Hmmm.... Friends from Purcell Marian High School want to know what I have been doing in recent years.... A 25th reunion is a nice time to sit and think a bit about what adventures one has had.... I responded with just a brief list of adventures in recent years, in no particular order:

Selling a website for enough money to be semi-retired for a few years, doing investigation and technical analysis for high-tech dot.com class action law cases against Google, Yahoo, Palm, and others, spending a summer doing literature evangelism at a San Francisco street market, collecting 10's of thousands of old books and digitizing hundreds of them, learning glass blowing / lampworking / bead & marble making, spending a year living in Bulgaria, nearly getting arrested in Istanbul for selling too cheap websites to merchants in the Grand Bazaar, getting stopped on the California Pacific Coast Hwy 1 up the doing 109 on my BMW motorcycle and walking away with a ticket for only 75mph, surveying pirate software and videos in several countries, hanging out at Russian Orthodox churches and monasteries and visiting the catacombs beneath the churches at Lavra in Kyev Ukraine, visiting cemetaries in the Ukraine and the museum of minatures (how about a rose inside of a human hair, or a flea with golden shoes), raising a litter of kittens in a small apartment in Bulgaria and getting one of them a passport to come back to the U.S., nursing a friend's cat back to health after it ate a lot of string and had to have major surgery, being amazed at Bulgarian veterinarian visits that only cost $1.50, debating theology with Russian priests, attracting too much attention at a Vegas casino for blackjack card counting and paying for three modest Lake Tahoe vacations using card counting, taking several hour walks through the non-tourist sections of Munich, Bangkok, Sofia, & Kuala Lumpur guided only by a GPS with no maps, breaking the law by giving Malaysian Muslims books about Jesus and Biblical health principles, driving a small one man hard bottom Zodiac boat from Tiburon around Angel Island over to San Francisco then out under the Golden Gate bridge over to Sausilito and coming back to find our friend's very angry boat captain worried at how long we had the boat out, finding ways to let the internet make me $500 a day automatically while I was wandering around foreign countries, then watching the income plummet in two days to $2 a day when google&yahoo changed their algorithms, riding double decker buses and wandering the streets of Hong Kong, and then going to several banks to get enough cash advances to buy the smallest laptop I'd ever seen (Toshiba Libretto 50), spending the night detained in a military compound by Turkish Jandarma because someone on the same bus had the great idea to try to smuggle home made vodka into Turkey, receiving a congratulatory letter from a priest at the Vatican for an internet research site I posted about the Shroud of Turin, spending New Years with a family living in the jungles of Sarawak where there is no internet or cell phones, photo documenting two Malaysian Navy seals taking all day to butcher a jungle pig for the New Years feast, getting five figure checks from Amazon.com (not counting after the decimal point!), being in charge of the radio communications for a Civil Air Patrol search for a downed aircraft where I had to track seven airplanes and four ground search crews, providing Amateur Radio Emergency Services communications for a Red Cross shelter during a California weather disaster, getting a Bulgarian resident passport, talking to people in 50 countries over Amateur Radio, packing my motorcycle to go on campouts, being awestruck by the gothic cathedral that towers over Strausberg France, taking 20,000 photos in foreign countries in one year, taking flying lessons in a four seater Cessna, getting a secret night time tour of a public mental asylum in the Ukraine, caring for a friend with liver failure, driving an Orthodox priest friend to and from L.A. and discussing church writings about the location of paradise, narrowly avoiding arrest for taking too many pictures of the railroad operations at a border crossing in Romania, buying a plate of great Russian pasta for only a $1 at a train station from women making their living this way, being the guest of honor at a feast at the apartment of some common people in Kyev and being congratulated that I could drink their home made vodka just like a Russian (quite an accomplishment for someone who never drinks!), giving the toast at many Indian weddings with hundreds of guests each, visiting the apartment of a former KGB agent and spending hours talking with him eventhough he speaks no English and I speak almost no Russian, preaching with an interpreter at a Tamil speaking Pentecostal church in Malaysia on how to study the Bible, having a $38 root canal in Bulgaria, being a named inventor on some patents, visiting Metropolis Illinois, the Home of Superman, touring the Louisville Glassworks, and the new Creation Science museum in Kentucky...

Well ok, a couple of things at the end are since getting a real job, and a few items are from the 1900's, but now you know why I had to get a real job again. Being semi-retired was a lot of work!