Let's start with the smallest dog, who has the biggest attitude. This pig-shaped mongrel is actually a purebred pomer with papers to prove it. Taffy (Salt-water taffy, also known as Taffyoca the pudding dog) is the one EVERYONE wants to take home with them. I have no idea why, she's sassy, grumpy, and anti-social.

Lest you think my dogs are just lazy good for nothing creatures, here's a snap of Taffy doing what she does best - sleeping. Er, I mean keeping the cold draft out of our house on a winter day.

Our dogs have this delightful habit of jumping up on mom and beating her with their paws to get her attention. This usually means 'I know the dog door is open and I want to go out and bark at nothing in the dark, but I need you to walk downstairs with me so I don't trip on anything inside' or some such nonsense.

This is the dog who would have been Clementine except as a pup she refused to potty outside. She'd make you stand for long minutes in the snow with this 'are you kidding me?' look on her face, but when you let her in she'd promptly pee on the floor. What a nuisance! Oh wait, that's her name!!!

We had about 16 pups over time, two batches of 6 and then a batch of 4 at the end. Both Taffy and Nusie are moms. These here my wife are holding are three of the last we ever had. For a long time after we quit my wife would say 'I really liked raising all those pups!' but alas our dogs are all fixed now. Or broken, as the case may be.

Smoky has had a hard life of chasing squirrels, biting the stray porcupine, and barking at strangers. Here he is after a long day of barking, eating, and sleeping. This is the real dog we own, the others are like cats, but friendly.

All creatures great and small, love mama most of all! Here is the normal dog situation, with my wife who can't possibly be chilled smothered in fur. Hope no one sprays ink at her!

And a final pic of Taffy. Poor Wiley our other pomer has no action photos, and frankly this is as close to 'action' as Taffy ever gets. Except, of course, when you have food of any kind. Here she is hoping the camera I am holding is edible.

This is what I got to look at *right* outside my office window when I started at Sun. I'd never had an office job before, and I didn't know how great I had it. Sure, I had to share an office with another guy but it was just the two of us, we had a sliding glass door in the middle of our all-glass exterior wall, and a balconly outside our office. Oh, and yes, the mountain was awesome to look at up close and personal!

This is my old office, the one I eventually ended up in with my good friend Gary. Note Gary (sitting) has got his feet up and is typing with one hand behind his back! I'm showing Mark and Paul this very image being displayed on my screen from our secret office webcam!

This is my current office, which looks like a train wreck. There are thousands and thousands of Sun trinkets, collected over the years. So many that the marketing folks come in and browse through them looking for ideas for future give-aways. Some of these are so old and so hard to find that they were borrowed from me, shipped to CA to be photographed professionally, and published in one of our company books.

A close-up look at some of my Sun junk. I have shelves and shelves of this stuff, each piece is unique and it's so desirable (and sellable on EBay) sometimes it gets stolen. Ah well...

This is the old me. Just so you might know that I was devilishly handsome at quite an early age (well, devilish if nothing else!)

OK, this is me. That's it, nothing else to see, move along. Yes I do wear bibs, I have a couple pairs I like. You can take the hick out of Ohio but you can't take Ohio out of the hick!

This is me with one of my friends. Yes, my friends are full size cardboard cutouts of real (er, imaginary) people. It's bad enough to have imaginary friends, but to go out with them dressed alike? yikes!

This is my wife Deniese out on the deck, the old deck. I was snapping pics of our house to compare before/after shots with and she came out to see what was going on. What can I say, when she shows up there's nothing else worth seeing!

My wife, a normal pic. My wife hates all pics of herself, just as most true ladies do, even though she looks great!

My wife has GOT to wonder what's up with 10 straight years of home improvements, some quite major. What can I say, I live to build things! Here she is with the trusses for our new three car garage and 24' by 40' playroom addition. Probably wondering how I'm going to PAY for all this custom built stuff!

Ah yes, the infamous Jessica Rabbit, who *I* have refered to as such longer than others who have laid claim to the same! I have always held out hope that she'd become my daughter in law one day, but as you can see my son Dave is having none of it!

A picture of my ex wife? Yes, she came to see that MA was not such a horrible place and to look over Dave's school, etc. This demonstrates the gracious manner my wife has to allow her to not only visit but stay in our house for a week.

My basement was just concrete walls, concrete floors, and no outlets. Now it's 430 square feet of finished space with lots of outlets, finished walls, and a drop ceiling. Here's one view of the L, note the cabinets holding every NES game ever released in the US (and many, many foreign ones) but 4.

This is a second shot of the basement, showing the pool table. We have cable, phones, internet, etc. Oh and the second cabinet has one of just about every Atari 2600 game made. Ever.

The original front of my house. Not really, I added the porch myself and had the driveway paved. Yes, I did 99% of the labor, design, etc for the porch. My wife painted it, because, well, I don't paint. But boy do I like to build things that need paint!

This is the original back of our house, and I think it's pretty accurate. I didn't fool with this right away, saving it for when I could afford to do BIG projects.

This is my hot tub. I built a level box of gravel 8 feet square to stick it on, and of course I wired the thing myself with a big fat easy-trip GFI. We bought the biggest spa we could at the time, a 550 gallon monster. Hey, I'm a big guy and I wanted a BIG tub to soak in from all these home improvement projects!

This is the pavilion I built. For once I got some major help; I did all the lower deck/structure/posts and then some friends from church came over and helped me frame the trusses. I did put all the plywood on, and shingled the roof, and added the cupola. A couple of the guys helped because they wanted to see how such a thing was built, but they never did build one of their own as far as I know.

I build small stuff, too. This is my generator shed, which my 40 AMP generator hides in. We get fairly frequent power outtages and one very HOT night we came home and got the AC running off of it. I was the hero of the week for that one!

My original attic. I hated to see all that wasted space up there but with only a rickety dropdown set of stairs I could not do much with it. However, when the big room was built on our house I had them put in full size stairs at one end of the space and at last got my chance to do something with it.

There are better pics of the attic, but this shows it all done and insulated and drywalled, etc. I consider it 'four season storage' and thus there are convenience rugs on the floor but no real carpeting, etc. However it does have cable, internet connection, and of course lots of outlets. I also added windows but they are behind you. Nusie likes the attic because wasps get in and dry up and she eats their crispy bodies like potato chips.

Well, here I am with my usual partners in crime Dave and Robert. We've cut a huge hole in the side of the house and now we are wondering if the window is gonna fit! Actually, I knew it would but the question was how to get the sucker into the hole? As it turned out, once Robert and I manhandled it into place and Dave pounded in a few nails to hold it this turned out to be a VERY easy project! But this one is on the first floor, the other bay window had to go in on the second floor at the other end of the house! Yikes!

And here it is, my biggest home improvement project. A three car garage with four doors (the center door passes through the back) and a gigantic 24 by 40 foot playroom above it. NO, I did not do any of the work on this beyond wiring the internet. Funny thing, we really didn't think about the room, it was the garage we were building and the builder was like 'you want that finished, right?' and I said, uh, sure, I guess. Everyone has eyes for the room but it was the garage I was after! I mean it!

We needed more space to park and maneuver, so we turned our half horse-shoe drive into a full one. In this pic you can see the brand spankin' new gravel. Oh, and Dave painting the bottom of the second bay window. I built a roof and skirt on both of them, and then fell and broke my elbow while finishing up here. There's a not so funny story there, but anyway here's Dave doing the painting for me. Did I mention I don't paint?

This is the original 10 by 12 deck that came with the house. It was not well flashed, and before we had gutters the water just gushed on it. I never liked it, it was never pretty and it was NAILED together (I screw everything!) I put up with it for 10 years and then enough was enough.

Here is my deck GONE, but not forgotten. The bad flashing has caused my siding and sheathing to rot! I put my finger right through to the insulation without any effort at all. Yuk. So there's Eric helping me cut the rot out so we can replace it with new wood.

Ah yes. It was beautiful in late March, in the 70's, but we knew it wouldn't last. Good thing I covered the whole deck in a giant single sheet of plastic! It took two days to build and with an OSB top I didn't want to build it twice. Dave is being very careful not to rip the plastic. Reminds me of the 12 by 12 dining room we added on our house in Colorado Springs, it also got a baptism in snow before the roof got on!

Laying out the girders and doing the redundant prep work. I spent a day just attaching parts together without assembling anything, then it just suddenly went up all at once! Here I have the wall down to the particle board and the girders laid out for easy attaching.

Here we go, much further along and really taking shape. The kit from www.sunporch.com was very easy to build, like a giant erector set!

Here's the finished sunporch. Blinds installed on sides and top, handy side deck with two sets of stairs built, carpet installed, back wall drywalled and painted, etc. It came out great and we use it almost every day. We'll see how much heat it collects in the cold sunny days of winter. I'm hoping it helps heat the house a little!

Not everything I make turns out well. One year, Dave, Deniese, and I built log cabins using pretzels and icing. Mine was beautiful and all fancy... right up until I got obnoxious about it and then carelessly let it fall on the floor. Serves me right!

The red metro of death, and my son as a 16 year old gladly cleaning out the car (just SURE that I had bought it for him!!!) I got it for $400 on EBay, put in a new $350 motor (also from EBay) and voila! The engine is so light, my friend Robert and I literally unbolted the old one and pulled it out by hand w/o breaking a sweat. It only weighs about 80 pounds, the three-bangin' weakling! But I love it. GOT 50(MPG)?

Here are a stack of atari games being made by me back in the pre-2001 days of desoldering old games and attaching new chips. Very time consuming, but I had it down to a science! At the time, I was the ONLY person in the world mass producing Atari 2600 carts and had been doing so since 1984.

Here are some XYPE games, Thrust I think, which I never did get paid for. Ah well, the person who authored this game never cared if I got paid as long as HE did, which led to greed and lots of lies about me by some other folks and bad memories. Yet this is a pic of a typical 'release' of the time, with me knocking out a lot of carts literally overnight!

The candy bars from our new years eve party, picture number one.

The candy bars from our new years eve party, picture number two.

The candy bars from our new years eve party, picture number three.

Would YOU eat a sweet and sour chicken chunk from a Chinese restaurant that looked like this? And no, we didn't do anything to make it look this way, this is right out of the box!

My dad gave me this, it has been passed down in my family from first son to first son etc for generations. My great grandfather said it had an interesting story to it, unfortunately he died before he told my grandfather! I am the second son, though, not the first. There's a sad story here that's best left forgotten. Cool cup, though!

My beloved Geo Tracker decided to not get out of the way of a wild deer in time, and this is what I have to remember it by. Psych! I fixed it up and my son has bought it from me since then. The deer was hit in Groton, next to a sign that said welcome to Pepperell, and shot by a Townsend cop. I had every policeman in the area out there arguing who had jurisdiction. And of course a dead deer that some very strange little man came and gleefully picked up in his truck. Strange days indeed.

A shot of my peach tree, which had no peaches for the first three years we had it and then had so many the branches almost broke off! Here they are laying on the ground, with so many of the fuzzy beauties!

Here's a rather large salamander I found under my pile of lumber during a job. Dave kept this for a few days, took it to school, etc. Note it does NOT HAVE BLUE SPOTS on it. There are no blue ones here, only yellow. Don't forget that!

Yes, we attract all sorts of birds to our feeders. Cardinals, Jays, crows, and of course Turkeys. They are chickens, really. If they see you even peeking out the window they blitz outta there. But this one was uncommonly bold. Wonder what fresh turkey tases like?

Ah yes, a show down on the 'herd' as they wander about eating everything they can find. They like our bird feeder and all the food the squirrels steal from it and hide in the yard. They have no problems locating it. My dogs don't chase the turkeys when they show up in such large numbers. They behave very timidly and skirt around them.

This turkey apparently wanted in the hot tub but couldn't find his way in. Or else wanted to be a weathervane. In any case, it was a funny enough pic to include.