More Than you Ever Wanted to Know About Dave

Family

Where to begin... ummm, I'm married with one child through college and the other still in college. The eldest graduated with a double major in History and Education while the youngest is working towards her commercial pilot’s license. I was born and raised in the southeast and spent much of my early childhood in northern Virginia while my dad finished up his 30-year military career at the Pentagon. When he retired from the U.S. Navy, the family was moved to southern North Carolina.

I have three brothers. The two oldest served in the U.S. Navy as well. It seems that, through a series of their own acts and a variety of circumstances, they both needed the firm hand that only the U.S. military can provide. The eldest served six-years as a nuclear engineer and the second served four-years as an electrical engineer for an F-18 fighter squadron. My youngest brother was downsized from the U.S. Army during the Obama force reductions, but got his twenty. He was EOD and then did a branch transfer to non-nuclear, chemical, biologic. In a nutshell, he has five kids and the wife wanted him stateside. I attempted to enlist in the United State Marine Corps after high school, of my own volition mind you. Unfortunately, however, a sports related knee injury suffered during my senior year of high school resulted in the recruiter telling me to stay home a year and heal some more. Well, I got a job building custom luxury homes and found I had a knack for it. One year turned into three and then night school at the local junior college and then eventually into an English degree.

C’est la vie.

Needless to say I plied all three of my brothers with an endless supply of questions given the subject matter contained in the first three parts of the Foreign & Domestic series. It is worth noting that all three brothers are in agreement that, due to the subject matter contained in the first three installments of the Foreign and Domestic series, coupled with their backgrounds, and our conversations about an assortment of ‘sensitive’ topics, I now ‘have a file’ in some nefarious government agency computer.

As of May 1, 2024

Career

When it comes to my career, I currently split my time between my day-job and my passions. From 9-5, I'm classified as a Senior Consultant with the company with over twenty-five years of experience in the volatile IT industry. In essence, I get the client to define how they want their complex IT systems to work, whether it be front-end GUI client/internal facing interfaces or back end mainframes. The information I elicit from them is very detail oriented... I'm talking down in the weeds to the point where I can see the individual specs of dirt underneath the weeds detailed. This might explain why I write in the manner that I do. Most of the work I do in this field is in the State and Federal government arenas with a smattering of private sector gigs in there as well.

Writing

In March of 2019, I published the final two installments of the Foreign & Domestic series. Part IV is titled Colder Weather and Part V is titled A Time for Reckoning. My previous published works include the first three installments of the Foreign and Domestic series (When Rome Stumbles, Hannibal is at the Gates, and By the Dawn's Early Light), as well as a non-fiction cooking and entertainment book titled Just a Small Gathering, Volume I. Once Parts IV and V were published, and I knew where the story arcs finally landed, I published new editions of Parts I, II, and III to better align with the finale.

I worked with a narrator to bring all five parts to life via the spoken word in audio format. All five parts are available on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.

In November 2020, I published my first non-fiction book in seven years titled Home Remedies, Poultices, Salves & Tinctures. In January 2021, I published a second non-fiction book titled Preparing to Prepare: A General Guide to Self-Sufficiency and Preparedness.

Education

I earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English, with a dedicated minor in Technical Communications, in 1998. I plied my trade as a Technical Writer for four years from 1998 to 2002 which is when we moved from the Southeast to the Midwest. It was then that I realized Technical Writers don’t have much of a future in the full-time employment game. Most of the work I was finding during the recession associated with the Enron collapse and the dot com debacle was contract work and it never seemed to last more a than a few months at a clip. So I changed up my skill set and became a BA. I’ve been doing that ever since.

In May of 2019, I was approached by my employer and was asked if I was serious about moving out of the consultancy side of the business and into the product side. As a result, I am now enrolled at the local community college and working toward an Associate Degree in Environmental Science. College is a lot different than when I attended in 1990’s. In the end, the client went with another vendor for the project but I’ve continued with the Environmental Science classes all the same. I’m kept everyone updated on my progress on the Environmental Science page so be sure to scroll through that page. Unfortunately, when they shut down the planet, my triumphant return to college was waylaid. I’m hopeful that I can return to this endeavor in the fall of of 2024.