager I moved to Denver. in 1982 another agent and I founded an employee benefits administration firm. The personal computer revolution was just beginning and I hopped on. I had taught myself BASIC on the agency's Wang 2200 M(VP). When we took off on our own, the first purchase was a Commodore 64 with a whopping 64K of RAM. Later on a Compaq 286 with 640K of Ram and self taught dBASE programming developed us even further. When C.O.B.R.A. was enacted in 1985 I wrote software to deal with that and we eventually developed over 500 clients with roughly 8000 former employees at some stage in their benefits continuation. In 1992 I left downtown Denver and began telecommuting from the family farm in Iowa. I have since sold that business and what started as a hobby after an early heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery has now become a way of making a living. I am the village kaleidoscope maker.

Act III. I am now in my 60s and all that background plus some volunteer activities have led me to 3 passions. One of my greatest joys ever was being chair for a centennial celebration for a small town of 200 people. Among other hugely successful activities, we hosted 252 entries in a parade. Yes, some of us went through twice.

Three main activites now take up most of my time.