Houston, we have liftoff. Liftoff of the Neon John Blog. The best thing to happen to the Internet since Mosaic! Ahem….. Well, let’s get this thing started.
Let’s see. I’m sitting here in my cabin-home [1] in the most gorgeous mountains in the country – Tellico Plains, TN. This is truly heaven on earth. It’s about 60 degrees outside, the whippoorwills are calling and a wild hog just tromped across the yard looking for something to eat. I just polished off a dinner of rainbow trout that were swimming in the river a few hours ago. Bob [2] the Cat is enjoying leftovers and all is well with the world.
Maybe I ought to introduce myself.
I schooled as a nuclear engineer. I’ve done that, electrical engineering, process control engineering, race car engineering, made neon signs, drove a semi truck for a year just to see what it was like, wrote software for about a decade (just missing out on the dot com boom), published several magazines, owned and operated the world famous John G’s BBQ restaurants [3] and now am in semi-retirement. Is that grand or what?
I have hobbies and interests so numerous that the internet would run out of zeroes and ones if I listed ’em all :-) I’ll chat about a few in the coming days. I try to learn a new craft every few years (goal was one a year but it hasn’t quite worked out that way.) My last one was furnace glass blowing and now I’m learning blacksmithing. Still a rank amateur but learning fast. I’m going to attend an excellent multi-week class in blacksmithing at the fabulous J [4]ohn C Campbell Folk School [4] [4]over in Brasstown Bald, NC come fall and cooler temperatures. This is a simply amazing school for all sorts of arts and crafts but their blacksmithing program is second to none.
I swore off TV and newspapers several years ago, one of the single best things I did to improve my quality of life. As such, you won’t read any mindless regurgitation of “news” that’s fed to the masses every day. I’m interested in politics but not partisan politics. My interests and concerns regard my and your accelerating loss of even the most basic freedoms. I got a stunning reminder of that just today. See the next post.
Oh, one last thing. Pay no attention to the current appearance of this page. I’m still working on that. I’m having to learn CSS, PHP and blogging all at the same time. Stay tuned.
Later, John