I have recently retired from a position as design engineer from a small steel-and-refractory fabricator, building lumber kilns for the timber industry. I feel very fortunate to have had this rewarding niche market occupation that put my engineering education to work and provided me with an exciting and varied hands-on real-world experience. My only practice teaching comes from training new employees, but I think I have many valuable insights to share and look forward to this opportunity.

My wife recently asked me to build a key-hole garden out of concrete block where we could grow our culinary herbs. A key-hole garden is a circular raised bed with a path to the center so that all of the plants can easily be reached without extreme bending or kneeling. I enjoy gardening, and this project was made more interesting by devising an overlapping block stacking pattern that avoided cutting any block in half. Pictures available upon request ; - ).