Beginnings ...

Well ...

Life is just one continuous road, and occassionaly we make pit stops. Sometimes they are planned, and sometimes they are not. When I got out of High School, I went directly into the Navy. I was all signed up for the Nuclear Sub program, I had a girl in mind that I wanted to woo, and I thought my life was on the fast track to fun and adventure.

Of course, even though I made it through boot camp, I did not make it into the Navy. I had fraudulently entered the Navy knowing that I suffer from debilitating migraines, and had one the day of graduation from boot camp. Needless to say, the Navy didn't want me.

What was I to do? I really had no plans as the plans I had fell through. I didn't get the career I was wanting. The girl I wanted to woo got married. And the fast track to fun and adventure took a detour.

Well, I started by living with my mother in a trailer in a town of 2,000 people. I worked the graveyard shift at a Mini mart in the dead of winter in North Dakota. It was not a career job, and I got fired from it because of complaints I had against me. Of course, I think they were trumped up complaints because I had 3 migraines in 5 days (nights), and so once again I was left wondering what to do.

I then decided that I would try going to school. I wanted to be a micro-biologist. I moved to Colorado to live with my father and his wife and got a job as a cashier at a local grocery store in a town of about 30,000 people in Colorado. I started school with minor expectations and no real clue about how it would be any different from high school. But I was in for a big suprise. Math used to be one of my best classes. I could do it all in my head and be done with the homework assignment even before the lecture was finished. But in college, I froze. I could not even do the simplest of math problems. My hands would start to shake when I would take a test and I couldn't even hold my pencil. Fate (?) intervened one day when I ran into my math professor outside of class and I told him about my predicament. His response to me: "PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE!" That's it. That was all he said to me and he walked off. Don't even bother going back and looking at what he said thinking you might have missed something, because there is nother there to find. It really blew my mind that he was not as helpful as my high school teachers were. I felt really disallusioned and unimportant. Not to mention I was young and stupid, and felt angry at the world, so ... I flunked out that first semester.

Now we run into all sorts of little pit stops in my life. I had a falling out with my father and his wife and I moved from Colorado back to North Dakota to live with my sister. I had some minor jobs here and there and then moved in with a friend of mine that was going to college. Again, some more minor jobs and then I moved out on my own when I met my first wife, Kasie. At the time I was working both at Wards and at a Bingo parlor when I met Kasie (she worked at a drug store). not long after Kasie and I got married, I got a job at a tech center that had opened up in town called Sykes. Sykes did a lot of outsourcing, and I was on the Gateway Computers account. I supported the entire computer system and all of the software that went with it. Well ... after 2.5 years, I left Kasie. A year after that (and 10 years after my fallout with my father and his wife), I decided I needed to get a fresh start on life. I called up my father and arranged to move back to Colorado. After all, I had three years of tech experience, so I should be able to get a goof job, right?

Three months after I moved to Colorado, I was hired by another outsourcing company called EDS. This time I was on the Maxtor hard drive account. I moved around in the same town I was in, had some romantic interests around the area and out of state, and then fate (?) once more stepped in. Maxtor pulled all of the EDS employess into a meeting room and said there was good news and bad news: Good news -- Maxtor was not going to be going overseas for tech support like most other companies. Bad news -- Maxtor no longer wanted to outsource, and if we wanted to keep our jobs we had to re-apply for them.

I decided I wanted to take the 5 year severence I had built up with EDS and did not even submit an application/resume. 5 years after I had moved to Colorado, I left and moved on to Illinois. It is here that I got another outsourced tech job (doing system installs and supporting them and their peripherals), and met my wife. Her name is Meredith and works internally for a major insurance company. I am an external and I installed her PDA, and that is how that kicked off our wonderful marriage.

It has been 3 years now that I have been in Illinois, and Mere and I have talked about our future. I am not very happy with my jjob, as it is not very satisfying or fulfilling. We tossed around the idea of me attending cooking school, but I decided that although I like to cook, I like more to entertain. Not something I want to go to school for.

Enter now Westwood Online College. You have probably seen their commercials on TV. They are an acreditted college and they have many options for degrees. I was checking out some of their degrees and came across: Game Art and Design. Whoa! That sounded so cool! After all, I love playing games (video and board and role playing), so what could be better than making them, right? So I did some more research and contacted the school. I got a response right away from Wendi, and we got the ball rolling.

Now, for anyone who is interested, here are a few tidbits that I found out in my research. First off, in the next three years the demand for animators (which I will be able to do once I get my degree) will increase by 15%. Going to monster.com or dice.com reveals around 40+ jobs as it is using the keyword "animator". It jumps to 60+ if type in "game designer". Jobs range from $50k a year to $125k a year. Companies that I saw were big names such as THQ, HSN, 20th Century Fox, and Disney. Am I excited about all of this? OH YEAH! And just as icing on the cake, my brother informs me that he has some connections at EA Games, a HUGE game manufacturer! So I am hoping I at least get some info on building a portfollio from those people.

Anyway ...

School will be starting in 9 days. I already have my first books and semester lined up, as well as a huge art kit. I will post more about that later. I will be posting as much as I can over the next three years, and hopefully my awesome grades I intend to get (my wonderful wife will be making sure I stay on track). And hopefully, with any luck, I will end this blog three years from now with me getting a kick-butt job with Disney!