Timothy Oldfield:  

Classmates.com now asks us for a STORY? 
 They used to simply request a Life Bio. Well, how about just one decade...? Brief? That isn't simple for me to tell any story briefly. :-D The ADHD thing (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) has really gone crazier than usual after I experienced a stroke in early 2011, but here goes.... :-/ If I croaked tomorrow, I can honestly say that I've made some terrific friends and had a really fun adventure on this planet this time around, and it will be even more so next time around! Then again, if all things actually happen simultaneously, I'm still enjoying it all NOW. ;) That was the brief version. Now for the extended version .. feel free to skip this more narcissistic version... 2001-2002: Moved from the Pacific Northwest down to the Southwestern USA after "federal school" (perhaps more on that further down) and a second divorce .. I had become an IT guy (Information Technologist) and CA (Commercial Artist) doing a sampling of many things .. mostly commercial graphics for printed collateral and websites .. some airbrush artwork (both forms; traditional/analog and digital illustrations) .. a little image retouching (using Photoshop and other creative software .. also PowerPoint Presentations and courtroom timeline charts. The client who kept me the busiest by far was a retired NSA agent who taught classes around the world (met him in a law library while I was doing some independent legal research). Much of that time, I was working remotely while living in a little cabin in the desert at the foot of the Organ Mountains of New Mexico. It was very peaceful being surrounded by many spectacularly-colored hummingbirds, or other critters passing by. When I was ready for more human contact, I enjoyed trekking around White Sands or into Las Cruces or even down to El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico to go Salsa dancing, as well as doing the Rumba, Argentine Tango, Texas Two-Step and also several styles as a beginner (Bachata, Cumbia, Zydeco, Zouk, etcetera). While living there, I learned to LOVE DANCING! 2003-2004: After a bizarre set of circumstances (after having done research and IT work with that retired NSA agent, I obtained an invitation to live and work in the British West Indies (BWI) in the leeward islands area of the Caribbean in the tiny country/island of Anguilla (by government work permit). The island is only about 16 miles by 3 miles; far smaller than here in Chelan County, Washington, USA. I worked for over a year as an Information Technologist for a Lex Mundi listed law firm and seconded out to a few of their clientele. The people, in general, were extremely kind, and although some thought I might feel out of place living on a rock (small island) and being the minority, I felt quite at home there. 2004-2005: Left the islands to work for a private bank in Geneva, Switzerland .. and I had the use of the company Mercedes (with stickers to make border crossing simpler), as I lived across the border in Divonne Les Bains, France. They did ask me to act as a chauffeur at times (as I'd done in the Caribbean (In Anguilla we drove on the left, and while in Saint Martin, on the right; different islands, different traffic rules and local styles) ... I didn't mind, and I was asked to be the designated drive often, as I didn't care which side of the road I was on ;). This way I was able to live far more economically over the border n an old French farmhouse (ultra-modern inside, with 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, heated tile floors, fancy appliances) located between the French and Swiss Alps. I worked one or two days a week in the Swiss office (the parking garage was under the Rhone River), usually security-testing the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system and a few other tech chores. But the website work or online work was usually done remotely from home in France. By having control of the company car, I was playing chauffeur more and more .. whether delivering someone to the airport or bringing them up through Mont Blanc from Northern Italy, Novo Mesto, Slovenia, etcetera. It was a wonderful trade-off, and I thought I might like driving a real stretched limo one day (and that dream came true a couple of years later). 2005-2006: Continuing to work for the Swiss AG (AG is their version of an INC or corporation), but far more remotely, I headed back to New Mexico, so I could dance again. Then, as is common for me, I overlapped projects, by getting back into designing websites, creating trading cards for Southwestern hot-air balloonists, business cards, postcards, tourism rack-cards, blah blah blah. 2006-2007: Moved to Seattle, as the desert view from my last Las Cruses home was being blocked by a new house being constructed (I missed having that unobstructed view), and for a change to cooler weather for a while (as well as for returning to college to update my education a bit at UW and Bellevue College). During summer break, I got a call from Geneva and was flown to Kowloon, China (across the bay from Hong Kong, where my "little sister"; a long-time close friend of the family was working) to speak at a conference on some of the private bank's newer security measures which had been put in place before I left. I also got to go into mainland China for a short visit to Shenzhen and a city I forgot the name of, where I got to see just a few of those many Terra Cotta warriors (of the many thousands that were being dug up). 2008-2011: Applied at Microsoft among 30,000 applicants for a commercial artist position. It got down to 6 people, and I didn't make it. When I asked, they shared that I seemed not to stay more than a couple of years at most jobs before wanting to do/learn something else and moving on. So, I ended up freelancing part-time as a resume "sourcer" to a recruiter who did work for Microsoft, while I went back to college again. I created fancy Boolean search strings to find candidates for open positions at Microsoft, and later did sourcing/recruiting work for X-Box, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Yahoo, Google, and a long list of other tech or environmental companies (like Secor International) over the next few years. But at school, too many professors were teaching on matters where the details were OFF (econ, business law, etcetera), which I'd already researched as falsehoods while at Gonzaga Law Library years earlier. Even after I cited documentation in my research, they said I had to alter/adjust it and regurgitate the versions of the truth as it appeared in the textbooks (often years old) to get a good grade. So, I dropped out of school AGAIN after finishing my marketing classes. I used to do a lot of bizarre research in my past that most people cannot believe (example: it took me almost three years to find the "precise and scientific" definition for "income", which I will NOT share here (no, it isn't in Black's Law, nor in the college textbook on Income Tax, although the index pretended it did, it danced around it and called it a "game" a couple times). Most people's heads might implode if they knew human beings ear...Expand for more