.After High School, I moved from Gresham Oregon to College Station Texas where I attended Texas A&M University, and the University of Houston where i received my BS in Geology/Geophysics. During my school breaks I traveled to Saudi Arabia where my father worked for Arabian American Oil Company. During this time, i was able to visit Germany, Amsterdam, London and other various parts of Europe and Egypt. After graduating from U of H, I began working for a wildcat oil company in Houston where I was a junior geologist developing and mapping new resource fields within the Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana areas. Then in 1982, when the oil industry went belly-up, I shifted to Hard Rock Mining in Northern Nevada where I worked as a Ore Control Geologist at the Sleeper;; Getchell and Ken Snyder Mines where i was eventually promoted to Project Geologist. . In 2003 , since the mine project was going further and further underground, I decided to take early retirement due to my dislike for the underground environment., and the fact that my wife wanted to move back to Albuquerque so that she could be closer to her parents. I started working for the City of Albuquerque in 2003, first as a surveyor in the Department of Municipal Development, then as an Transit Route Analyst within the Planning Division for the Transit Department (ABQ-Ride). In 2005, I started using Trapeze software (FX, BlockBuster, Bus Stop Manager, MapMaker, and Ops beginning in 2007.
After making over 15 career related moves, we finally bought a house on Albuquerque's West Side overlooking the Rio Grande River.(more of a muddy looking creek by Oregon standards) ...really, it's not much to look at.
! In 2006 I decided to continue my education while working for the City and obtained my MS in Theology with emphasis in Church history, and a second MS in Computer Science. I have since become an associate Pastor (Technical Ministries) with a local church., and just to see how far i could push this aging body of mine, I received my PhD in Theology in 2015, and was grossly disappointed as to how easy it was.
We currently (2019) have one daughter age 32, one son age 27, one grand daughter age 4 and one grand son age 1, two dogs ( a lab and a husky), two cats ( a Ginger and a Tonkinese), and a canary in which my daughter lovingly named "Mr. Tweets" We also have a family of Roadrunners that love to taunt my dogs to no end.
I must say that i definitely miss the green lushness of the Pacific Northwest, and often travel to Portland / Vancouver to visit my sisters and relatives. I find that vacationing up there helps to clear the sand between my ears lol,
With the loss of my wife in 2007, and the loss of my parents in 2017, I now find fewer reasons to visit my old stomping grounds. Sure i have sisters that still live in the area, but we were never close. Perhaps, someday i will return to visit them, but until then, I'll just continue to be an ole 'Gospel loving, prospecting preacher.. (how is that for a retirement prospective) ?