One Dad's Life

I Remember When...

• Gas broke that $1.00 barrier and all the signs needed to be changed from the two digit signs.
• Darth Vader was evil personified in the universe and not a voice for your GPS.
• Marathon Bars still existed.  I waited until my braces were off to get one again...only to find they had stopped making them.
• Cell phones were the size of a briefcase and only in James Bond movies.
• India and China were nearly fictitious places on a globe...not somewhere I actually visit and have friends!
• Staying up to 1:00AM was crazy late...and not an early night to bed.
• I wanted to be a carpet layer.
• Work stopped when you left the office.
• Our TV had 5 channels, not hundreds.
• My daughter was entering Kindergarten, not High School!
• My dream car was a 1968 Camaro, not a 2010 Camaro. Note: I have yet to own ANY Camaro.
• we barbecued on our covered patio, with Jack Buck calling the game through a small radio propped up on the window sill. Magic!
• The weekend meant "down" time.
• I was terrified of honey bees.
• I had the first Dr. Pepper (that I remember) from my Grandma Mueller.  Love 'em to this day.

Childhood Memories - Car Trips

One of my favorite things to do as a kid was going on long car trips. My mom had made this big denim thing that hung on the backs of the front seats that had a bunch of pockets for my brother and sister and me to put all our books, drawing supplies, and other miscellaneous items we HAD to bring in.

I remember spending hours with a straight-edge, triangle, and a french curve drawing, of all things, train engines!  Diesel train engines.  In minute detail.  I loved trains.  Still do, actually. In between drawing, I'd read library books...lots of library books.

Another one of my favorite things was following our route on a map.  I was the navigator!  I'd carefully watch the exits, mile markers, and towns and constantly watch for the next major upcoming landmark. I always wondered about all those places we drove past.

I'd nearly forgotten about my love of maps as a kid, but the other day driving home, Dave Glover (on the aptly named Dave Glover Show) mentioned that maps were dead, and had been replaced by mapquest and the GPS.

What!?!?  This couldn't be! Suddenly my love of maps came rushing back to me, and then I realized that he was right. I didn't remember the last time I had really used a map unless it was on Mapquest or our GPS.  Then I started thinking about what one of our typical longer car trips is like these days.

Sure, the kids still bring stuff to draw with and they bring books to read.

But, we are also packing more electronics than NASA used to launch the original rockets that went TO THE MOON!

There are iPods (multiple - and multiple as in having FOUR iPods), also portable DVD players, cell phones (my oldest daughter manages to keep in constant contact with all her friends - which is critical), and multiple Nintendo DS portable video games machines.

The old standby car games like the license plate state game or travel bingo (remember those little cardboard bingo cards with the little red windows you could close when you found the item behind it?) have been replaced with three out of four of our car occupants playing Mario Party DS via the wirelessly networked Nintendo DS games.  I abstain, because I'm driving and it doesn't really seem safe for me to be kicking everyone's posteriors in the mini-games while I should be watching out for road hazards...and other cars.  In the back of the car, my wife and I are both packing our laptops.  We of course need those in case we need to remind each other of something...you have to send the email with something!

Oh, and yes, we have the GPS, too.

From My Music Collection - The Bay City Rollers

I've always been a music fan, and spent lots of time listening to my dad's records and even spent my allowance on records! I've been collecting albums and CDs ever since. My main interest has been rock music for a very long time...ever since discovering KSHE on my dad's tuner and KXOK-AM on my Charlie Tuna Radio!

Mixed in with the typical 70's rock music were the occasional total POP albums. Inexplicably, one of those pop bands for me was "The Bay City Rollers."

Yeah, that's right, you heard what I said.  The same time I was listening to Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy, Rush, and Boston, I'd also throw on The Bay City Rollers and play air guitar along with this band.

One of these things is not like the others.

To tell you the truth, there are albums in my collection that are even more incongruous than this one.  However, I'm kind of testing the waters with "The Bay City Rollers" before I go confessing some of my other band choices!

The funny thing is, I can still hear these songs in my head even though I haven't heard them for many years.  I'm pretty convinced my kids would LOVE them. They are catchy!  I really need to dig out the turntable and put some of these things on for them.

In particular, off the album above there was ONE particular song that I played over and over and over and over....and over.  Check out track #3 on the right (you may have to click the image to expand it):

That's right, it's "Saturday Night!"

You couldn't go to your neighborhood roller skating rink without hearing that track at least once.  Good times. Good times. In case you've forgotten, I've included some of the lyrical genius for you below.

S. A. T. U. R. D. A. Y. night!

S. A. T. U. R. D. A. Y. night!

S. A. T. U. R. D. A. Y. night!

S. A. T. U. R. D. A. Y. night!

Gonna keep on dancin' to the
rock and roll
a Saturday night, Saturday night
Dancin' to the rhythm in our
heart and soul
a Saturday Night, Saturday night

Oh, and for the record, I still DO regularly listen to Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy, Rush, and to a lesser extent Boston.  Of course these are mixed in with a whole bunch of NEW rock music.  I'm not totally stuck on the music that was around when I was in high school, just so you know.

update: I should mention for some of you youngsters out there that the pictures are scans of Vinyl Albums.  They came in a big 12" cardboard case, which often had fantastic artwork. Inside, was a round vinyl disc that you put on a turntable.  It was stereo, though not at first.  The turntable would pick up the music from bumps in the sides of the grooves on the disc.  The second scan is the paper label that was glued in the middle of the disc.  The discs were two-sided.  Does that help?

Childhood Memories - Fall

Yesterday in St. Louis it was un-seasonably cool as the remnants of hurricane Gustav arrived.

It seemed like fall!  Since it was so cool, and overcast, the early evening triggered a series of certain childhood memories.

(This is where you imagine squiggly lines from the top of the screen to the bottom as we go way back in time.  OK, we're there.)

I think because of the cool air, the relative darkness, and the fact that I had been in school all day made playing outside in the fall all the more fun.  I remember wearing those hoody sweatshirts with the strings that always got pulled into the hood somehow and running around my yard in my Sears Toughskins pants, playing, while my mom was inside making dinner.

Once in a while, you'd hear a pot clang, or the water run, but mostly you just concentrated on your playing.  In the fall, there were all kinds of fallen leaves and seed pods to collect, too.  We'd pretend we were farmers gathering the harvest and would haul our "harvest" all over the place and carefully sort it into piles to be saved for winter.

Or, we'd have our Tonka trucks out in the large sand-box my dad had built for us, which was another amazing place to play, while light from the windows spilled out into the shadows in the yard. 

Some days we'd play the whole cowboys and Indians thing...which worked out pretty good as my brother liked being the Indian (even had an Indian birthday, complete with a tepee over the gate to our yard) and I loved the whole cowboy thing.  Back then, you could even have realistic looking cap guns and have great fun blasting away at everyone.  I still love all those western cowboy guns!

Some days, we'd play with those little green plastic army men, creating elaborate campaigns in the flower beds and among the shrubbery.  Strangely, we had a set of astronauts similar to the army men - except they were brightly colored and held various astronaut equipment in addition to their space-suits.  Since we didn't have many characters, the conflicts were usually the army men on one side and the astronauts on the other. Space exploration was HUGE when I was a kid as the Apollo moonwalks were going on.

As soon as my dad would come home from work, we'd scramble to get his attention and show him what we were playing or try to get him to play along.  Sometimes he would, though I'm sure all he wanted to do was relax a minute before we had to run in for dinner.

Perhaps fall was great for all the anticipation it brought as well.  There was Halloween with my Casper the Friendly Ghost plastic mask and suit, or the similarly styled witch costume.  Yes, I dressed like a witch for Halloween on more than one occasion! Also, a marionette.  I guess I had some, um, interesting costumes for a boy! Then my birthday, and Thanksgiving with all the Pilgrim decorations, and a cool horn-o-plenty filled with fascinating gourds.  Of course, the moment Thanksgiving was over, the Christmas Season was in full swing with special church services, Advent Wreaths and Angels and Mangers with Wisemen and Baby Jesus along right along with "The Night Before Christmas", "Silver Bells", and Santa at the mall.

I'm still looking forward to fall, as an adult, but for many different reasons...though some are the same, I must admit!  However, I'll save those thoughts for another post.

Last night, just for a little while, I was transported briefly back to being a kid and I want to savor that feeling for just a bit longer.

Favorite Childhood Pastimes

Nostalgia has struck, again.  This time, the trigger was sitting at my desk, looking at the HUGE stack of books on it.  With a rush, a whole bunch of childhood memories...enough to fill many posts...filled my head.  Let's start with the first one!

1. Going to the library - There was so much that was magical about the weekly (or so) trip to the library.  I loved the aquarium by the entrance, and I loved browsing for books.  I loved how they had those heavy duty plastic covers on many of the books.  It was also the one time you could just pick something out you wanted and bring it home. I still like the library.
2. Those little plastic army men - I also had some little spacemen.  During the 60's and 70's, space was fascinating to everyone.  The little plastic spacemen where all kinds of bright colors, too.  Weird.  Now I have an Army Men video game for the Gamecube that features those little plastic guys running around waging war on kitchen counters and other common home locations.
3. Making home-made Christmas gifts in school - two specific projects were those candle sticks made out of clay pigeons (those discs that are used for skeet shooting), and wreaths made out of IBM punch-cards.  I'm not actually sure I ever made one of the wreaths, but I sure remember them being around.  The candle sticks I made out of clay pigeons sat on our piano for many years.
4. Lincoln logs.
5. Playing the same few records over and over on one of those fold-down record players with the speakers built in.  Funny, I still do this, just with a more expensive system! Plus, there are many more albums...
6. Sesame Street.  Perhaps the greatest kids show ever.
7. Playing in our yard - something it seems kids don't do, anymore.  I wonder if my parents basically threw me out of the house and made me play outside?  We had these great, concrete, flower beds filling one side of our yard, and they were just fun to climb on.  Additionally, there were some big bushes at the top that we could crawl under, and we made "houses" in those bushes.  It was also fun "farming" which meant collecting seed and flower pods from Mimosa trees, Rose of Sharon bushes, etc.  In particular, I remember playing outside on chilly fall evenings, waiting for dinner to be ready.  It seemed extra nice to come into the house on those days!
8. Coloring books, with the Crayola 64 color box of crayons.   Just organizing the crayon colors was fun!
9. Trips to the mall - This had to be a rare occurrence, I remember them most around Christmas time, and the malls were different places then.  I loved the ceiling in the rotunda at Famous Barr, just the nameof Stix, Baer and Fuller, and the ride home where I liked to lay down in the back seat and look at the stars through the car window.
10. Taking pictures with my first camera - a 126 cartridge film camera, with flash cubes.  We mailed the B & W film in for processing.  It was expensive!  Using color film was a treat.  Now, the presence of our Nikon D60 and GIMP causes me to lose MANY hours playing with picture taking, but with immediate feedback.  Photography has come a long way from carefully conserving the number of shots left on your one roll of film, and sending it in by mail, waiting for those pictures to come back!

Now it's your turn, feel free to add as many as you want in the comments!

Christmas Memories - Perhaps the coolest Christmas gift I ever received...

I have no idea what brought to mind Christmas gifts as we just enter summer in St. Louis. Perhaps it was because I was playing with my newest toy, a Nintendo DS I received for Father's day, that made me think of other cool gifts I've received.

One year at my parent's house, adding to all the usual magic of Christmas time, a sign appeared on our basement door.  To paraphrase (due to foggy memories) it said, "Santa's Workshop.  Do not enter."

OH.  MY.  GOSH!!!!   What could be going on in the basement?  It was very hard not going into the basement, we had a family room area finished off there, tools, rock collections, Lincoln logs and other fun stuff to play with.  In particular, when the weather was bad and us kids didn't play outside, the basement was the next big place.  It could have been sealed off for just a week or two, but it seemed like an eternity. 

I don't even remember what age I was when this was going on, but I do remember that the suspense was totally killing me!  It seemed like Christmas would never come.

Finally, Christmas  day came and we could go to the basement.  I don't remember the exact sequence of events and gift opening, but the important thing is that my brother and I received our own HO scale model train set.  My dad and at least one friend of his had set up a train table with layout and several complete trains that was amazingly cool.  He even put some of his old American Flyer buildings and accessories on the layout, which I thought was the coolest thing...even though they were the wrong scale.  This really beat a little circle of track around the Christmas tree!

Over the years, I had almost endless fun tinkering with the many aspects of model railroads.  I made train cars, engines, buildings, messed around with the electronics, etc. There was no end to the creative things that could be done.  Very few of the projects ever got completed, but I gained some knowledge and got to exercise my creativity at the same time.

When we moved to a new house, the original train layout became a slot car track and we built a larger, open-grid layout that I tinkered with even through college when there was time.  We disassembled the layout years ago, but I still have dreams of building a new one.  It will have to wait until my wife and I have space, somewhere, though.  We live in a very small house, so this will not happen anytime soon!

This hobby is even something that my wife and I could enjoy together.  She also has model building skills, and in fact (a topic for another post) she built a very nice doll house in May of this year, complete with electric lights.  For the time being, I satisfy my train interests with trips to the excellent Museum of Transportation in St. Louis, but I dream of the day I can build a new layout of my own.

Things You Don't Know About Gregg

If you have been visiting this blog for long, you know that I am a person of rare and abundant talent.  If you are new here, and there has been a rapidly increasing number of readers, then you have some catching up to do!  I suppose if I got my act together and tagged all the posts, it would make it easier for you to navigate, but as it now stands you'll just have to read...and read...and read.  Sorry.

Let's get back to my amazing talent(s).  This is a blog about my life, after all.  A small amount of narcissism is allowed...perhaps even expected. But, let's move on to the first thing that you don't know about me: 

I have the ability to calm the savage beast.

Yes, it's true.  Pretty much all animals instantly love me.  I don't know why...unless I smell like a raw steak or something.  Let me give some examples.

When I graduated from college, I bought a cat to go with my apartment.  This cat was ferocious.  She LOVED to attack items around the apartment, my poodle (which didn't work out too well...her claws kept getting tangled in curly poodle hair - so they eventually became friends, instead), and particularly people that came to the apartment.  Many a poor soul stopped by and would say things like, "look at the cute kitty!"  Then they'd reach their hand down to give the cute kitty a little pet, and the carnage would begin.  She was like the killer rabbit in Monty Python.

When she went on these rampages, the only way to calm her down would be for me to reach into the middle of the little ball of fury, and pick her up.  She would instantly relax.   It's the same way today, and she is going on 18 years old.

I have multiple cat examples I could share (with other cats), so let's move onto dogs.  My next door neighbor picked up a stray dog.  It was pretty big, and appeared as if it had been abused.  It would very fiercely bark at anyone coming by the yard. It was also scared of lawnmowers.  One day, I was mowing the lawn and the dog leaped up and bit me, when I passed by the fence.  I won this dog over with giant milkbones.   A single giant milkbone is all it took.  I became the ONLY person who could walk into the neighbors yard, if they weren't out, without being attacked by this dog.

This rare ability with savage beasts goes all the way back to my childhood.  Age 5, as a matter of fact.

I was playing on my patio one day, when I noticed a young Robin on the other side of the patio, chirping away.   I started imitating the chirping.  The bird responded.  Whoa, cool!   I kept this up and the bird gradually hopped closer and closer to me.  So I thought, "I could feed this bird something!"  I got some bread from my Mom, returned to the patio, and amazingly could get the Robin closer and closer to me.   Eventually, the bird either took the bread from me, or came VERY close and picked it off the ground.  I don't remember.

I named the bird "Hoppy."   You see?  Even at 5 I was a creative genius!  I should write about that talent someday.  Anyway, for the next day or so, I'd walk around looking for this bird.  My bird.  My bird "Hoppy."   I don't think I had much success finding the bird, but it has remained one of my favorite childhood memories.  Below is an actual picture, of me as an actual 5-year old (circa 1971), feeding the actual "Hoppy."  The black and white is not for artistic emphasis, this was genuine black and white film!

How does this relate to savage beasts?  Don't you know anything about birds?  THEY ARE FREAKY SCARY!!!!   Yes.  They have those razor sharp talons and the beak...do I have to go on about the beak?  Birds would just as soon kill you as look at you!  It's true!  They are practically designed to rip your flesh and peck your eyes out!  A bird could jump up on your face, latch on and....well, this is a family friendly blog, so I won't go on.

I calmed this savage beast, and I have photographic evidence.  That is all I need to say. 

The Best Day of School, Ever!

It's odd how sometimes completely out of the blue, a thought hits you that completely derails what you were doing or thinking about and takes you to another time and place.

If you are lucky, this does not occur while you are driving!

I had one of these thoughts tonight and fortunately, I was sitting down.  Unfortunately, I was sitting down in a Bible Study.

I don't remember the details surrounding the moment of my "thought."  Perhaps this is early senility setting in, or perhaps it was just the derailing nature of my thought.  Who can tell these things?

The thing is, we were having our discussion and something in this discussion triggered this thought.

Wait.  I actually suddenly DO remember what triggered the thought, and I'm too lazy to go back and delete all the stuff I just wrote, so you are forced to just DEAL with this stream of consciousness post.  Just DEAL with it!

We were talking about possibilities for the next Bible study, and the discussion moved to a Bible study that involved a video.

This is what triggered my thought.

You see, I am currently in my early 40's.  When I went to grade school, video, in the form of video tape and DVD essentially didn't exist.  There were laser disks, that only Mr. Fancy Pants could afford, and there was a form of magnetic video tape, but it was largely used by news crews, not consumers.  So for OUR videos in school, we had actual film projectors.  I still love the sound of the old film projectors, but that is the subject for another post.  This post is all about my derailing thought.  Remember?

Anyway,  for whatever reason, when we talked about the video possibility, I had a little flashback to grade school and watching science films and the like using actual film projectors.  At the end of every film, the entire class would start to screech in unison:

"PLAY THE MOVIE BACKWARDS, PLAY THE MOVIE BACKWARDS!!!"

You see, with actual film projectors, you have to rewind the film back to the original reel the movie came on, so you could return it to its original box.  You could do this by directly feeding the film back to the original reel and switching the direction to rewind, or you could feed the tape back through the whole complicated mechanism, past the bulb, and finally back to the original reel.  If you did this, you could have the lamp on, and watch the movie backwards at high speed.  This was endlessly entertaining and every film we watched, the class would BEG the teacher to let them watch it backwards.

Occasionally, the teacher would oblige.  When the teacher obliged, it was the best day of school, ever!

This memory was triggered for some reason on the mention of a video in my Bible class.  Try to keep up. 

So did I let this derailing thought run its course and try to catch up to the conversation, already in progress?

OF COURSE NOT!

With no warning, I blurted out:

"CAN WE WATCH THE VIDEO BACKWARDS!!!!"

Well, there was a moment of silence as the group struggled to hold on to their train of thought.  It wasn't possible.  My derailing thought was so powerful it derailed the entire group.  I had to go through my whole explanation of the outburst.  Eventually everything was straightened out, and the discussion returned to normal.

So, what made your best days of school, ever?

When I Grow Up ... an update

OK, I had a totally different post planned for today, but I'm going to have to put that one off for a couple of days.  The responses from Monday, in particular from my parents, dredged up a couple of additional memories that I just must share to you, my semi-captive Internet audience.

First on my mind is a phone call I received from my mom.  She was asking if she did the comment thing correctly (she did) and then corrected me on a point.  She indicated that the piano was not thanks to a grant from my grandparents, but possibly from my great aunt.   My mother received an inheritance of some amount from her and she (my mom) indicated that it was either spent on a trip to Washington D.C., or the piano...or both.   However, as I'm typing I seem to recall an incident when my grandmother was baby-sitting us and I didn't want to practice the piano and she may have said something about her investment in the piano.

Of course, this is now just rumor because she isn't around to refute or confirm this story.  So, anyway, funding or partial funding of the piano is now in dispute.  It doesn't matter, though, because the primary point is that I stuck with it long enough...or was (ahem) encouraged to stick with it long enough that it stuck permanently, and I still play on a nearly daily basis.  I even have the intestinal fortitude to "put it all out there" and play publicly...and loudly, I might add.  I don't remember if I mentioned it on Monday or not, (and I'm too lazy to look it up!) but I actually have this piano in my living room and play it every single day.

OK, next up.  The whole trash man thing.

It's completely true.  I instantly remembered it as soon as my mom mentioned it.  In fact, a portion of this career choice apparently has stuck with me.  For years, anytime I was at home and the trash man came, I excitedly called my daughters to the door, yelling, "The Trash Truck is here! Come look!"

For a short while, each of them would dutifully come to the door, and watch them dump the trash in the truck.  They were (and are) completely unimpressed.   Although it is not quite the same as the "good old days" of trash collection when they had to pick up the cans and bang out the contents (we have one of the rental dumpsters), it's still fun to watch them hook the dumpster up to the little forklift-like thing and dump out the contents.  I also will still stand at the door, hoping that my house is the "lucky" house that causes them to run the whole compaction thing.

Hydraulics are cool. WAY cool.

My dad also mentioned the telephone repairman or line-man that climbed the telephone poles. I remember them as well!  I also thought it was cool that they had these spikes on the sides of their boots and could scale those poles.  My dad sort of laments the fact that the telephone poles are disappearing, but they now live outside of the "ring of safety" (highway 270) and have their utilities underground.  I still live in a cool old neighborhood that has the poles.  Of course, the linemen and the telephone guys don't do the spike things anymore, either.  If they need to work on a pole, it's either with a bucket-truck or an aluminum ladder.

Just in case you are wondering, I consider things inside the 270 loop as safe.  Interestingly, people who live in urban sprawl land see things the opposite.  It doesn't matter.  We just have all the cool stuff on the inside.

That whole listening to the organ records thing reminds me of something else I've mentioned before.  I didn't just listen to the organ records my parents had...I probably listened to EVERY record they had including Doris Day, the Kingston Trio, etc. etc. etc.   Hopefully, my parents still have all these records because I'd love to hear them again...on vinyl!   I've even recently purchased some of the same records as I've come across them.   This listening to records has stuck with me to this day and my wife and I have a pretty large record and CD collection.   I don't want to say exactly how many we have (yes, I actually know) but let's just say it is between 2 and 3 thousand.  I worked at a radio station in college that had around 35,000 at the time and I didn't think that was too outrageous, so Dianne...plan some more space for albums!

All of this talk of early influences reminded me of something else that may even be a surprise to my parents.  One day, while bicycling, I found what was probably a hose-clamp.  It probably came from a car, or maybe an air-conditioner installation.   However, to me, having just learned about the Wright Brothers, it seemed like something that could be used....somehow...in the construction of an airplane.

I hung on to that hose-clamp for many years.  It may even be in my attic somewhere today.  I was convinced, in my mind, that just by riding my bike around I would eventually be able to discover most of the parts I needed to build my own airplane.   I never really found anything else appropriate, though.

However, I still LOVE to fly in airplanes and will do it whenever I get the chance.  I am even secretly thrilled when I must take a connecting flight, because that just means more takeoffs and landings and airports.  This past summer, in a 4 or 5 week period, I was actually on 13 different planes.  That was so cool!  I even look forward to those long transatlantic flights, because not only am I flying in a plane, but it ends up being a long, quiet time for reading.

So, as the scorecard now stands, it would seem that the only major influence from my childhood that doesn't have a carry-over impact in my current life would be that whole carpet-laying thing.  My apologies to the International Brotherhood of Carpet Layers, or whatever your union is!

(BTW, feel free to keep sending in your childhood influences and career goals!)

When I Grow Up ...

One of the things that kids, and adults for that matter, think about most is "what do I want to do when I grow up?"  And by "do", they don't mean "what movie should I go see." 

They mean, "what kind of job or career do I want to have?"

Most kids have early career plans of being a doctor, a rock star, a teacher, a fireman, or a president.  Not me...at least as far as I remember.   While I dabbled with many musical instruments...toy drums, pianos, and guitars...and the occasional "Kiss" impersonation, there are relatively few concrete memories of career choices that stuck with me for any length of time.

The first one is a big one.

The number one career choice of Gregg as a child was (drum-roll please) :

A carpet layer!

That's right.  As a small boy, I wanted to be a carpet layer.  You see, at some age, I witnessed the laying of carpet in my boyhood bedroom.  You see, at that time in St. Louis history, it was nearly mandatory that you cover up all that old fashioned looking hardwood floor with modern wall-to-wall carpeting.  If you didn't, you may as well live in a cave...or in your tool shed. 

In any case, watching the carpet layers stretch the carpet with those stretchers that they banged with their knees left an indelible impression on me.  Soon after, I could be found with some of my building blocks, simulating being a carpet layer.

This phase didn't last too long, however, and then I abandoned a promising career in carpet laying and moved on to my next career choice:

An Architect!

Yep, I wanted to be an architect like Mike Brady.  It also helped that my dad had all of these cool looking drafting instruments.  Drawing with them seemed like a lot of fun.  My dad even gave me one triangle that included a french curve, lots of standard hole sizes and even some hex templates.  I don't remember all the different things I could do with this, but I still have this combination triangle/french curve/etc. device. 

One of my favorite activities was to go to "Open Houses" on Sunday afternoons.  What kind of kid likes to look at houses?  When we bought a brand new house when I was about 5th grade, I thought it was so cool that we got to pick out EVERYTHING that was in the house!

My architect career plans lasted from about 1st grade all the way to 6th grade.  I was frequently caught drawing house plans on pieces of paper during school and sometimes sketching elevations on my worksheets.

In parallel with the whole home architecture thing, I hadn't lost my love of toy instruments.  In fact, I had expanded this interest to now include pipe organs, thanks in part to my father's record collection. So I decided on my next career...a combo career (as many kids do) of architect and :

An Organist!

I could sit for hours listening to organ music and dream of playing like E. Power Biggs or Virgil Fox.  Things got even worse when my church built a 3-manual, 35 rank pipe organ. Every week, at the end of the church service, I would run up to the balcony to watch our incredible organist, Henry Glass, play the postlude.

I wanted organ lessons!  Well, my parents did some checking around and were told that if I wanted to play the organ, I should probably first learn how to play the piano.  When I was entering 2nd grade, thanks in part to a grant from my grandparents, we were able to get a piano at home!  I loved it and started taking lessons.  Happily, I advanced rapidly and continued taking lessons through 8th grade!

During this time, I still was set on being an architect/organist but I was also gaining an interest in math and science. Then it happened.  In 6th grade, a new kid came to school.  He fit right in with my musical interests and in fact took it to the next level.  He played the guitar...and electric guitar!

I never imagined that a 6th grader could conceivably own their own electric guitar.  This guitar was an ES-335 copy and in my opinion, awesome.  He took me up to a music store near his house and showed me all the great instruments hanging on the walls.  I fell in love with the look of the Gibson Les Pauls and vowed to someday get one of my very own.   Now that I was paying attention to guitars, I also began to notice the bands where the guitar-players used Les Pauls and I loved the sound, too!

It was around this time that I combined my musical interests, and my math and science interest, and decided that what I wanted to do was design guitar amplifiers for a living.  To do this, I needed to learn all about the circuits and such, so I became determined to be:

An Electrical Engineer! 

Another hobby of mine, model trains, also helped fuel this interest because I was interested in all the control systems and wiring that it took to make a nice train layout.  This interest stuck with me all through high school, even through the time when we got our school's first Apple computers in 1982.  I took the first course offered and was hooked.  I excelled at programming.  You are probably thinking that this is where I plug in my next career path, but you'd be wrong.   I stuck with Electrical Engineering.   Although I seriously toyed with going to school for music (yes, I did end up getting one of those Les Pauls and loved guitar!) I ended up taking the career choice more likely to provide an income.

What about all those long lost loves and interests?  Well, I'll have to say that with the exception of carpet laying, each of them is still with me in some shape or form.  I still love architecture and marvel at the beautiful details that are on older buildings and homes.  My biggest dream right now remains moving into such a home near downtown St. Louis.   I'd love to build/rehab my own, but just don't have the time.  So, somehow I must earn the money for it.  Unfortunately, it seems like these homes are farther out of reach each year as their popularity grows again.   I still go through open houses, and house tours in these neighborhoods.

I did continue piano lessons through 8th grade, as I mentioned.   I should also mention, that at this point a couple of other musical events happened.  My parents gave me an Alvarez Acoustic guitar for graduation that I still use today.  It must have been terribly expensive for 1980.  I still use it today.  In fact, many years ago I installed pickups inside and use this almost weekly for our contemporary church service.  I actually have a small collection of guitars, most of which I use regularly.

Also around this time, the organist at our church, knowing my interest (not that I kept it much of a secret), got me a volunteer position playing the organ at Laclede Groves, a convalescent home, once a month.  A year or so later, I became the full-time organist at an historic Lutheran church on the city's north side.  The church at that time was called Pilgrim Lutheran church.  It was a beautiful stone building and it sadly burnt down this past year.  I still haven't had the heart to drive by.  I also began playing at our church when I was 16 and continue to play periodically.  I play keyboards weekly at our contemporary service and several times a year for various musicals.

As far as the computer interest - I bought my very own Apple IIe in high school (1983 - no one had computers then!) and I did end up combining that and Electrical Engineering at the University of Missouri - Rolla and eventually became an embedded programmer for the company that I was a co-op student at during college.  Now I'm the manager of the group and have programmers all over the world.

The funny thing is, I'm still wondering if I should make music my career!

What were your childhood career plans and how did they turn out?