My story since graduation
In 2019 I was diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer. I had surgery, radiation, and androgen deprivation therapy. In 2022 a metastatic lesion was found in my L7 vertebra. Radiation did not treat it effectively, so the future is less certain than it was. Still, I plan to keep plugging along. We went to Southern Chile in November of 2023 on another wildlife adventure where we where we saw King Penguins, Lesser Rheas, Guanaco, and Pumas (mountain lions to us Kansans). We have plans to go to Botswana in the summer of 2024 and make another trip to Australia later that fall.
My main hobbies these days are photography and model railroading. I have given up trying to build a dragster. I began to suspect I would never get it finished. I'm not really sure about my future and I didn't want to burden my wife with having to dispose of it or its parts. I have enjoyed travel to all 50 U.S. states, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador (including the Galapagos), Brazil, Chile, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand. The region I have visited most is the Amazon Rain Forest, having been there over a dozen times. If you click the "View Website" in the first section, you can see pictures from some of our travels.
We moved to a different house in Wichita just before I retired. It needed a lot of work, which means I spent a lot of time dealing with home improvement. We still have a few things to do, but we are now mostly in maintenance mode.
I'm beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel on my model railroad. It is a fictitious representation of a narrow gauge railroad in the mountains of Colorado (think Durango and Silverton). There still isn't much scenery yet, but I'm working on the last major section of track. That will take a while since it will have a roundhouse and turntable as well as a major yard and industries. I expect it will take a while to get the track all down and functioning. When the whole railroad is finished, it will have over 200ft. of main line serving five towns. It's fun being a railroad tycoon in my old age!