I am married to a smart, beautiful woman who is really my life partner. We live in the Owens Valley which is on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Out my office window I can see the snow-covered Sierra crest which rises 9,000 feet above the valley floor and if I look about 60 miles
to the south, I can see Mount Whitney. We have a ten year old daughter who is the apple of her daddy's eye. I have a son, Chris, from my first marriage. He lives in Kansas City, will soon be 23 (can't be), and he is getting married in August. I am busy as ever at work and at home.

  At work, I do a variety of things and I love it. I work for the California Institute of Technology at their Owens Valley Radio Observatory near Big Pine, CA. It is the largest university-based radio observatory in the world.  Here we do astronomy, just like optical astronomers, but we do it at radio
wavelengths. We study many of the same objects that optical astronomers do - stars, galaxies, star formation regions, comets, etc. I do some astronomy
(investigating water masers around large, old stars) but mostly I help
design, build and maintain the telescopes and ancillary equipment. I am also the site safety officer, frequency coordinator and I do all the public
outreach, including tours.

  My interests at home include running, woodworking, camping, gardening and reading. Although I am getting slower in my running, I am still competitive - I won four out of the five 10K races I was in last year. (It seems to get harder every year.) I run from six to nine miles every day and my favorite non-competitive runs are on trails in the Sierras. I should also include Egyptology and paleontology as interests. I haven't made it to Egypt yet, but we plan to go in the next year or two. I am a member of the American Research Center in Egypt and I am still trying to learn how to read ancient Egyptian. As for paleontology, we have gone on a few fossil-collecting trips, my favorite being the fossil fish quarry near Kemmerer, WY where we "caught" several good sized ones.

  I almost forgot to mention Halloween. It is very big at our house and I take a week off from work to set up a wide variety of "haunts". My wife thinks (but doesn't say it) that it is a waste of time, but I can't tell you how much fun I have scaring the c**p out the little buggers. I have flying ghosts, hands coming out of bushes, heads popping out of trash cans, rats
running across the yard - you get the idea.

  Every year I enter the local demolition derby, again to my wife's great consternation. One of the pre-derby events is a "pretty car" contest, which I won last year. I made a framework over the car, turning it into a dinosaur with articulating legs, a head that turns, glowing eyes, and smoke (in the
form of CO2) coming out of his mouth. It was a great hit with the kids when I drove the car around the arena at the fairgrounds. I don't know what I'm going to do this year to top that.

Cheers,
Mark