Brief status: i'm male, 40, very married. i live on an island in puget sound and work on the mainland. i type with 2 fingers, so my writing style is to sum up paragraphs in sentences...
i was raised on welfare by potheads. so i got very familiar with the eviction process. i went to 20 different schools before graduating early, never the same 2 years in a row. we lived where the cheap rent was, so sometimes in the deep backwoods, sometimes next to the crackhouse. i'm INTJ with scores from the 60's high 80's. So, geeky new kid, over and over. yup, there were a lot of fights, most of which i both started, and lost. a testament to a pattern of the "smart kid" being stupid... i still fight that pattern.
getting out of high school, i was afraid of becoming another booksmart but otherwise useless engineer. so i went into construction. after a year and a half of being in a economic wasteland and not competing well, i joined the army.
the less said the better, i was a lousy soldier.
i got out, tried to get on as an electrical apprentice with no luck, then a friend of a friend told us how to get on as a "teledata tech" i.e. structured cable tech. running cat5 and fiber optics during the dot com boom. i got on with a major telecom in '99 as a foreman, and in 2005 i transferred into their engineering dept, where i work with my wife today. happily. this is the best job i could imagine. so my goal is more financial independence than ERE.
in 2001 i bought a house. and started the remodeling. in my typical pattern, i took that too far. in 2008, i found a house that needed to be moved on Whidbey Island, bought 5 acres, cleared some, moved the house, and jacked it up, and built a daylight basement underneath. i'm currently renting the house on the mainland, and still working on our whidbey home.
yeah, upside down on both, now. not that this matters to me much, as i intend to pay these mortgages off. but it does make it more difficult to buy more in this awesome buyer's market.
i do realize that my background is a little unusual, and my opinions are strong, so i posted all this so you'd know where i was coming from.
it may be crass, but now i'm going over to the political disagreements to ask Jacob to backup his global warming propaganda.
Havaguudn!