Thursday February 01, 2007

101 Things

Thanks for the tag, boss. I thought if I simply ignored this, I could avoid answering. But no such luck.

1. I always wanted to be an oceanographer. I idolized Jacques Cousteau, got my YMCA cert (at 16) in era of horse-collar vests and J-valves, and wanted to design submarines. I started living my dream by working my way through UCSD with a part time job in the Underway Data Processing Group at Scripps. But every time we went out for sea trials, I puked over the fantail. So much for that dream. (Eventually outgrew the sea sickness, fortunately.)

2. My first career was as a controls engineer with HP (in the San Diego division designing servos for plotters) and then Honeywell (doing flight controls). My first job at Honeywell was verifying the stability of re-entry control system on the Shuttle before its first launch. As a junior engineer that was beyond cool.

3. I'm half Greek, half Hungarian. My dad emigrated right after WWII on a post-war reconstruction scholarship meeting my mom at Miami of Ohio. He was Greek Orthodox, she Jewish. Let's just say there was a lot of "energy" in my house growing up.

4. Jonathan pointed out that I love to cook. My latest passion is artisan sour dough bread (thank you Laurie, for still smiling at my bursting mason jars of starter in our new fridge...). It's way low tech (just yeast, flour, water and salt), but deeply rewarding to the psyche.

5. What he didn't point out is that I also survived a train derailment. It was September 13, 2001. I got one of the very last seats out for the California Zephyr out of Chicago on 9/11. In the middle of the night in the Utah desert we hit a coal train. Here's what's left of the engines.

Lemme see,.. Tag you're it DD!