Time to talk up the fam just for fun as part of the personal mythology tour:

So my brother Phil is an engineer and when I was little he was always getting in trouble for taking things apart. I remember this box in the kitchen with half assembled electric can openers and what not. He must have been sixteen or seventeen then. People were always bringing him things to fix and then he give them back fixed, except after fixing something he often had parts left over. He’d say, “Well, it’ll work better now. Those parts weren’t really important.” And he was generally right.

So he grew up and joined the Navy and went to Navy Nuke school and got to watch diodes on an aircraft carrier for six years while touring the world. We went to the commissioning of the ship in Norfolk as a family and caught Indian Jones and The Raiders of The Lost Art in a local theater on that visit (just to give you a time code). When he got out of the Navy he went to engineering school in Oklahoma. During his second semester of college he was hired to teach the classes that he took his first semester. He let me play with the campus’ electron microscope when we went for his wedding. Now he integrates software and hardware in manufacturing for a subsidiary of G.E. He has worked for Boeing, Rockwell, and even at N.A.S.A. where he was part of a design team for early concepts of the current space station.

So anyway I want to show you something I had forgotten about that is kind of cool. He’s always got these projects, and one of them was designing a board game. They actually used to sell them here in St. Louis at the Science Center (when the center was less corporate). He was in town visiting and we just took a box of the games up to the center, asked for the manager, he liked them and sold them for a while. I think he still has some to sell if you’re looking for weird Christmas gifts for kids.