Lifelong Learning
Staying Alert and Keeping Sane
We’re not always traveling, especially as we get older. But we still enjoy our intellectual pursuits. Here are a few experiences we’ve had over the years
Segway Personal Transport – “train the trainers”
It wasn’t meant to be. We sat out the coldest, nastiest winter in memory in New England, on the premise that we’d become trainers for the Segway PersonalTransporter initial product rollout. Didn’t happen. C’est la vie. It was looking for a while that we would actually have jobs. Horrors!
“Back in the day”, Dean Kamen came up with this self-leveling, well for lack of a better description, personal transport device. The headquarters for Segway was in nearby Manchester, New Hampshire; Kathy had a friend working there. For the initial offering (which first appeared on a then-very-young Amazon.com for about $5000), we were to first master the device, then learn how to teach other Trainers on how to use it (and how to instruct consumers). Among the students for this initial training was Steve Wozniak.
A few links that are still valid from those days: https://www.bookofseg.com/
https://time.com/4309573/most-influential-gadgets/item/segway/
Mediation Training in Arizona
Both of us attended Pima County Arizona’s Mediation training. Kathy has attended a number of mediation sessions and has co-mediated some.
Scott’s Culinary Training
Bread and Pastry at The San Francisco Baking Institute – his first forray into “professional culinary”, after leaving Digital Equipment
Professional Culinary (Western) at Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver
and Professional Baking and Pastry
Asian Culinary Arts at Vancouver Community College
“Masters Class” at Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School
Why you might ask… more than a year and a half of full time Culinary Arts training? Is this a fool’s errand? Perhaps. But among Scott’s earliest memories is hanging around the kitchen with his Mom; he learned to cook for himself during his… lengthy… bachelorhood, and broiled baby lamb chops help him woo his bride. That’s a whole ‘nuther story.
Scott Web School
As part of his quest for Canadian (dual) citizenship (which came to fruition in June of 2016), Scott is spending 3 winters in our Vancouver home. Winters in Vancouver aren’t so much harsh as bleak; rainy with gray skies and temperatures hovering around freezing. Scott needs a way to keep busy. So in January 2013, Scott started on an intensive about 6 month program in web design at BCIT, a well-respected college in Vancouver. That program seems to have been retired (2022) with the Front End Developer one at that link. The program was quite challenging – Scott was 56 at the time: the average in the class was about 25. He held his own, and graduated with honors.
Kathy returns to her math roots
While Scott plowed through Vancouver’s winters, Kathy was not idle. She boned up on her Probability and Statistics and has been proctoring a class for seniors on the subject. Always the financial wizard of the two of us, Kathy goes through annual IRS (the US’ federal tax agency) training in tax preparation, and helps seniors with their annual federal returns.
Scott’s Language Bits
Scott studied Spanish while in grade school and parts of high school. Since then, he took a semester at a local university in Massachusetts, has a lifetime all-language subscription to Babbel.com, and as of this writing has been taking classes through a “Neighbourhood House” in Vancouver Canada – near where we live there, since the classes are via Zoom, independent of whether he is actually in Vancouver. The group met “in real life” for the first time ever today – Aug 9, 2021 — after over a year of “virtual” classes. Over time, Scott’s studied Mandarin Chinese (Vancouver Community college), Japanese (1 1/2 years, New England Japanese Business Center), and Thai (AUA Thailand, Chiang Mai). With the exception of Spanish, he can’t claim fluency in any languages beyond English, but he can order beer almost anywhere on earth.