What A Long, Strange Year It's - wait, I used that already..

[Sharkey]

Well, 2006 is on its way out, and I can't say that I'll miss it, a lot of effluent went through the sewer pipe this year. No real need to write about it now, as a lot of it is already posted in topic threads here.

Looking back farther might be instructive. Let's see what we find 5, 10, even 15 years back in time:

2001 (5 years)
I suppose that the big event of this year was my Big Adventure to SolWest 2001, my first attempt at taking my home made hybrid vehicle the Pusher over the mountains to Eastern Oregon for the energy fair. Of course, much of the year was spent preparing the car and trailer for the trip in July, and the rest of the year tearing it all down, rebuilding and getting ready to do it all again.

I cut my hair after eight years of wearing it long.

1996 (10 years)
This year started off poorly for me when my mother died on New Year's day after taking a very sudden and unexpected turn for the worse after hip surgery. The first two weeks were spent dealing with her personal effects and organizing her cremation and burial arrangement in Las Vegas Nevada. Some of the aftermath of that trip are contained in the topic thread: Grace 8 - Comfort and Condolence.

1996 also was the year that I got seriously interested in computers after being given a discarded 286 desktop by one of my clients. I learned DOS 6.22, Wordperfect 5.1, and the ins and outs of autoexec.bat and config.sys. Being a non-stop tinkerer, I gutted operating system files and program directories of any unnecessary code to keep my 30 Mb hard disk from getting filled up. Later in the year, I was introduced to Windows 3.11, graphical user interface, 256 color monitors, and 3-1/4" floppy disks.

Late in the year, I was reading an article in one of my industry trade newspapers about hypertext markup language (HTML), and how it was possible to create pages that would display in a web browser by entering the correct code tags. I decided to give it a try, and the result was the very first Mr. Sharkey’s Homepage (reproduced here in it’s near-entirety, I couldn’t find all of the pages or graphics). At first, it existed only on a floppy disk I carried around in my shirt pocket to show to friends and co-workers, but it soon was posted on the free server space at the local FreeNet, and then later in a directory borrowed from one of the radio stations .com accounts. After getting some emails from people who managed to find it through search directories (Alta Vista was about the only one back then), I realized that it had been picked up as one of the few sources of information about Housetrucks on the entire world wide web. The rest is, as is said, history.

I did get some work done on the Crown, you can view that by following this link.

1991 (15 years ago)
Wow, I’m kind of digging for information here. I made a trip to Santa Cruz in the late spring. My interest in solar power grew and I purchased additional photovoltaic panels to produce more power. I think I finally decided that living in the city wasn’t for me, and ceased to work on completing the house I was building there.

1986 (20 years ago)
Oh man, a bunch of stuff happened around this time, not a lot of it good.

Home was 1.97 acres of hillside view property that I was caretaking in exchange for rent, living in my housetruck.

I was volunteering at the local public radio station as the host of the late-night electronic music program, and serving as their live-music recording engineer. For income, I was Chief Engineer of one of the local AM-FM commercial stations.

I got the chicken pox at age 34. If I ever get that sick again, I hope I just go ahead and die (no joke).

A court settlement over a land dispute provided me with some money to put a down payment on the 1.3 acres of property next door (the property I just sold and moved away from this year). I would begin building a house the next year. I wouldn’t move to the new property until 1988.

Ten days before my 35th birthday, my father passed away after suffering from cancer for an extended period.

In early fall, I moved the Housetruck downtown for a couple of days to be set up as the studio for mixing live music for broadcast from one of the stages set up at the yearly festival.

In September of 1986, I was bucked off of a horse that had been attacked by dogs and suffered two fractured vertebrae, an injury that would take ten years or more to stop causing me intense pain.

1981 (25 years ago)
The year started off with a long distance trip to Santa Cruz in the Housetruck. I had spent the previous year doing a complete remodel on the interior of the truck, prepared and painted the exterior, and moved the truck out of the deep forest location where it had been parked for the previous couple of years.

I traded an old sewing machine for a worn-out antique couch, then took an upholstering class at the community college to recover it for use in the Housetruck.

Relations at the commune where I had been living were strained, so in the late fall, I took a leave-of-absence and moved the Housetruck to Portland, Oregon to work for Wind Power Systems installing and servicing electric wind generators.

1976 (30 years ago)
This could be called my “Summer of Loveâ€

[Griff]

Happy New Year, Sharkey! I hope this is a good one for you and that getting your new place Sharkey-fied will get easier! Although. . .without the problems, life would have no challenge, and we wouldn't be able to enjoy nearly as much of your forum. Your writing skills are envyable and allow us to "live" your experiences through it. Thanks for a great place to stay!