A bit of this,
some of that.
It’s probably easier to show than tell.
I build, fix, plan, and fly my drone over things. Lately I’ve even become a bit of a code talker — I don’t write software so much as talk it into being, which is how a job that needed a tool I didn’t want to hunt for or spend money on still ends up with one. I often work for family, neighbors, friends, and friends of friends. Apparently a reliable, affordable handygal is hard to come by.
Home is a little spot I rent on a ranch here in Colorado. Once a year I head to Florida for a stretch to work through my mom’s honey-do list, and the long game is to retire someday on the family land in Kentucky. This page is partly to show what I’ve done and could do, and partly to remind myself I’ve actually gotten a few things done.
Generalist by necessity.
The school of hard knocks doesn’t offer a major.
I’m a generalist because for a long time I couldn’t afford to hire the right guy — so I figured it out and became him, one stubborn problem at a time. I’m honestly too old to want to repeat a lot of it now, but it’s why I can look at almost any mess and see the next move.
A partial list
A bit of this, some of that — for a long time.
Renovated houses
As a teenager, alongside my mom — she was flipping old Denver houses in the ’70s, before it was cool.
Co-owned a pizza shop
Delivery to management to marketing to ownership, plus a hand opening a couple of franchise stores.
Ran my own service, 18 years
A backflow-testing business — mine, start to finish, for the better part of two decades.
Operations Director
Worked my way up at Waste-not Recycling — forklifts, logistics, sales, the books — then demoted myself, because I’d rather do the work than meet about it.
Liquidated ~1,000,000 lbs
Managed the teardown and sell-off of a shuttered Agilent plant’s equipment, out in California.
Landscapables
A business of my own — reclaimed pallet collars resold as stackable garden beds and wall systems. I also pulled apart monstrous windmill pallets for use as big landscape timbers.
Programmed a Chinese robot
For several years I ran all the assembly, packaging, and shipping of Tenex’s mercury-filled shock absorbers — and my proudest feat there: programming their Chinese robotic dispenser with no instructions at all.
Built my own Linux machine
Taught myself to set one up and live on it — some of my dad’s computer-geek finally surfaced.
Restored old sewing machines
Gave my mom’s old Singer a deep cleaning and greasing and had so much fun I bought three more — a treadle included — and did those too. I figured I could flip them for the mere cost of the service. Turns out there’s no market for them, sadly. I’m keeping one; the treadle and an old Japanese clone are still up for grabs.
Turned my own wrenches
Not that I’d want you trusting me under the hood or on the roof of your vehicle — but I put solar panels on my van, bent and flared new brake lines for it, swapped hoses and other maintenance items that cost a fortune at the diesel shops, and set fresh brake pads and rotors on my truck. It’s amazing what I’ll do to save a buck.
Bed-linered a whole truck
Outdoors in the mulch, amongst the bugs, with a $40 battery sprayer and some magical U-POL Custom Coat — and I’m honestly impressed (thanks, YouTube guy). It’s a salvage-title truck, so call it practice for doing my van. Now I want to coat everything. Shower walls?
I drive tractors and forklifts, I’ve built my own websites for 30-plus years, and these days — thanks to my old hired hand ChatGPT (aka Chatterbox) and my new hire Claude — I can “talk code.” You can call me a programmer now: .
What I have done
Easier to show than tell — let the pictures do the talking.
I needed a tool that didn’t exist.
So I built one.
WiggleLot is a storage-lot planner I wrote from scratch. Hand it an aerial photo of the lot, set the scale off something you can measure, then wiggle containers and parking spaces around until the lot earns its keep — it tallies the monthly rent as you go. Drag a fence, reshape it to dodge a wet spot, mark your spaces, see the conflicts.
The aerial is just the starting canvas — drop a drone shot into the program and tailor a plan to almost any property. Rearrange objects that weigh thousands of pounds with one finger…over and over again. I made WiggleLot for a single consulting pitch and kept refining it because it turned out to be genuinely useful. It runs in a browser, on any machine, with nothing to install. It only took about 200 versions, but I’m pretty happy with the result. Please take it for a test drive.
Five generations of women have held this ground.
Great Granny Carrie, my namesake, lived here. Then her daughter Eulalia, then her daughter Deborah, and then me — briefly, in the late 1970s. Women weren’t allowed to finance real estate on their own until that decade, so it’s a good thing the land was given to Carrie by her sister. A good run for the ladies — and it’s not over yet.
None of those women left the astounding mess. That was done by She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Mom and I are working on it, but it’s daunting.
It takes too much time and money to stay in a motel while you clean up, so Mom bought a twenty-year-old trailer. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It seems like more work now. Learning never stops.
What I’d like to do next.
I’ve done the hundred-hour weeks. These days I want work that’s kind to my knees and keeps me off extension ladders.
Some of it I’m already good at and glad to keep doing. Some of it I’m itching to learn.
Still up for it
Select hands-on work
Still glad to build and fix — just nothing up an extension ladder, on my knees, or in a crawl space. I’ve paid my dues in those areas. Still up for minor electrical and plumbing, though I’m not a pro. And I really like to throw things away and organize what’s left — a lot of folks seem to need some of that. ;)
Assembly work
Turns out I rather enjoy it — putting widgets together, boxing them up — especially with one ear on something good like Game of Thrones.
Gardening & landscape
Raised beds, cleanups, plantings, and the smaller landscape projects — including stackable garden beds built from those reclaimed pallet collars.
Planning & tools
Lot layouts, property plans, and small custom tools when the off-the-shelf one doesn’t exist. WiggleLot is exhibit A.
Property eyes
Boundaries, layout, drainage, and an honest read on what a piece of land could become.
Video
Turning footage — aerial, walkthrough, before-and-after — into something worth watching.
Things I’d like to learn
3D printing
I’d love an excuse to buy a printer and learn it. Trouble is, the one widget I can’t buy anywhere keeps eluding me — the day I find it, that printer’s mine.
Welding
I feel a little inadequate not knowing how, and I mean to fix that.
Plasma cutting
Looks like entirely too much fun. I don’t know how yet — emphasis on yet.
The longer game
Not a resort — a place to make things and get quiet. The dream for the Kentucky land is small and off-grid-minded: a little camp and skills retreat for writers, artists, and climbers, just up the road from the Red River Gorge and Natural Bridge in the Daniel Boone National Forest — some of the finest climbing in the country. The land has a clifftop, a waterfall, and a spring-fed creek that drops in a dry stretch but never runs dry. There’s limestone underfoot that’s surely hiding a cave I haven’t found yet, and an old tobacco barn stuffed with salvaged pipe and peeled timber — all of it waiting for a second life.
My mom spent her childhood summers on this land and has always wanted to live here. I’d like to make that possible.
The rough order of operations: get water in, build a shower, clear the mess, set up solar, repair the barn and the other little buildings — and then invite people out for alternative-building workshops of all flavors.
So much fun. Wanna come?
Note to self: build the ducks a coop out in the middle of the pond, where the predators can’t reach — duck eggs make jaw-dropping deviled eggs.