Random Parts Of Life   (March 28, 2007)

Sooner or later, usually for an obscure reason, we all get an urge to reminisce. Here are some random parts of my life:

• I took hundreds of photos of Alaska when I lived there in the early 1970's but I don't know where they are. There were some pretty dramatic shots -- of Mount McKinley as seen from Anchorage, and of Homer Spit (yeah, it's a weird name, but a beautiful place!). Never got good photos of the aurora borealis however.

• After Alaska, I lived in South Dakota. At that time (in the mid-1970's) things were so rural there that you could drive along the Interstate from Sioux Falls to Rapid City, and have a few hours where there was no radio reception whatsoever, until finally South Dakota Public Radio had pity on the drivers, and installed towers along the Interstate. But there was Al's Oasis, where you could get a good cup of coffee for a nickel, and also buy buffalo burgers... My goodness, I just found Al's Oasis website, and coffee is STILL A NICKEL.

• I have an almost complete collection of Model Railroader magazines dating from the 1970's on, except for a few that got water-logged when the basement flooded years ago.

• My first computer was an Apple ][. I got it in 1979, and my first game was Flight Simulator. At that time, you bought the software on a cassette, put the cassette into a standard cassette player, then hooked the outputs from the cassette recorder into the computer, then pressed "PLAY" on the cassette player to load the program. No hard drives, no floppy disks, and practically no memory!

• Although I'm an endocrinologist, my second choice of a medical career would have been pediatric surgery. Go figure.