Ecce Signum

Happy birthday to me! For no particular reason, I have decided to to a retrospective of the past forty years, in five-year intervals.

40 years ago, I had just finished my sophomore year at Springport High School. I was learning to program on my new Commodore 64 and made my spending money milking cows, baling hay, and shoveling manure. I think this was the summer that I was hired out to a neighboring farm to help with the hay baling for $2.00 an hour, which was substantially less than the $3.00 an hour I made milking cows on our farm.

35 years ago, I had just finished my junior year at Grand Valley State University and was living off-campus for the first time, in a terrible apartment on the northwest side of Grand Rapids. I worked for a landscaping company, then for a moving company, then for Meijer. My roommates and I were taking classes at a local Shorin-Ryu karate school and playing a lot of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. For my 21st birthday a few friends took took me to Tootsie Van Kelly’s bar in the Amway Grand, where I drank many beers, shots, and mixed drinks, including Ouzo, Guinness, and something called a Blue Motorcycle. Was it fun? Yes! Did I get horribly sick? Also yes!

30 years ago, I was living on the southeast side of Grand Rapids and working at Schuler Books, which was in the middle of leveling up to become Schuler Books & Music. I was an up-and-coming student at Master Lee’s School of Tai Chi Praying Mantis Kung Fu, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.’

25 years ago I was living in a different place on the southeast side and working at CyberNet Engineering, my first “real” developer job, and discovering that, for some employers, the idea of work-life balance was a thing to be roundly mocked and derided. I was now an instructor for Master Lee’s School of Tai Chi Praying Mantis Kung Fu.

20 years ago I was living in an apartment on the northeast side, which was in a house owned by a friend and occasional co-worker. I had recently quit my job at BBK Studio and was working as a contractor for Waterfall Productions, just about to be brought on board as an employee. Master Lee was training me and senior instructor Rick Powell to teach Iron Shirt Chi Kung to some of our most dedicated kung fu students.

15 years ago I was living in my current house on the northeast side, and working for PeopleDesign, the new iteration of BBK Studio. Rick and I were teaching an Iron Shirt class to a group of about ten students, three mornings a week, out of From the Heart Yoga, the studio owned by Rick and his wife Behnje.

Ten years ago I was working for my present employer and living in my current house. Caffeinated Press was just getting off the ground. Rick and I were still teaching the Iron Shirt Chi Kung class. Thus my average week included about seventy hours of work-like activity.

Five years ago my partner Zyra and I were enjoying our first summer living together, and also the first summer of the COVID lockdowns. We were also entertained by our new kitten Poe, who we had adopted from a farm in the Upper Peninsula. Zyra and Poe still live here, so we must have done something right.

And now here is me, 56 years old in 2025, still in the house with Zyra and Poe and our second cat, Pepper, who we adopted from the same farm where we got Poe. I am in my eleventh year at my current employer and things continue to go reasonably well. With a little luck, I will get to post a few dozen more of these annual updates.

Thanks for stopping by!