>Basically I grew up in Florida, in Bartow (Polk county) to be exact and went through grade school and high School there. I spent a couple of years at the University of Florida in Gainesville and transferred to Florida Southern College in Lakeland, FL where I graduated with a degree in Citrus Production. While going to Florida Southern and living in Bartow, I met and married the lovely and talented Judy West and after 45 years can still introduce her as my "First Wife". We have two grown children, one of each, who live fairly close by (sometimes too close) and three uniquely special grandchildren.

I have had only had two jobs outside of some part time work while going to college. First with Marion County Agricultural Extension Service as an Assistant County Agricultural Agent working primarily as a Citrus and Horticultural specialist for a period of three years. Then Judy and I were offered an opportunity to go into the Cut Decorative Greens business with a retired Army Colonel, Richard Scarborough. We now own the business and I am still operating it after 40 years. We produce, harvest and ship several types of greenery used by the florist trade in floral arrangements.

Judy and I purchased our first Apple computer from Sears in December 1993 (Christmas) and it was a Macintosh Performa 550 (about $1700) with a 160 mb HD and around 4 mb of memory. We purchased a printer at the same time and it was an Apple Stylewriter (Black & White) that cost something like $349. I decided to add memory and at that time an 8 mb stick was $200. Trying to share the one computer nearly lead to a divorce so Judy, being independent, went out and bought a Performa 6116 from Staples and had her very own computer. We now are at the point where we have more computer equipment than good common sense. Presently I have and use the following: (1) G5 tower (2) Mac G3 Powerbook (Pismo) (3) Mac 9600 Power Mac tower and last and least (4) An older custom built "PeeCee" with an AMD processor.

We have both been involved (probably too involved) with OMUG for somewhere around 14-15 years having joined back when Ray Petro was the President and Alan Gold was Vice President. It can truly be said that we have met some of the finest people through this User Group and certainly have furthered our knowledge of Apple computers. My main use of the computer is to work with digital images whether they be scanned or digital photos imported into the computer. I've always enjoyed photography and this hobby works hand in glove with the computer. Primarily, the applications I use the most are Photoshop, both the full version and Elements, iPhoto, Roxio Toast (CD/DVD burning software), Appleworks 6.0, Microsoft Word, and presently striving to master Corel Painter, Keynote, Pages and iRemember. I spend entirely too much time on the computer in order to get out of household and outside chores, so far it is working.

This is my story and I'm sticking to it.