S. R. Christenson:  

After high school I attended Jr. college for one year and then got offered a job by the Minnesota Dept of Conservation as an Asst. District Forester. Two years into that job found me unable to scratch the itch I'd had since a young kid to serve in the military. I wanted to find something that I could somehow translate into civilian life so I ended up in the Air Force "Air Weather Service." AWS is a small, quite unique branch of the USAF. We had a lot of flexibility at times and at others, due to a shortage of personnel, quite rigid. However, I totally fell in love with meteorology. As I look out my window now, 35 years after taking my last official weather observation, I can tell you that we have a broken sky with altocumulus at about 10,000 feet and a layer of cirrostratus clouds above that. The wind is out of the southwest at 8 to 12 with gusts in the low 20s. That's not to prove that I"m weather savvy, it's simply that the weather is a constant scene playing in the back of my thoughts. It's much like background music, except that I am always observing what is going on in the skies. After the USAF gig, I came back to my old job, and got married, returned to college at Bemidji State Univ. and completed my education, not in forestry, but in Park and Recreation Planning, with an emphasis on botany. I stayed in the forestry field and when it came time to compete for a p...Expand for more