Me in 2018

Eric & Patti

Go to About Me for more details about my life, and My Career  for a history of my working life.

I grew up in Payette, Idaho. After high school I went to college for 2 years (1966-68) at University of Idaho in Moscow (here's an aerial view of Moscow and my home state college where both of my parents had graduated), where I majored in Mechanical Engineering. I took a break from college and moved to Seattle, where I lived for 5 years and I had long hair and experimented with psychodelic drugs like we did in the late-60s. Because I wasn't going to college I lost my 2-S student-deferment draft classification (this was during the Vietnam War) and I got drafted in 1969, and because of my beliefs (I was very anti-war!) I was a draft resister (this caused a little termoil in my life but that is ancient history now). I had taken up guitar in college and started playing jazz, so I came to Boston in 1973 to study jazz at Berklee College of Music. I went to Berklee for a couple of years (1973-1975) but then I discovered computers and went to several more schools in Metro-Boston to study computer programming, and I eventually graduated in 1983 and became a computer programmer and had a great career until I retired in 2018. For 35 years I commuted from Hingham (where we live) to jobs in Boston by boat.

Our Hingham houses

Patti

I met Patti in 1977 (she was a student at B.U.) when she had just bought a house in Weymouth (a Boston suburb) and I was still living in an apartment in Boston (I lived there during the Blizzard of '78, a notorius snow storm we had that February), and I moved into her house with her in 1978 (after the storm) and we got married in 1979 (the year Patti graduated from college). Since 1977 we've owned 3 suburban houses on the South Shore—we lived in our first house in Weymouth for 5 years (1977-1982) until we lost it in a fire in 1982, then we moved to Hingham into our 2nd house (first Hingham house) where we lived for 34 years (1982-2016) and raised our two sons, and after they had graduated from college and were grown up and gone, we were "empty-nesters" for 8 years and we decided that our large, 3-story, 5-bedroom, Victorian house was too big for just the 2 of us and it was time to downsize, so we sold it in 2016 and bought our 3rd house (second Hingham house) where we still live.

My family
   I can't express how proud I am to have 2 grown sons, both college graduates!  Now that Alex & Ben are grown up and live elsewhere, our home family consists of Patti and me, our 2 dogs, Casey & Quinn, and a cat, Pepper (our other cat, Mandy, we had for 17 years and she died in 2018!).

Eric & Patti

Alex & Ben

Casey & Quinn

Pepper

Mandy

Family photo

Family news

Go to... My family The boys

Now that I'm retired one of my main activities is I go for twice daily dog walks.

was launched in 1996 to share things that interest me, express some philosophy and opinions, put up family photos and information, provide links to interesting sites, and just simply to entertain. Generally speaking, the content of the site is what I consider interesting, amusing, stimulating, educational, technical, totally non-commercial, and hopefully non-offensive—and I try to verify that my links go to sites with the same standards.

There is a menu bar above with links to the website pages on this site, and the icons above them are links to various locations on the site. Each page has a menu across the top with links to a

| Page section |

for the page on display, and on the title-bar of each page is a drop-down Site index menu providing direct access to the other pages. To speed up the loading of the pages I have tried to minimize the size of graphics that will immediately appear, and I have provided small thumbnail images to click on to see enlargements of the photos. In some places I put a to click on to go to the top of the current page or a to click on to go to the top of the current section.

Links on the webpages are displayed in several colors (your browser must allow webpages to choose their own colors for these to work in CSS):

• links to remote websites  (blue) - displays in a new tab
• links to places in PENCELAND.com  (green) - same tab, current page replaced with new page

• Removed pages – these pages are no longer on the menu bar above but I didn't delete them and they still exist on PENCELAND. I have links on my website going to them.