Even though she has already done this with me once before, Joyce came up with five more questions for me. 🙂
If you want to play:
1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. Update your site with the answers to the questions.
4. Include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, ask them five questions. And so on, and so on, and so on.
Questions from Joyce, with my answers:
What’s your middle name (if you have one)?
Heath, as in the candy bar. 🙂 I didn’t realize you didn’t know that.
Are you named (first or middle) for anyone: relative, book/movie character, historical figure, etc.?
Actually, I’m not sure. I need to ask my parents about that sometime. If I find out, I’ll post back here. 🙂 I don’t think so, though.
Who’s your favorite relative?
That’s a bit of an evil question (even though I don’t think many relatives read this web log). Instead of favorite, let’s say most influential. My late maternal grandfather Nelson DeLano (”Paw D”, as I apparently named him as a child) was an electrician’s foreman at a large metal working plant. He was also an amateur radio operator. Growing up, every time I visited, he let me play around with the tons of spare electrical and radio parts he had lying around the house. He let me sit in while he talked on the radio, and he explained all kinds of details to me. He bought and made cool little electrical things as gifts for me. I have no doubt whatsoever that he is the biggest reason I ended up becoming an electrical engineer. I hope he knew how much that meant to me. I think he did. I know he loved to brag about me to his buddies on the air. Unfortunately, he died about 7 months before I graduated from college. I often think about how much fun it would have been to bring him up to the lab at work and let him sit in for a while, see what I do, and know that he was part of making that happen.
Why did you start a blog?
*chuckle* Honestly, a lot of it was a matter of trying to “keep up with the Joneses.” 🙂 I was quickly becoming almost the last person among my very geeky circle of friends not to have a web log. Specifically, when you’re married to someone who writes as prolifically and as well as Amy does, it’s tough to not feel some pressure to do a bit yourself. It’s also a release sometimes, though. One only has to look at the number on this post to see that I don’t write particularly often, but it’s good for me when I do it. I need to stay in better practice, and I need to be better about putting things down in writing as I feel them (in a private journal if not here). I’ve learned that strong emotion is usually a pretty temporary thing for me. My self-righting mechanism is pretty strong and pushes me toward center. That’s good and it’s not. It allows me to deal with things quickly, but it also means that I don’t often feel things for very long. Writing down how I felt helps me save a piece of that so I can come back and remember it later. Probably the best example of that is my post about Duffie, but there are others.
If money and making a living were no object, what would you do with your life?
Oddly enough, I think I might actually do much the same kind of things I do in my job right now, just not full-time. I’d probably try to push myself to travel more. It’s good for me. I’d be a bit more adventurous about trying some things that I think I would enjoy but require financial investments that I can’t justify. I don’t know what else. That situation is just so alien to me that I think it might have to really happen and sink in for a while before I really knew.