Who we Are

Last updated about 2002. This is an historical snapshot only...

Our two children are grown and flown from the nest. Sandra and Carol both graduated from the University of Maryland. They both married great guys and seem to be quite happy.

Sandra and Kent live north of Baltimore. Sandra graduated with a computer science major from Maryland and now works for Legg-Mason outside of Baltimore. Kent has a degree in engineering and an MBA. He works for an independent power company in Baltimore. They recently moved from their town home to their new single family home.

Carol and Rich live in Charlottesville, VA. After graduating from Maryland, Carol went on to the University of Virginia to get her Ph.D. in Microbiology. She met and married Rich there in 1994. Rich also got his doctorate from U.VA., and they both work in the labs there. We have two grandsons, Colin, and his younger brother Andrew. They recently bought their first home and seem to be enjoying it a lot. You can visit their web page.

We stay pretty busy. We get a fair amount of exercise keeping up with the yard work and other projects. We enjoy our home and have no plans to sell everything and move away as we get closer to retirement. We live in a relatively rural area about half way between Baltimore and Washington. It's quiet and private out here yet close to the cities. Our children are fairly near, but not near enough to bother us (or vice versa). As long as we can cut the grass once in a while, we have no particular reason to move. We both work full time jobs. We still get funny looks when we go out in public.

I'm a systems engineer working as a contractor to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). You can learn more about NOAA, the weather service, and the satellites used to gather the weather data. NESDIS runs the satellites. I work for the Office of Systems Development. I do ground systems development engineering to keep the satellite ground systems technically up to date and compatible with the next generation spacecraft. I don't do a lot of hands-on detail engineering any more. I write system specifications and requirements. I review proposals and contract info. Mostly I monitor and direct contractors that do the development work. The equipment and systems we develop are used by the Office of Satellite Operations. Their web page is more interesting than ours is. (We really do control the weather, but you'd need to send money!)

SWMBO is a girl Friday for Gambro Health Care Patient Services, a dialysis services provider. We both enjoy working... at least mostly. We would both like a little more time off, but most employers are not amenable to much more than the usual vacation and holidays.

Well, that's the end of my show 'n tell. I'm always happy to talk about wood working projects, and/or the tools we use. You can e.mail me if you like. Thanks for stopping by. Here's looking at you!