In the beginning

I was born in Benson, a small town in west central Minnesota, of full blooded Norwegian parents, I lived on a farm until I was seven years old. Even though I have lived in south Minneapolis the rest of my life, I still call myself a farm boy. I think it's in the blood!

My education began in a one-room school, District 73. It continued through Erickson and Northrop elementary schools, Folwell Jr. High, Roosevelt High, Brown Institute of Electronics, and the U of M.

You can learn more about me from some of my Hobbies and interests found below.

Sharon an I have been married since 1965. She is mostly Norwegian, and also grew up on a farm, near Hayfield, MN. She attended Winona State University and later in life graduated from Metropolitan State University. She worked as a Coordinator of Volunteers at the 'Minnesota Masonic Home' in south Bloomington and now volunteers for various neighborhood organizations. Her hobbies include books, sewing, knitting, hardanger, and gardening. 

We have one son, Christopher, who is now married to Carrie and living in Des Moines, IA.  He has his Bachelor of Fine Arts, Master of Arts, and Master of Fine Arts degrees in Ceramics. His other artistic interests include photography, handmade papers, cooking, and like his father and grandfather, building.  He works for RDG as a ceramics artist and also teaches ceramics classes for three colleges and the community education classes in Des Moines.

Interests:

I am interested in a large variety of subjects but none to the point of obsession. The following are several that I enjoy the most:

Photography

I have been taking pictures ever since I was old enough to hold my mothers "paper board" Kodak 620 with the spring lever shutter that made an exposure whenever the little lever was moved up, or down.  Next came my very own Brownie Hawkeye followed several years later by a Minolta AL and still later by a Minolta SRT-101 (A poor man's Nikon.).  The SRT-101 has prompted a case full of lenses, attachments and flash units that have traveled with me over most of the north western hemisphere.  I still enjoy trying to get that one "good" picture and am content to spend lots of time looking through the viewfinder.  I haven't found it yet!  I will put some of my better "not good" pictures in the page as time allows.  I have now moved almost exclusively to digital photography and have several thousand pictures filling my disk drives and CD backup files.  I now have a slide scanner and occasionally work on preserving several thousand of my slides in digital form.

When we were first married I took the formal pictures for a friend's wedding and later was talked into taking wedding pictures for others.  I got all my jobs by word-of-mouth and soon found that I didn't really enjoy taking formal pictures of people I didn't know (and who often didn't really care), so now I will only do weddings for special friends.  This way I enjoy it more and so do they.

Computers

I must enjoy them, I designed them at work for forty-one years seven months before I retired as Senior Staff Engineer at Unisys. I have used them at home since the early 80's and at one time built my own from scratch. In my time at work I have seen both the company name and computers change many times. My expertise was in the realm of large scale memories. How does 1 Tera Byte (1,073,741,824 bytes) of RAM on one card sound!?

Building Something

Watching my father work has taught me the skills needed for many trades.  On the farm you need to be able to fix most everything (unless you are rich enough to hire it all out) so I learned to build or fix everything in sight.  I like to plan out and build with stone, wood, glass, metals, wire, light, sound, and software.  Think that about covers it.

Now-a-days I get my building-fix working for 'Habitat For Humanity' and on the maintenance repair team down at church.