I have to go back to some other things now as background and more aspects of where I'd come from.
My bent as a kid beyond reading was learning about plants and so I had a lot of house plants as a kid and I had this big book of how to do things which I studied and worked my way through all the various ways of propagating plants.
I also had the normal kid's facination with Venus Flytraps and Pitcher Plants and Sundews. Praying Mantisses. Ants were a big part of my reading and observations too, including keeping an ant farm.
Why I did not go to college for some natural sciences kind of degree was fueled by the math classes and one teacher in high school who was observant enough to notice that how i went about solving problems (without any formal training at that point) was very procedural and he said that i would probably do well with computers and computer science.
So without ever having spent much time with computers beforehand I went off to college and jumped in both feet full on.
I had to work my way through college, Mom paid for one year, Dad paid for the interest on some loans which probably amounted to half a year or more total by the time I graduated. I had some savings from working as a teen and pre-teen (I mowed lawns and did garden work for some people). The family business was commercial flooring contracting (and some wall tile too and some other things besides that), I worked summers hauling stuff, delivering, truck driving, cleaning up after jobs, warehouse, fork lift driving, whatever needed to be done. if times were slow I would clean the warehouse and get rid of old junk or at least re-organise it so it would take up less space and be less of a hazard. Nothing worse than pulling a pallet of boxes of tile off a shelf three levels up and having a box break open or fall off. Tile can be sharp... and heavy. And those bags of cement and sand and other things some weighed in over 125lbs. A lot for me to carry, but I could get them moved. The big rolls of carpeting and other flooring we had wheeled carts that could move those. When I finally had my last summer working there I was so glad to be done. Physically my body never recovered from some things that happened. I was glad to be moving on to a more safe kind of work, in an office.
Except sitting at a desk all day isn't the best for you either. I made sure to get enough walking in to keep healthy and also did some weight training, but for the most part I walked, even in the middle of winter in some of the worst blizzards I would go out walking for miles just to get some fresh air and to enjoy the snow.
At the end of my first summer of college, when I went back to school I was able to get a job working for one of the departments as a programmer working on a database for the department to keep track of students and what rooms they were in. This was all done on the mainframe, PC's were just starting up, but years away from being useful enough for what we were doing. At first I was working with a senior classmate who was a friend but he didn't stay for long so the whole thing fell on me. Which is why it took me a few extra years to get my degree. That all said though it also paid my way through the degree.
When I finally did graduate, I worked for another few years at a low pay rate to get my debts settled and started working on the masters but then decided it was time to get a better job and so I started looking away from college. At that same time the university was starting to work on converting the old mainframe system to a mini-computer, from an in-house computing shop with programmers and the mainframe engineer and all that expense to purchasing the software from another company and removing the whole floor of this huge computer equipment which cost a huge amount of $ just for the AC and electricity let alone the engineer on site and all those programmers. Well of course this didn't go well for the people who liked their home grown system, but it was too hard to keep up and cost a lot. They wanted to replace all that. They posted four positions and ended up hiring one. Me. So that was my job for the next six years to be a part of the central administrative staff working on this conversion and also having to run the existing system at the same time.
I did have the experience with the mainframe but also through the course-work I had experience with the new mini-computer system so I could do whatever was needed. I eventually became the systems programmer for the mainframe too as it was being phased out but it still had to work until everything was moved over. I also had to put processes in place between the mini-computer database program and the various printers needed (three large laser printers that could run 600 pages a minute) and come up with ways for others to get long sequences of jobs to run and keep running as long as there weren't any errors. accounting stuff. I was so happy I never had to read any of those reports other than some bits looking for the error messages needing to be found. Also I worked on the scanning machine and software for reading the grades in and printing out the sheets to begin with. All fun things. Oh, and the switchboard software and system for answering the phones. I took some equipment they had purchased a few years before and then the people who were supposed to put it in decided they didn't want to do it. Well when I was first hired there was a quiet period when they were negotiating with a vendor and then that fell through and we had to find and switch to another so I was not too involved with that so my boss asked me if I wanted to do this switchboard project and I was yeah, give me something to do.
Three weeks later it was in place and answering six phone lines so that the people running the switch board could concentrate on more emergency items instead of having to answer questions about where a teacher's office was or what room a student was in. By the time I left some six years later (when the conversion was done and it was all winding down) the phone switch board system had answered over four million phone calls.
All this is put in here, because it is the context for what came next. I was burned out. I'd spent 15 years in front of computers for course work and also for work itself or both at the times when i was working my way through school. I'd also taken a large number of computer science credits including almost all the senior level and some graduate school classes (on top of all the math). So that was my life for those years. Very much stuck inside too much and away from nature and plants.
I fished some days and weekends I could get away. I didn't take any longer vacations except for the one month I'd spent looking for work out in Colorado (and didn't find anything, but I also fished out there too
). I hopped on the bus and rode back to MI and the family business and worked the last two months of summer doing what I'd done before, hauling and cleaning up stuff and anything else needed. That was the last of that I ever did.
So being ready to take a break, I'd done the year of grad school and didn't finish, the job was winding down and I didn't like how it was looking for me. The other guy was going to keep working there as he was and I was looking to be stuck working with someone I didn't get along with at all. I told my boss six months that if that was how it was going to be that I'd be leaving so he knew what was up. Also the whole time I was there I was trying to get paid for the work I was doing and the same work title as the other guy. I finally got the title but they made some excuse about not being able to pay me so that was the final nail in that coffin. I saw my freedom coming ahead.
I'd been investing and saving since I'd started the conversion job, I had paid off my debts, I lived simply. So finally I was free and moved away. That fall I moved in with a friend and his family, by next spring he decided to divorce so I had to scramble for a new place to live and get moved within about five minutes time. Loaded up his truck and put my stuff in storage, came back here, stayed one night with Mom, but Step-Dad was coming back so I could not stay here. So I stayed with Dad a few weeks until I bought a small car, a tent, a sleeping bag and a few other things and then I pretty much drove around the country and camped and checked out places where I wanted to live. Perhaps.
Luckily I didn't get an offer accepted on a place or I'd have been stuck, I rented a few places, I hiked parts of the Appalachian Trail in Eastern TN and swam in the reservoir near there all summer on any days I wasn't hiking. After a few years and some bad events I moved north again since I was spending time on the road coming back and forth to here for visiting family. I lived in Ohio near Toledo and then moved back to a small city near here.
My Step-Dad then became my Ex-Step-Dad and Mom was stuck out here in the country alone. I fixed up the room here when he left it a mess and had just gotten it done when the place I was renting had some new people move in downstairs who were smokers. So I gave notice to my landlord and moved here and I've been here since then.
as an aside the Ex-SD was also into the UFO conspiracy things but also a very harsh racist (one reason why I never wanted to be around here much when he was here). Sadly he also was an excellent artist and I can appreciate his work, but his negative aspects cling to it for me too. A hard legacy IMO.
With all this room and gardens that became my main new job besides keeping track of Mom and helping her out when she needed me.
I was able to get back to my love of plants and nature and started reading up on anything related to gardening and permaculture (which can be sort of cultish if you're not careful). I think I've avoided that rabbit hole and the prepper versions of the right wing conspiracies (my Dad on the other had is very much so in those realms - we don't talk much and I try to change the subjects when those sorts of things come up because I don't want to argue with him).
Here I study gardening, plants, beans being a big interest of mine, some genetics when I can get the time, trying to read up on the history and figure out what to do with the many hundreds of beans I have for each season. I'm always working on breeding new varieties and talking about them with other people, the gardens here can keep me busy all summer.
My current project is learning about cameras, photography, light, colors, monitor calibrations so I can see the right things on the screen and any related topic and learning about the software and other aspects like lighting. This past few weeks I finally got the two things I needed the most for the next steps in learning so I am working with those the next few weeks and hope to have better picture as a result. I have hundreds of different kinds of beans to get pictures done once I am happy with the quality of what I am doing.
So the longer version of this story, I'm skipping big parts and chunks, I'm avoiding some parts that aren't easy to talk about, conversations with old friends who decided that since I was no longer a believer that I also couldn't be a friend and losing those whole communities of people. Once I moved away that was easier.
Small town life here and this area though is still pretty religious, I don't talk to many people normally. I don't mind talking to them, but being so busy here with the gardens and being a homebody most of the time I don't get out much. The part-time library job I was doing was more my social connection, but that is now almost 11yrs in the past since I quit. The current pandemic hardly has affected my day-to-day routine other than worrying about family and friends who may be vulnerable and I've been doing a bit more reading and on-line stuff since the 2020 Election and subsequent events, but I've managed to extricate myself from getting sucked into that the past week again. Covid science and current events are where I have been having the most conflicts as I am interested in science and microbiology. Microbes play a big part in soil sciences and decomposition along with being interested in the workings of cells and life in general. Not hard for me at all to get sucked into arguing with people in some places I read/write about what they think is going on with this virus and their rejection of policies which can help save lives. Arg!
I could get on that topic for hours so I will stop here. I think I've written this fairly quickly and not all that well organised but it gives some ideas of what I've been through, the rabbit holes and some snares and also avoiding a few that came along later.
Still a work in progress. I am looking forwards to learning how to interact and cope with others who are in their various rabbit holes and that book is on it's way for me to read so I'll be sure to come back to this thread and post updates as I read and ponder what I'm reading, and of course to have questions.
If anyone wants to get into the various problems and issues I had with my religious beliefs and why I stopped, I'll be happy to answer questions in public or private, but I'm not sure anyone really wants my particular debunking of that. I'd read enough of the bible and studied it enough to know about what was in there. i ran into too much trouble with it when i attempted to turn it into a logical system and something to be argued about vs. a faith that you accept (lumps and all or however you may view it).
So now I am either someone who has completley put it all in God's hands and I don't have to worry about it or argue about it, or I am someone who lives without believing and the net effect is the same. If God is there and is a just God then I try not to worry or bother even if my judgement of what is recorded in the histories and the Bible are the truth or not (I don't think it is though for various reasons). So I do what I consider right and important, without being threatened with Hell, without wasting my time in whatever church or group setting, I'm done with that. The only group you may find me in next would be a seed swap or a library. I like writing and talking to people on-line and that is my social aspect for now until this virus calms down or the most vulnerable are vaccinated.
My focus though, right here is taking care of Mom, taking care of the gardens, having fun, learning as much as i can, growing good food and sharing the results and seeds with others.