Undergraduate Degree: West Texas State University - Bachelor of Science, Mathematics

Graduate Degree: University of Tulsa - Master of Science, Applied Mathematics

I live to learn new things. I am almost always taking some class somewhere. I became fluent in Spanish after the age of 40. I’ve taken a lot of digital media courses. I have taken practically every computer class the local community college has, and have 5 Associates’ degrees to show for it after I already had my two Masters’ degrees. My most recent hobby is photography. I like to play with photos in Photoshop and turn them into works of art that often look nothing like what they started out as. I have won a number of awards at the State Fair, and I had one Photoshop composition accepted in a professional showing. If you’d like to see my better photos, ask me for the link to my 500px account. I also enjoy playing with Illustrator. I enjoy doing all kinds of art. I have done a lot of clay construction and sculpting as well as using the potter’s wheel. I’ve done oil painting, but they can take weeks to dry. I plan to try acrylic painting next. They dry a lot faster. I’d also like to do some wood turning and other kinds of wood-working. The hobby I spend the most time on is gardening. I live on a 3/4-acre lot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and pride myself on having the prettiest flower gardens in the neighborhood. After COVID and the grocery store vegetable shortages, I started cleaning up my dad’s old veggie garden to grow my own vegetables. I didn’t have a lot of luck except with the okra and I harvested a few nice honey dew melons along with a few tomatoes and several very small ears of corn. A hoard of killer bunnies ate all my cabbages, too much rain caused fungus to kill my pumpkins, squashes, and melons, and tiny white fly-like bugs ate holes in my tomato and okra plants. However, I learned a tremendous amount and lost 35 pounds in the process. I am feeling great with the weight loss and all the exercise, and next year, I think I can avoid some of the things that went wrong this year. Actually, the herb garden did pretty well. I had lots of cilantro in spite of the bunnies’ continually stealing it, and plenty of parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (hey, that reminds me of a Simon and Garfunkel song), and of course, my favorite, basil. I love computer programming and all things tech. I actually write code just for the fun and challenge of it. When I was younger, I was a very competitive amateur tennis player. I didn’t start until I was an adult, but I won a number of local and state tournaments. I’d like to start playing again. I love to play old-time fiddle. I’m not very good, but I entered the contests at the fairs anyway. It’s fun to meet other people who enjoy making music. I like listening to folk music and some of the old hippie songs. My favorite singer is John Denver, but I like Simon and Garfunkel as well as Bread. I also like Barbara Streisand. I love classic movies and classic books (odds are I have read whatever book your English teacher has assigned). My favorite author is Jorge Borges, a 20th century Argentinian philosopher and writer of Spanish poems and short stories, although I love Shakespeare, whom I consider to be the best writer who ever lived. My favorite novel is A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. My favorite color is violet. My favorite movie is Star Wars, the original, which is now called #4. I enjoy most of the various series of Star Trek, especially TNG and Picard. I have two sons; one is working on his PhD in Philosophy at Bowling Green State in Ohio, and the other just graduated from high school and is attending Tulsa Community College here in town. I have two dogs. Zack is a toy fox terrier, and he is getting rather old. Allie is a standard Pomeranian, but she is quite large for her breed (during her puppyhood, I was starting to have flashbacks involving Clifford, the Big Red Dog). I’m currently keeping my younger son’s dog, Delilah, who is a small-pony-sized Siberian husky. She keeps escaping from her pen and running roughshod over my veggie garden. She even broke down the garden’s fence post, and yanked down my prize honey dew melon from its vine and started pushing it around with her nose like a soccer ball and gouged it with her teeth. She was literally and figuratively in the dog house for days after that. Genealogy is probably my favorite passion. It’s interesting to see where you come from and to find out that maiden name of your great-great-great grandfather’s wife that has alluded generations of genealogists. With computerized records, I can find things that my great Aunt Sadie never had access to in her years of traveling to discover her own roots. I enjoy corresponding with distant relatives whom I didn’t know existed in order to try to solve some mystery. I really love it when I find a story about someone; then I get to know what my ancestor was really like, which is the most fun of all.