Saturday, December 22, 2007

This Is Me

I don't have much time right now, but I wanted to give this blog a start. I've long wanted to have a personal website, but I've never been able to get it off the ground; thus I'm happy sites like Blogspot are available for personal blogs, at least. A little about me: I'm 48 years old, live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have been married to my wife Dorine for 23 years, work as a financial analyst at Sandia National Laboratories, and have five kids (four girls and one boy, ranging in age from 29 to 15) and four grandchildren. We are LDS (Mormon), something about which I'm sure I'll write much in the future. I love the outdoors and enjoy activities like hiking, family camping, backpacking, climbing (bouldering these days), and caving (less so now than a decade ago). I play guitar and enjoy inventing various riffs and chord progressions, although only rarely do I find sufficient inspiration to write a complete song with lyrics. I very much enjoy playing my electric guitars (all Squiers -- Fender's foreign-made budget line) through my Line 6 Spider 112, an extremely versatile amplifier that produces a variety of interesting sounds. I'm sort of a movie and music buff, although only within certain temporal and genre-based parameters. My favorite music is rock and pop from the 1960s, although I find myself revisiting the rock music of my youth (1970s) more and more these days. I used to enjoy playing sports -- especially slow-pitch softball, volleyball, and basketball -- but the combination of age and a botched radial keratotomy in 1994 (which left me with slightly impaired night vision and depth perception) eventually killed off my interest. These days, I play no sports (although I do run a lot at the gym to maintain at least some level of conditioning), and I can really only bear to watch soccer on TV. (My interest in soccer is a product of both the time I spent in Chile as a Mormon missionary in 1979-80 and the fact that several of my kids played youth soccer here in Albuquerque.) I am an inveterate diarist, something that ensures I will upload regular updates to this blog. Politically, I'm pretty conservative with regard to social, economic, and foreign-policy issues; however, I don't regard myself a right-wing ideologue by any means, and my future posts will probably reveal that I have significantly more "nuanced" ideas regarding various topics than do many Mormons (your mileage may vary).

Well, that's enough for now.